We pause and honor those lost in war.
We pause.
Seeing my hair woven into nests of birds, I give thanks for connection shared.
Mark Nepo:
In a world that lives like a fist, mercy is no more than waking with your hands open.
Memorial Day
Gratitude
I woke this morning in a field of gratitude, not just gratitude in one place, like heart, stomach, and/or lungs, but I woke as though I was immersed in a field, held in a gathering of sunflowers, daisies, and strawberries.
Rumi’s words fluttered through me like butterflies.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
Then, on Nextdoor, I saw a photo of a whale frolicing and waving its tail. It was taken at Stinson Beach yesterday. The whales are here.
That led me to open Amanda Ripley’s book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. One focus of the book is the tightly knit community of Muir Beach, ten minutes from where I live. It’s peaceful there and yet the community became embroiled in conflict.
My intention is to read this book this weekend. I suggest it as a tool, guide, refuge for us all as we navigate through pain and trauma to meet in a field “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”. Let’s meet there.
A Pause
It’s memorial weekend. We remember. Some put flowers and, or flags on graves. Memory is caught, held, and shared like flowers as they come together and fall apart.
I’m filled with grief at the tragedy in Uvalde, and how some, even now, are allowed to spout lies at the NRA convention which should not be held.
The Buddha’s last words were Be a lamp unto yourself.
And so today, we light our lamps as we merge with the lights of those so recently and tragically taken from us.
Anne Lamott writes: Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
This three day weekend, may we pause and reel connection to Source, the place to begin.
Healing
I went to the Muir Beach overlook yesterday. The fog is in so I dressed for winter and felt the news of these days melt and flow away. I met two friends. One just lost her husband after 16 months battling pancreatic cancer. The three of us lost a very good friend this week, and so I sink into melding with the ocean and rocks to give expansion, compassion, and comfort with transition, passage, and grief.
Counterbalancing
I find myself mind-boggled with the news and events of the days, and so I come to Yeats.
God guard me from these thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone.
Enough
When my children were young, there were times I wanted to lock them in a closet, to keep them here with me, to keep them safe. Today I think if they were still young, I wouldn’t let them go to school today. We would stay home together and cuddle and snuggle and read books and go to the park, the mountain, the beach. We would play with Legos and Tinker Toys, and talk about ethics, morality, compassion, kindness, non-judgment, community, and peace.
Non-judgment – today’s challenge is to not judge those who vote against background checks and common sense regulation of guns. Why do they vote that way? Money. Power and Money!
From Heather Cox Richardson:
Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.
The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—support background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it.
I think we’ve all had enough.
Honey
Sorrow
I had trouble sleeping last night as I felt and thought of the parents and children affected by the tragedy in Texas yesterday. We are all affected, all pained, all bent. I come to this poem by John O’Donohue from his wonderful book To Bless the Space Between Us.
For a Parent on the Death of a Child
No one knows the wonder
Your child awoke in you,
Your heart a perfect cradle
To hold its presence.
Inside and outside became one
As new waves of love
Kept surprising your soul.
Now you sit bereft
Inside a nightmare,
Your eyes numbed
By the sight of a grave
No parent should ever see.
You will wear this absence
Like a secret locket,
Always wondering why
Such a new soul
Was taken home so soon.
Let the silent tears flow
And when your eyes clear
Perhaps you will glimpse
How your eternal child
Has become the unseen angel
Who parents your heart
And persuades the moon
To send new gifts ashore.
~ John O’Donohue ~
(To Bless the Space Between Us)
Grief
Tonight, we grieve, again. Another shooting, another – when will it stop?
19 children and 2 adults – no reason.
The stapes is the smallest bone in the human body. Shaped like a stirrup, it’s located in the middle ear where it conducts sound vibrations to the inner ear. The inner ear. What isn’t reaching the inner ear? What isn’t penetrating so we more fully hear?
I sit outside as the sun sinks through the wind stroked trees. Birds flit and sing. I breathe in peace as I sink to the ground in grief.
Life
I’m reading William Elliott’s book Tying Rocks to Clouds, a title I love. He interviews various spiritual leaders to find guidance for his own path. He asks them a series of questions about their beliefs and ideals.
As I answer for myself, I feel the purpose of life is for each of us to fulfill in our own unique way. I think of the sea star, the creature that eats by extruding its stomach out through its mouth to envelop a meal. When the food is digested, the stomach is drawn back into the body. It’s an image I can use to consider how I might meet another person or event, to more clearly expand how I listen, receive, and perceive.
On that note, Robert Hubbell has this to say.
The wife of a supreme court justice participated in an attempted coup. That fact is outrageous and should matter to every American and should remain on the front pages of every newspaper in America until the justice resigns or recuses himself from all election-related cases.
I say he should resign. He’s tainted in a multitude of ways and should never have been allowed on the Supreme Court.
It might seem easy to ignore Clarence and his wife in light of Heather Cox Richardson’s column today where she issues a warning that you might need to skip reading about the abuses in the Southern Baptists church.
And with that, on this beautiful day, I trust in balancing beams of love with shared awareness and care. We can’t heal what we don’t know, and the more we learn of abuse, the more we can focus on healing the wounds. May this be so!
Presence
With each book I hold I am in awe, with awe, am awe. It’s not just the words, but the font, the cover, the arrangement – each book a miracle, a collaboration. Might I receive each book as it passes through hands and mind as Jacques Lusseyran received the light?
Blinded when he was eight, he later wrote his memoir, And There Was Light. He writes:
“I began to look more closely not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside.”
“I was not light itself. I knew that, but I bathed in it as an element which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them.”
Guided, I reach for Thich Nhat Hanh: With each step the earth heals us – ah, I first typed heart – earth and heart – and with each step we heal the earth.
“Breathe in and think I am solid, breathe out and think I am free.”
