With the challenges of these days, I now open Mary Oliver’s book Devotions in the morning. I let it fall open and receive.
Today I open to “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End”?
“Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.”
Just that enough to begin this day, a day where the fog is softly settled in, and squirrels are chirping as they scamper up and down the redwood tree and birds are singing.
She goes on as she does and comes to this:
“And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
Comes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.”
Yesterday, inspired by her invitation to go into nature I went to Hawk Hill and Rodeo Beach. Clear here, the fog was playing its dance at the Golden Gate of in and out, hide and seek, form and dissipate. I walked and sat, embraced, expanded, entranced.
My mantra continues to be: Be loving awareness, breath blowing through everywhere.
A bench on which I sit – the wood grained with lived supportTemperature Differences MeetRocks rest, receive what comes, open to touch
The weather is exquisite here today and yet I feel that dip toward fall and want to make pumpkin and apple pies. Perhaps the dip is contemplating the tragedy in Highland Park, a desire for a safe and secure home scented with cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves. I keep seeing the little boy who lost his parents. He is the age and look of my grandson.I keep twirling his curls wanting to hold him close.
Where do we put such trauma and pain, such empathy for the pain and suffering of others? How do we breathe it in and allow it to blow throughlike clouds, rain, snow?
Anna Quindlin told Villanova’s graduating Class of 2000:
“Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.”
I center there.
Looking east from Sausalito Looking south from our deck – the hills losing their green The red chest and head of the bird shine bright, a beacon of Joy
A friend suggests we change the name of Independence Day to Interdependence Day. I like that and wonder how we move toward that recognition when I read Heather Cox Richardson today.
From HCR today:
Traditionally, Americans have celebrated the Fourth of July with barbecues, picnics, celebrations, and parades as people come together to celebrate our democracy without regard to political party. In Highland Park, Illinois, yesterday morning, a gunman opened fire on a Fourth of July parade with a high-powered rifle, killing 7, physically wounding at least 47 others, and traumatizing countless more. There were more than a dozen other mass shootings over the holiday weekend, as well. All told, mass shootings this weekend caused at least 15 deaths and injured at least 91.
Police arrested the alleged Highland Park shooter, a white 21-year-old, without incident, inspiring comparisons to the police shooting of 25-year-old Jayland Walker of Akron, Ohio, last week after a stop for a minor traffic violation. Walker fled from the scene in his car and then fled from the car. Officers shot him, saying now they believed he was reaching for a gun. A medical examiner found 60 bullet wounds (not a typo) in Walker’s body, which a medical examiner said was handcuffed when it arrived at the coroner’s office. Walker was unarmed. He was Black.
The unarmed Black man was shot 60 times and then handcuffed. He was running away, not aiming a gun.
And what is the punishment for those who shot him? Until there is accountability, this will continue.
Interdependent, we all suffer with the injustice we continue to see over and over again. How many tears? How much pain?And why?
Yesterday, these words of Ram Dass carried me: We are simply loving awareness.
He said to radiate loving awareness. I move the words through me in two ways. Loving awareness, the two words expansively one, all one, no “me”, and then, this individual me saying I love Awareness. I weave the two in and out as though playing an accordian or receiving food like an anemone in the rising and sinking tides.
Stefan led yesterday introducing the concept or image of “pockets of peace”. Within us, we each have pockets of peace. I felt myself like one of those children’s cloth books with pockets that open with zippers, buttons, or velcro. Soon the pockets were opening like origami swans spreading their wings. I opened to, or was opened – layers and ripples – a sea of peace.
Summer fog – a moving blanket of moisture and ease
Because I enjoyed the delight of caring for my grandson I now have his generously shared cold which means I’ve been gentle with myself. I listened to the fireworks from the couch absorbing how the day began – more killing by someone who spoke his beliefs and yet was not stopped.
I’m reading Krista Tippett who believes in hope as do I. She responds to Rilke’s words in “Letters to a Young Poet”, “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
She says: The notion of living the questions in a world that is in love with answers. I’ve been reading Rilke since I was in Berlin almost 40 years ago, but what I feel coming back to our world is this idea that to do justice to a question means that you cannot rush to an answer. What you’re called to do is hold the question itself, dwell with the question respectfully, and love the question. Live your way into the answer. If you hold a question, if you’re faithful, the question will be faithful back to you.
I think we’re all with how we stop gun violence in this country. In 2020, more than 45,000 Americans died of gun-related injuries. I think it’s time to look at the senators who receive money from the NRA. Mitt Romney has received more money from the NRA than any other senator. He has received $13,647,676 dollars. Here’s the list of senators who receive money from the NRA and the amounts.
This is an American holiday, and perhaps appreciated more this year when the independence so fought for is threatened. We know life is movement and change but I think most of us see it as movement forward not backward. I see the date, the fourth, as going forth.
Amidst all that’s happening, I return to the questions the philosopher Spinoza suggested we ask ourselves each night.
What inspired me today?
Where did I experience peace, balance, comfort, or satisfaction?
What made me happy today, what, not who?
May we all travel forth on the Fourth.
Cormorant drying his or her wings on FridayThe bay draws our eyes, inspires
As much as we’re all shaking from yesterday’s events, I note it is Republican women who have come forth, who are speaking out.Inspiration!! And the truth comes out despite threats and intimidation. The hearings were moved up to protect Cassidy, and we’re all watching even more closely and carefully now.
Yesterday I watched the first hour of the hearings, watched Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony on what happened on January 6th. I was shaking, shaken as I often am by what has been happening. I watched while it was happening on January 6th, and I felt what Trump was doing was obvious and clear, so I’m not surprised or shocked by her testimony. I also note that those who testify under oath reveal what those who asked to be pardoned refuse to say.
That said, today, I wake aware that the saying of support, “and the sky is blue” brings to me words of even more support. The earth is turning, always turning, at least within our lifetimes. Can we tune into that turning, feel the motion, see it as one does when pausing allows one to see the movement of the sun from east to west, the changing shadows in the trees?The earth is turning and we are turning, opening to and being given new views.
Awareness – sensory awareness. Yesterday I participated in Stefan’s offering where he spoke of generosity, the generosity in seeing, and allowing what’s here to come to us. In my home, I see what I’ve gathered and created, what’s been given to me, and how I choose to arrange and display the gifts.
The earth is generous; the universe is generous. In this circling motion, this opportunity, may we allow ourselves to be nurtured on truth revealed and spinning on looms we create and perceive.
If you are interested in Stefan’s work, you will find him here.
I’m reading The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh. The book shows how capitalism leads to domination and destruction of this sensitive planet, a living system on which we depend.
On the subject of our use of fossil fuels and how they affect the environment, he begins with a steam-powered battleship called the Nemesis that allowed the British to destroy the Chinese navy in 1840.
“Since then the use of fossil fuels in war-making has risen in a steep curve. During the Second World War the American military’s consumption of petroleum amounted to one gallon of petroleum per soldier per day; during the first Gulf War this rose to four gallons per soldier per day; in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate of consumption surged to sixteen gallons per soldier per day.”
“Today the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States – and probably in the world. The U.S. military maintains vast fleets of vehicles, ships, and aircraft, and many of these consume huge amounts of fossil fuels. A non-nuclear aircraft carrier consumes 5,621 gallons of fuel per hour; in other words, those vessels burn up as much fuel in one day as a small midwestern town might use in a year. But a single F-16 aircraft consumes a third as much fuel in one hour of ordinary operations – around 1,700 gallons. If the plane’s afterburners are engaged, it consumes two and a half times as much fuel per hour as an aircraft carrier – 14,400 gallons. The U.S.Air Force has around a thousand F-16’s, and they are but a small part of the air fleet.”
“In the 1990’s the three branches of the U.S. military consumed approximately 25 billions tons of fuel per year. This was more than a fifth of the country’s total consumption, and “more than the total commercial energy consumption of nearly two thirds of the world’s countries”. During the years of the Iraq War, the U.S. military was consuming around 1.3 billion gallons of oil annually for its Middle Eastern operations alone.”
The author continues with statistics and points out the Department of Defense “generates 500,000 tons of toxic waste annually, more than the top five US chemical companies combined, and it is estimated that the armed forces of the major world powers produce the greatest amount of hazardous waste in the world.”
As we struggle to get money for climate change, we and other countries continue to fund the military without question even though the military is well aware of the dangers of climate change. They’re already dealing with the problems of sea-level rise affecting many of their bases. In addition, “In 2018 Hurricane Michael struck the Tyndall Air Force base in Florida with great force, damaging seventeen jets, each worth a third of a billion dollars.”
This book is depressing and I’m reading it slowly but I think we all need to be aware of our increasing dependence on the military and how both political parties vote to support their insatiable demands.
Are we spending money in a way that makes sense when it comes to continuing to live on an inhabitable planet?Not all of us are going to want to, or be able to, head out to Mars.I like it here.
This morning Samantha Wallen of Write in Power invites me to look around and notice something I don’t pay much attention to. I note that my printer sits on the desk, a heavy presence, patient, waiting until I decide something needs a harder form, something I can hold in my hands.
Is that where unsettlement comes from, that place of waiting, and now I hear a chirp. The nest has little birds and they’re waking up.
Attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.
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