Cathy's Blog!

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Moments to Hug

The little wren is sitting patiently on her nest waiting for her eggs to hatch. She was busy building it, and now, she sits, and when the chicks hatch, she’ll be busy again. Meanwhile, either she or her mate chirp away.

I sit between, on, above, and below the notes.

I received sad news this morning. My younger cousin has pancreatic cancer and will begin chemotherapy. Where do I put this information in the melody and harmony of the day? The metronome is so precious in its song, a song beating with my heart and the larger heart we share.

Yesterday I read an article on how to respond to another in need. We ask: Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged? Of course, hugs are preferably done in person though we do send them through space on the internet.

And right now, a ding, and I receive a text of an emoji of two kitties hugging with a heart above, and then, an explanation from my beloved niece.

I was at a retreat recently for work and the somatic instructor said we need 4 hugs a day for survival, 8 hugs a day for maintenance, and 12 hugs a day for growth

And the best part is that our nervous system doesn’t differentiate between a hug from someone else and a hug from ourselves

So hope we can all hug ourself today

I embrace her hope and send it to you and to me. May we all reverberate in and celebrate a loving circle of care.

Posted on June 8, 2023 by Cathy Edgett · 1 Comment

Good Morning

Birds are tweeting in the early morning light as I reflect on these words from Joanna Macy in “Positive Disintegration”.

We can place the self between our ears and have it looking out from our eyes, or we can widen it to include the air we breathe, or at other moments we can cast its boundaries farther to include the oxygen-giving trees and plankton, our external lungs, and beyond them the web of life in which they are sustained.

Posted on June 7, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Connection

Our family gathered on a ranch 1000 feet above Half Moon Bay to celebrate Steve’s 75th birthday.

Fire in the custom fireplace morning and night

Prayer flags wave in a Tibetan temple above us

Posted on May 31, 2023May 31, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Enter

Yesterday I saw an egret standing like a sentry in an open field where once there was a Chevron. There are signposts everywhere.

Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.

– Robin Wall Kimmerer

And there’s John O’Donohue:

Fluent

I would love to live

Like a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

Chamber after chamber – embrace, embraced

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Interdependence

I woke this morning, aware of interdependence. What freedom there is in that. I’m not here by myself. I’m supported by trees, air, breath, you, me. We don’t do this alone. We live in support.

Br. David Steindl-Rast:

The challenge before us is this: to treasure and preserve the independence given to us and learn to integrate it in an all-embracing interdependence.

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Memorial Day

I woke this morning, feeling shaken, like small earthquakes were moving through me. I rose as though shaking sand out of my clothes after being at the beach.

This week my Tergar meditation is focused on The Wisdom of Multiplicity. The more I feel multiplicity in myself, the more I feel it in the world, and in that, comes a deep appreciation of the preciousness of being here, and the awareness of how we’re continuously balancing on a beam of life and death.

ETTY HILLESUM:

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

Etty was murdered in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943. She was 29.

She inspires in demonstrating how to meet what comes from an inner core of support that doesn’t judge or divide into good and bad.

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Multitudes as One

From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

As a child, on Memorial Day, we went to Bedford, Indiana and laid flowers on family graves. Flags flew on the graves of the veterans, placed there by my uncle who fought in WWII. His father fought in WWI. My father was a pilot of a B-17 shot down in WWII. Lives, memories, honoring in a desire for no more wars, for coming together to solve and honor the complexity each of us is, in a world complex, and in that complexity, whole.

Recognizing the multitudes of which I consist, I hope on this Memorial Day we can come to peace in ourselves and the world. It’s a time to honor what’s come before as we use it as a launching pad to honor the dead by living in peace.

Many ropes are required to climb into and open up trees

Clouds, fog, buildings, marsh, plants come together with a place for all

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Transport

Yesterday I was at Bedwell Bayfront Park with my three and a half year old grandson and his dad. I was watching him ride his new bicycle, a bike complete with hand brakes and a kickstand.

When I told him I needed to go to the bank and invited him to go with me, he said, “Toad Hall”, and I was stymied with the connection until I realized he loves the book Wind in the Willows, and his only knowledge of a ‘bank” is the river bank in the book. I’m not sure he was impressed with the interior of a financial institution, but everyone was friendly, and there was a bowl of tootsie roll pops which he was not allowed to take. It was a good reminder of the complexity in language, and what we visualize and hear.

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Passage

A friend, Ben Parker passed away easily this week, his sense of humor and incredible intellect still intact. He was 102. His last words were “the dewdrop slips into the shiny sea.”

“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”

Comforted by that, I open Yehuda Amichai’s poetry book Open, Closed, Open. to the ending of a poem in a section on The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds.

And there’s all that talk about Till death do us part,

Even death will not part us, it will bind us

somewhere in the universe

in a new encounter that has no end.

Soft and hard, curved and flat, life and death

Posted on May 24, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Pilgrimage

Today I tackle another room filled with books.

The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau falls open.

In perusing the book, I resonate and recognize this journey through this room’s accumulation is my current pilgrimage. I enter into the sacred territory of books I’ve chosen to accompany me and now release.

From the book:

Freya Stark in her book on Alexander the Great: “A good traveler does not, I think, much mind the uninteresting places. He is there to be inside them, as a thread is inside the necklace it strings. The world, with unknown and unexpected variety, is a part of his own Leisure, and this living participation is, I think, what separates the traveler and the tourist, who remains separate, as if he were at a theatre, and not himself a part of whatever the show may be.

Cousineau quotes from Rene Daumal’s parable Mount Analogue on the return from the journey. We return determined to remember to live with redoubled courage.

In the process of putting so much pressure on language, thought ceases to be satisfied with the support of words; it bursts away from them in order to seek its resolution elsewhere. This “elsewhere” should not be understood as a transcendent realm, a mysterious metaphysical domain.

This “elsewhere” is “here” in the immediacy of real life. It is from right here that our thoughts rise up, and it is here they they must come back. But after what travels! Live first, then turn to philosophy, but in the third place, live again. Then man in Plato’s cave has to go out and contemplate the light of the sun, then, strengthened by this light, which he keeps in his memory, he has to return to the cave. Verbal philosophy is only a necessary stage in this voyage.

It’s healing when we integrate and share our journey, continuously share, with ourselves and others. I want to live as a thread inside the necklace I string.