Today is the one year anniversary of Uvalde, the shooting of 19 students and two teachers killed by an 18 year old who bought the gun legally. Their families gather now in a group called “21 Angels’ to call for action and share their grief. And yet, again, as after Sandy Hook and other shootings, nothing changes.
Yesterday I read poems that Poets.org sent in honor of the upcoming Memorial Day. I read the poems, touched, wondering how we’ve come to celebrate pain and loss with parades, floats, and food. Perhaps that’s one way to process grief.
Monday, a friend who lost her husband recently, said it’s heartbreaking and also heart opening.
We come together and share the open wounds of grief.
May we honor the mist and twine our roots like trees.
This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.
Perhaps because I was out and about this week, this morning I’m aware of what it was to have the world so suddenly close up on March 17, 2020. Steve and I were enjoying a weekend in Monterey, when, like that, everything closed. We drove home along the coast and stopped in Davenport, CA, where we were served the last cup of coffee before they closed up and were told that even that was “illegal”, but it’s a small place and they took pity on us. We bonded in saying goodbye to what we’d known before as we entered a new realm.
Suddenly we couldn’t see family or friends. We spoke of forming “pods” of touch and communication.
How are we changed by this sudden awareness of oneness and passage of breath that meant isolation and with that, hopefully introspection and reflection on what matters?
I sit with that today as I try to absorb the “news” which is my own little pocket of information hand-picked and tailored for me. Well, not chosen by hand, as much as computer generated.
A friend recommended the book Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. It is by Terrence Real. I’m still reading it but it’s about a relationship with ourselves and others, about the science affirming how we’re connected and influence each other. Yes, we need to deal with unconscious responses formed in childhood, but when we learn to pause, to rest between stimulus and response, we come to a conscious, more adult choice now.
That brings me to these words of Jim Harrison:
Moving water is forever in the present tense, a condition we rather achingly avoid.
Aware, may we each move with the gift of presence, the wholeness we can hold like a nest, a flower clasped at the stem.
GatheringStreamingScreeningResting like a Rhododendron nestled with a redwood treeGrouping to bloomCamellia circling sight Like a star
The little wren is back. She is an industrious little being with the sweetness of her flight. The top of the lamp has been empty since her eggs hatched last spring and she left, but now she’s back, and in a few days of flying back and forth gathering twigs and such, there is a nest.
During the pandemic, we didn’t drive a car that sat outside. When we went to start it, the battery was naturally dead. Under the hood, a perfect little nest, it’s maker now departed, but there intertwined was my discarded hair.
John O”Donohue:
Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
Outside a medical officeThe north side of Mt. Tam –
Great Blue Heron and Cormorants in Sausalito – Alcatraz in the backgroundGreat Blue Heron Grooming on the top postA neck scratch to finish the grooming sessionThe swirling tideReflecting stillness
It’s a day of complexity and fragility as we honor Mother and Mother Earth as represented in our own mother,
My mother passed gently and sweetly in 2005, passed as she lived, gently and sweetly, and so today, a sweet, gentle sadness comes in as part of me.
A crow is energetically cawing around our house today. I remember when I had a tiny basket of three tiny brightly wrapped chocolate eggs resting on our wall system. One day the three eggs were replaced with three tiny rocks. I believe it was our local jay that gave the exchange.
We don’t know how closely we’re watched by our surroundings, by birds and trees, plants and people, and so on this day it is to celebrate our own mother, our own tendencies to mother, and this beautiful earth we share birthed moment by moment, and year by year.
Watching the top of one tree for a hawk, this tiny bird flew up from the tip of another branch top.Joy in Flight
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
I
Nina Simone:
I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.
Kabir:
Wherever you are, that is the entry point.
Dogen:
Mountains and oceans have whole worlds of innumerable wondrous features. We should understand that it is not only our distant surroundings that are like this, but even what is right here, even a single drop of water.
There are so many poems that give me pause. I feel the beat of my heart, the flow of my blood, embraced, entranced, enhanced. This morning it’s this poem by William Stafford.
Living on the Plains That winter when this thought came — how the river held still every midnight and flowed backward a minute — we studied algebra late in our room fixed up in the barn, and I would feel the curved relation, the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life holding the earth round and ready to meet itself again when morning came. At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal she said, “You’re studying too hard,” and I would include her face and hands in my glance and then look past my father’s gaze as he told again our great race through the stars and how the world can’t keep up with our dreams.
This morning as I meditate, I feel spring in my heart, the opening scent of flowers, the invitation to unreel the layers of the bud, build a nest, fill it with eggs of creativity, and birth what’s here.
Yesterday, Steve and I decided he needed an x-ray of his arm, swollen and bruised from a fall and so we rushed out of the house even before I could grab a Kindle or book. I waited outside of the medical office and meditated and took photos of flowers lining sidewalks and streets. I realized I was near a library but it closed as I walked up, so I sat on a bench and sat, and felt, and thought of porches with rocking chairs and benches, and how enclosed life can be with ATM’s and self-checking, and everything delivered and left right at the door.
Because I watched and enjoyed The Wizard of Oz with my grandson this week, I came home and watched Pollyanna. Okay these movies are fantasies, very colorful fantasies, escapism, and yet, what is it when so much has left technicolor for a darker view of life? Another shooting – oh, my!
How do we balance what we view, and how we involve and evolve with immersion in the flowers blooming everywhere, except perhaps Tahoe which continues to stay white with snow. Yesterday I appreciated the gift of sitting outside with nothing to do and nowhere to be. Steve is fine, just swollen and bruised, and I feel the opening call of spring even as I more firmly root.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
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.
Outside my window – oak and redwood twine Outside the medical centerAlong the parking lotEnchant
Yesterday I drove down to Menlo park, entranced with the clouds. They resembled images sent back from outer space.
Today is a full moon, Buddha’s birthday, and Cinco de Mayo.
From Writer’s Almanac: It’s the birthday of the man who said, “No man is lonely while eating spaghetti”. Christopher Morley, born in Haverford, Pennsylvania (1890), wrote a hundred books.
Morley said, “You can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”
It’s a day to read, and either fast, or eat rice, guacamole, or spaghetti, or all three.
Today I was early for my dentist appointment so I strolled along the marsh.
Duck and Killdeer share a niche.Egret lifts nearbyA sturdy bridgeCamouflaged, so look closely to see three KilldeerEgret and KilldeerKilldeer, a sentry for eggs laid on the ground while egret feastsRegal with destinationEgret and Duck
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