Sometimes life feels like a bunch of pick-up sticks. Clasped together in our palm, we let go, either willingly or with a push from outside, and the sticks fall, so we’re given the opportunity to put them back together again in a whole new form.
I read about humans needing to adapt to increasing heating patterns on the planet. Impermanence. Change, and how do we meet what comes?
More than 2000 years ago, the great Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu said: “The True Man breathes with his heels; the mass of men breathe with their throats.”
Walking brings breath to and through our soles, toes, arch, and heels; it brings us down to the ground.
Yesterday at Tennessee Valley beach, I was entranced with stone, with what surrounds, holds, guides.
At one point I walked on chert, and felt the ridges as though I was walking on the tail of a dragon. No wonder we love fairytales and I think now of the book by Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon, about a dragon who preferred writing poetry to fighting.
Ilse Middendorf said: “Perceiving our breath as it comes and goes we discover an opening into our unconscious life, and bring about a conscious expansion into the whole of ourselves.” The whole of ourselves, and I feel the breath move in a wave, connected like a Mobius Strip.
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.
Ebi and Ginger, two rescue greyhounds, were with us on our trip to Palm Springs. There’s nothing like being greeted as though you are the most amazing person in the world even if it’s just that morning comes and you’re there.
On our return, our cat needed to go to the Cat Spa. He’s older now and his fur mats in a way we can’t comb through so I sat and talked with a lovely woman as Tiger was outwardly pampered though he didn’t seem to recognize it, but then, he calmed and now he’s happy to be home and freshly groomed.
Life –
My son attended a funeral on Thursday. It was done in the traditional Chinese way. He appreciated the ceremony, the ritual, and suggested he might want some of that when I go. I’ve said I want simplicity, a scattering of ashes in nature, no ceremony at all. He pointed out that I won’t be here, which is true, so this morning I’m with how to satisfy us both which even as I type this sounds ridiculous and I laugh both inside and out. I’m tickled by this odd need to control even when I’m entering and merging with other streams.
Today a close friend is sixty and another is seventy and I wake to feel I’m living in the Wonder Years. The phrase pops to mind though I never saw the show aired in the 80’s and focused on the 60’s, but now I realize it fits this time of my life
It is a time of wonder. There’s a pause in the breath, a time to wonder with a rainbow spread of awe: what comes next?
I wake in the morning grateful for the immersed touch of life, cells popping, and breath moving in and out, tracing paths of wonder. What is being now?
Yesterday I watched a Ted Talk by David Eagleman. Can We Create New Senses for Humans? Yes, we can. Watch this and feel possibility and perception expand. In a world of wonder, each day is a celebration of birth and death, expansion and contraction, youth and age.
I’m entranced with the moon shining as the morning sky comes to light. My eyes are drawn outside even as I consider the room in which I ruminate and communicate.
In Anna Held Audette’s tiny book, The Blank Canvas – Inviting the Muse, she writes, “You need to arrange your studio environment so that it fits you. Even Van Gogh, who was forced to work under the most rudimentary conditions, wrote, “I have taken some (prints) for my little room to give it the right atmosphere, for that is necessary to get new thoughts and ideas.”
This morning after meditating, I sat, eyes still closed, and gently touched with my hands the seven bones that meet at the eye socket. Then, I allowed one hand to touch the opposite shoulder and the collar bone. The hand seemed content to stay in the air. I allowed and savored that even as I moved it slightly; the thumb fanned the air as it moved with delicacy and tenderness in and out.
When I opened my eyes, I perused the palm of my hand; it felt heavier with the weight of my eyes. That led me to Google to investigate photons which have no mass but do have energy. What was happening with my hand? Was it simply that I was noticing the celebration of light in its passage in me, through me, as me?
I was reminded of George Eliot’s wonderful words in her book Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
I don’t think we’d die from keener vision and feeling. I think we come more alive. I look up and out and the moon still shines. The sky is shared by moon and sun. We are containers for all.
Cathy's Blog! 