I’m glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility.
Nikki Giovanni
Might we pause and listen to ourselves? What is there to receive?
As we prepare for bed at night, we could activate the advice of the philosopher Spinoza and ask ourselves three questions.
What inspired me today?
Where did I experience peace, balance, comfort, or satisfaction?
What made me happy today, what, not who?
All forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many forms as possible.
– Alan Watts
The first indoor movie I ever saw was Old Yeller. I was stunned with grief that the little boy had to shoot his dog. I never let my children see that movie. I had never seen Bambi but I finally decided to risk it with my sons. We went to the theater, sat down, and the power went out, so I’ve never seen Bambi.
I’ve also never seen The Lion King, but it’s the second movie my three and a half year old grandson has seen.
When we were at CuriOdyssey with him, we came up to a table a senior citizen was staffing. The table was covered with items to touch, feathers, two tortoise shells, a bobcat jaw, and the skin of a skunk. Grandson held back, looked up at the man, and said he’d seen The Lion King and that it was sad. The man leaned toward him and asked if he was sad when the father died, and he nodded. And the man said he, too, was sad, when the dad died. And then grandson talked about Scar. It was one of those moments in life I didn’t realize I’d taken in until it kept coming back to me, flooding my heart with witnessing the gentle sharing and understanding of an older man and a three year old boy.
When we went outside Grandpa sat on a bench and Grandson curled up next to him. It’s only now that I recognize that Grandson was again snuggled into kindness. This is the world we share.
I’m told The Lion King is about the circle of life, that it is a “story of redemption and overcoming shame, finding yourself, knowing who to trust”, and that I will love it.
Clearly, Grandson understood and trusted that man, and hearts were touched and shared.
Day camp was happening around us, and a group of children passed us carrying their creations made from cardboard boxes and tubes. The creations are made as offerings to entertain and stimulate the animals who live there. A little girl showed me a house she had made for a ferret.
Last night we watched the first episodes of the TV show Silo. I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of it so I watched an interview with the author of the book and the director of the movie. The author, Hugh Howey, was influenced by a sailing trip he took to Cuba over 20 years ago. He’d been warned about the place, propagandized. What he found was the most welcoming and friendly place he’d ever been. He wrote the books to ask us to look beyond screens that deliver continuous bad news to instead visit and learn what is truly happening with a people in a place.
It’s summer and the birds are twittering and tweeting. Our little wren and her mate are busy caring for their nest.
Life is a circle and the circle is Love, pebbled with layers and layers of kindness, like galaxies of stars.
Yesterday we spent time with our grandson at CuriOdyssey, an entertaining and educational place for children and adults at Coyote Point Drive in San Mateo. I tried to catch photos of sleek and curious river otters but they were too fast for me. My immersion in time is slow so I went for a focused child, turtles, and bobcats.
Yesterday I had an 8:00 dental cleaning. I arrived early at the marsh. At first I saw no birds, then, darting swallows and then two egrets. The water moves in and out, tidal like the seasons as we celebrate light and shadow in these long days of summer solstice.
Emily Dickinson:
To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else.
I go down to the marsh to welcome Father’s Day, and the soon to be longest day of the year. The sun is shining. I wonder where the fog went and think of these words of Alan Watts:
The anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up.
It’s like that, living and dying happening all the time, signing and signaling the joy of being here now, today.
When Mr. Fuji designed our Japanese garden, I learned that bamboo symbolizes enlightenment because it moves and sways. Yesterday I walked to a bench near my home and listened to the wind talking through the trees. I understood that enlightenment is movement; movement is enlightenment. Listening is movement; attention is grace.
Mark Twain said: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Yesterday I started Andre Dubus III’s book, Such Kindness and read all the way through until midnight. The main character discovers we’re here to “play” the game. My father always spoke of work as play. It’s about our attitude as we listen to and move with the dance of the wind, and see our partners in this game we share, listen to them, receive them, as we play with the cards we are dealt.
Last week we toasted marshmallows over an open wood fire. It’s so tricky, the matching distance to embers and fire to get the golden brown, or perhaps a black end, torched.
I sit here now considering the textures we are, the warmth and movement, heat and fluidity.
A woman I study with, Miren Salmeron, says “Give yourself your sweet attention.”
I do that now, feeling a coating respond to my environment and melt to the sweet.
Last night we watched the movie The Lost King about Richard III and how history was misaligned with the truth. One woman changed that. I remember when the news came out, and with this movie even more people will know the power of a vision in uncovering the truth.
Again, where I live is wrapped in fog and mist. It’s an invitation to meld even more intimately with the air, and the in and out of the nourishing and living chords and cords of breath.
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