I’ve been enjoying time with my three year old grandchild. Seeing through his eyes and imagination is stimulation, gratitude, and blessing.
As the political scene deepens, I’m with these words of Nelson Mandela.
It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.
Yesterday I was at our local native plant nursery, a place to be with sculptures, fountains, plants, and bees.
Robin Wall Kimmerer:
Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.
Yesterday we took the Sausalito ferry to “the city” for one of the birthday celebrations for our three year old grandson. Circus Bella was a treat, a generous creation and abundance of love and fun, offered by donation. Check it out:
I’ve been with the words of William Shatner and his experience venturing into space. He, too, like others, looked back at our planet with wonder. It’s such a precious jewel.
I’ve been meditating outside these days, inside, too, but this morning was outside wrapped in fog, with the hooting of an owl leading to caws of crows and the shriek of a hawk. Somebody scrambled up the redwood tree.
More and more I find myself settling into the wonders of this world of which I’m part and whole, form and non-form, life and death.
Chief Crowfoot:
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
We’ve lived here on a non county maintained road for 45 years. When we moved in, many of our neighbors had built their homes here at the end of World War II, and were the age of our parents. The land was sacred; the Coast Miwok had lived and thrived here, and now people who knew war and left it behind, came here to raise their children in the serenity of nature, connection, and peace.
Now, those people have passed on but in some cases, their children, now my age, retain their childhood home. Last night the neighborhood block party was continued by a son and his wife, and yet the spirits of the parents were there in the generosity of hosting. The set-up was the same, the food, and many of the people, though now older. Where before there were children running around, including ours, now there were only two, though the neighborhood is changing and there are children around.
This seemed a gathering of the elderly though our spirits are young. Maturing gives wisdom and the focus of much of the conversation was on gratitude, gratitude for life and health, for what continues whether we are physically here or not.
One woman spoke of how she and her sister cared for their mother in her home until her death. She didn’t want Hospice so they administered morphine which was frightening because if they spilled it, their mother would be in pain. Her mother requested they wash and prepare her body. The woman said how hard it was and yet she was grateful too.
I haven’t had that experience, and wouldn’t choose to have my children wash my body but I respect the reverence in it, the way of saying goodbye to what the spirit no longer needs and leaves behind.
Several people talked about their chickens. I didn’t know that hens lay eggs in accordance with the light, and for only 18 months to two years. In the spring, more roosters hatch than hens, and that reverses in the fall. There must be a reason for that though I don’t know it. If you want eggs, you want more hens than roosters, though I learned roosters also fill the soup pot. The chicken we buy in the store is young, eight weeks or so, to keep it tender.
We spoke of how we love living here. For many their children live far away now and so the parents “think” they should move, but the land holds us here. Our roots twine with the hills and critters, and oak, redwood, and bay trees.
We walked home, each carrying a goodie bag, put together by the hosts. It was all so sweet, and I felt then and I feel now, I’ve been to, and still am, in the reverence of gathering we call church, temple, tepee, tent, flower, tree, mosque.
The fog is in, which may affect today’s flight of the Blue Angels. Tomorrow is Indigenous People’s Day. We honor the past with presence and awareness of integrating change.
Mingyur Rinpoche: Compassion is the spontaneous wisdom of the heart.
Yesterday, before time with my grandchild, I stopped at Filoli Gardens to celebrate Fall. The name comes from the motto of the former owner, Bourn. FIght for a just cause, LOve your fellow man. LIve a good life.
Meanwhile today, the Blue Angels are thundering overhead while birds circle in the sky proclaiming a quiet superiority.
In meditation today I think of my ancestors, all the way back to Neanderthal and Cro Magnon and before. Each month is sacred, but I, one son, and my grandson were born in this month, so, for me, there is an extra preciousness. Leaves change color and fall, and I recognize we are moving toward November when the veil between the living and the dead is thin.
Today, eyes slightly open, I saw the oak tree outside the window shaking. First one squirrel and then another, and another were running up and down shaking the branches of the tree like a wild and crazy breeze. Then, they’d pause to eat an acorn, then scurry along.
I was reminded of a poem from my childhood from The Book House.
Whisky, frisky,
Hippity hop.
Up he goes
To the tree top!
Whirly, twirly,
‘Round and ’round.
Down he scampers
To the ground.
Furly, curly,
What a tail!
Tall as a feather,
Broad as a sail.
Where’s his supper?
In a shell.
Snappy, cracky,
Out it fell.
This morning I’m enchanted with eyes opening and closing, with the depth and texture in eyeball and eyelid, the meeting and departure – relationship.
I’m with these words of Anne Lamott:
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Last night I was outside enjoying the stars, the planet Jupiter, and the evening sky. Then one shooting star and then another shot brightly and seemingly slowly by. It was my father’s birthday. Born in 1921, he would have been 101. He passed away in 1969 when he was 47 and is still missed.
From Snow Leopard, Lama Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds:
Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere – in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that … leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him though yet hidden from his sight.
As I’ve shared, in preparing my eyes for cataract surgery, I’ve moved from 60 years of wearing contact lenses to wearing glasses so my eyes can return to their natural, and not a controlled state.
I’m realizing the gift of this as I sometimes view myself, as perhaps many of us do, as “fixed”, forgetting the movement and change we always are. The earth is not standing still, and neither are we.
In this change, I have more awareness of my eyes and my way of seeing. I understand the visual cortex is in the back of my head, by the occiput. Those with myopia as I have may focus more upward there, elongate, and so now I allow changes in my eyes, in my way of seeing, feeling, and being.
We also balance in that area, so as I change my ability to see and perceive, my interaction with depth perception, I, at times, feel disoriented, unbalanced, even discombobulated. Who am I with all these changes?
This is an exploration, and as I say a gift. I feel a return to when I went through chemotherapy, not as exhausting, painful, or demanding, but certainly it is awareness, observation, feeling the space within open and close, the bones in my head open and close, the connections all through me of oneness in this world we share.
I trust in the experience of each unfolding moment.
Lin Jensen, “Molting”:
Awakening arises in times of vulnerability and awkwardness between, before, and after where prior identities are canceled and anything is possible and nothing certain.
Alan Watts:
In Zen, mountains are mountains at first but then everything must fall apart before mountains can be mountains again.
Cathy's Blog! 