When my youngest son was five, I signed up to train as a Terwilliger Nature guide.  We led children into nature at Muir Woods, Muir Beach, Richardson Bay, the Mill Valley Marsh, and Ring Mountain.  Ring Mountain was my site, my place to lead.  

Ring Mountain was the home of the Coast Miwok and we introduced children to life as it was when living with everything at hand, and how differently from that many of us live now.

Making a grocery list, we led fourth, fifth, and sixth graders up the mountain to the petroglyphs at the top.  First, we gathered Pennyroyal from the pond below, and placed it in a thermos to steep so when we came to the midden along the stream under the Buckeye tree, we sat and drank tea.

Above the midden, a place where clam shells and other garbage were tossed, a rounded hole in the rock shows where acorns were ground, to easily be leached in the stream.  Acorns are a powerful food source, and fish was plentiful in the bay below.  As far as we know, life was bountiful and peaceful, and because Ring Mountain is preserved, it is a peaceful spot, though it overlooks the high-security prison San Quentin on the other side of the bay. Being there balances even more clearly the wonder and joy of being outside and not locked up behind bars.

The Terwilliger organization which began with Mrs. T. leading groups of children has expanded to become Wildcare which is still involved with education but also  cares for and advocates for animals.

Last night I attended a fund-raising Gala for Wildcare.  Ambassador animals also attended the event. I felt for them, even as I understood their confinement is essential, and they are well cared for, nourished, and loved. Their lives are not like those at San Quentin.

I sit here now feeling how feathering compassion for all beings illuminates all our lives.

This red-tailed hawk can’t fly because of a wing fracture that didn’t heal properly.  The little opossum has no eyes.

I’m out early this morning, the moon still up, already moving to close itself to half, and the stars shining.

A friend shares that she’s been on a seven day rafting and camping trip in the Grand Canyon, sleeping under the stars, no tent.

I look up and celebrate the luxury of enclosure in canyon walls that open to the sky.

Meanwhile I’ve looked into the stones in the bay, a different type of star.  Life dances in my chest.   

It’s raining, pure delight, and I’m with windmills, and the simplicity of the discovery that changed the world, and still can, and does.

Thinking about windmills brings me to the story of Don Quixote, “tilting” at windmills. It also reminds me of David Brooks inspiring book, “The Road to Character”. Brooks brings forth the lives of people who’ve influenced and changed our world. He mentions over and over again the wisdom obtained from the classics, novels by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, and others.

I think now of these novels as windmills, harnessing the breath of great minds to grind and turn thought into path.

I’m reading a poem by Jim Daniels called “Cosmetic”.  In the poem his mother who’s had good vision for 75 years and is now legally blind has had eyebrows tattooed above her eyes.  She wants to know how they look. He realizes he could tell her anything.

He continues,  “she’s rounding everything off into simple shapes”.  

At my age, almost seventy, I am grateful for each moment and what I’m able to do.  I recognize the gift of being able to sharpen an eyebrow pencil and draw on brows, but what about when I can’t.  Will I simply keep my bangs long, or will I be as I was when I went through chemotherapy, an open lake?

And are eyebrows what we see when we look at another, or is it energy and enthusiasm pouring through, an inner light, as though we look into a cave, and see, yes, there is light.  There is light.  

Yesterday I met a friend at Tennessee Valley.  I was early so I placed a blanket under the trees and lay on my back looking up, listening to chirps, and feeling the breeze.

We met and walked in unprecedented heat to the beach.  98 degrees, I learned later. We like to walk and talk because as is said, Solvitur Ambulando.  “It is solved by walking”.

What is the “it” you might ask, and in this case, there was no it, just an opening to connect with ourselves, each other, and the landscape of which we’re part.

When we got to the ocean, we looked for shade, and found a little inlet, not a cave because it was open at the top but it allowed us to sit in the shade of the cliff.  The rock held water that dripped down my back.

When I mentioned still grieving my brother’s death, she asked what that felt like, and at first I thought of what I’d read, that grief is like waves, comes and goes like waves, but then I realized it was something more.  It was expansiveness.

I’m feeling my brother open me to something more, to spaciousness. It’s the cosmic joke perhaps, the huge laugh, and maybe that’s what the Big Bang was, and is, a giant “guffaw”. Who knows but I think we’re designed to laugh, as much as we can, even as we recognize happiness is helping others, because in helping others, we help ourselves because we are all One.  

Today I drove early to Stinson Beach.  Other than the gulls, I was the only one there.

As I walked toward the water, it looked like the young gulls were in school.  Then, I noticed they were gathered around a structure, a creation, an artwork, gathered as though worshipping. Of course, school, properly inspired, is worship, the most important worship we do.

I was reminded of Burning Man but I thought these are gulls, and then, I realized the structure was a wing.  The feathers were palm fronds. I don’t know the intent of the gathering, but I imagine in gull world it equaled the one on the Playa.

The tide was low and I walked south past exposed rocks, noticing here and there, a lone gull, or a lone sandpiper.  Then, walking back, I saw people stumbling with loads of stuff to plop in their spot. It was time to go.

Chain saws are roaring next door, and my nervous system feels the whirr and the roar, so today’s words circulate unable to land, unable to bond and form a band.

My Ditty for Today

I vowed to post every day 

But in this moment I’ve nothing to say 

The moon last night was almost half

Thoughts like glaciers drop and calf

Mind spins round like a centrifuge

Separating words 

from my hue-gathering 

muse

An oak in my yard waves

legs in the air

head rooted, imbibe

all moments with care 

I love stones.  Stones call to me, and people give me stones.   I’m reminded of the poet Robinson Jeffers wonderful Tor House in Carmel, CA.  where stones gather, collected from all over the world.

The story in the New Yorker this week is called The Stone and is by Louise Erdrich, a writer whose work I love.

She has this to say about the story and “the stone”.  

“In the Ojibwe language, nouns are animate or inanimate; the word for stone, asin, is animate. One might think that stones have no actual power—after all, we throw them, build with them, pile them, crush them, slice them. But who is to say that the stones aren’t using us to assert themselves? To transform themselves? One day, the things we made out of stones may be all that’s left of our species. Of our complex history of chipping away at and arranging stones, what will be recorded or known?”

Words to contemplate as we sit with a stone in our hand, or tip-toe through stones in a stream or on a beach.

Meanwhile, I again offer one of my favorite poems by Charles Simic.

STONE

Go inside a stone 

That would be my way. 

Let somebody else become a dove 

Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth. 

I am happy to be a stone. 

From the outside the stone is a riddle: 

No one knows how to answer it. 

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet 

Even though a cow steps on it full weight, 

Even though a child throws it in a river; 

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed 

To the river bottom 

Where the fishes come to knock on it 

And listen. 

I have seen sparks fly out 

When two stones are rubbed, 

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all; 

Perhaps there is a moon shining 

From somewhere, as though behind a hill— 

Just enough light to make out 

The strange writings, the star-charts 

On the inner walls. 

Last night a crescent moon dropped gold in the arms of trees, and stars stayed perched in place, and then, this morning, a quiet wrap of fog. I didn’t hear it come and still the birds sing.

Mary Oliver guides this morning with her counsel: 

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Margaret Atwood’s poem “Up” is also a wake-up call as she writes of changing our attitude when we struggle to get out of bed, by imagining it as our deathbed, and then we are given one more hour to live and forgive.

And then there is this: