Connection! – Page 2 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Earth Day

It’s Earth Day, as is every day since we, this planet, and our environment evolve as one. Last night I was out with the almost full moon, a reminder of the movement we share.

Heather Cox Richardson is again strong with her substack post. I pull this from it:

The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.

The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.

Let us honor the Earth we are, the Earth we share, as we celebrate the Earth each day.

With awareness and care, a place for All!

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Covenant

Yesterday I walked with a friend to the beach at Tennessee Valley. Though I was there ten days ago, it was completely different. Part of it was the light, filtered through a cold wind, but, also, despite rain, the creek had slowed, and it was possible to cross without taking off one’s shoes.

Also, the willows had filled in and the landscape was denser with plants. We didn’t see a bobcat but we did see a long, brown snake slithering into the path for warmth from the sun.

Snake paused when we paused so I saw he was harmless with his thin neck and sliver of a tail. I was reminded of Stanley Kunitz’s wonderful poem “The Snakes of September”. He writes of hearing snakes in the shrubbery all summer long, but then with autumn’s chill, he sees two of them, “dangling head-down entwined in a brazen love-knot”. The poem continues:

I put out my hand and stroke

the fine dry grit of their skins.

After all,

we are partners in this land,

co-signers of a covenant.

At my touch the wild

braid of creation

trembles.

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Mushy

Meditating this morning, I was aware of my heart, this pinkish-red organ generously pumping air in and out to nourish and keep me alive. My heart felt soft and spongy, sensitive and receptive, and I felt the weight, the wet weight of so much horrifying news that comes my way each day. None of it is particular to me so perhaps I could avoid it but then a feeling of compassion poured in, connectedness, and happiness to feel the tenderness in meeting joy and sorrow as one.

Because we’ve had so much rain, the ground outside is mushy. In its wetness, mushrooms, Mush Rooms, have sprung up like lanterns for leprechauns and mycelium. Perhaps my feeling of mushiness today is a reflection of what I don’t always see like mushrooms proclaiming the underground presence and connection of mycelium. Today I give myself time to be in a Mush Room and reflect on receptivity, hidden connection, and change.

A nearby store doubles its image in a flooded parking lot and street

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

A Sense of Balance

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl but I’m aware of the back and forth and the final score. Before 2022, the 49’ers would have won with the first overtime score, but new rules changed the game. Now, the 49’ers are discussed as though they are losers when they went to the Super Bowl and the game was as close as could be.

I’m reminded of a writing class I took with Pam Houston. Her book was on the NY Times best seller list and she was thrilled to share the news with a friend. The friend asked, “What number?” and then, “How many weeks?” Houston knew then this was a no-win as perhaps only the Bible has that top spot. The win is within.

The money that was spent on this game, on advertising, betting, attendance, is unfathomable, and meanwhile we have a measure on our ballot, measure A, that will cost each household possibly $300.00 a year, though depending on when you bought your house only $30.00 a year. It’s to augment our deteriorating schools. It needs 55% to pass, and probably will pass, but it’s strange to consider what is spent on weapons and war, and what the world could be with cooperation, not competition.

Meanwhile increasing light invites sap to rise as the earth turns toward Spring.

A bird and Buddha commune in the spring light

Camellias continue to offer beauty and scent

Posted on January 12, 2024January 12, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Perception

I spent the last two days with my four year old grandson. Part of the time we were at his school as he likes me there and I like to be there. The children seem so grown up with their questions and desire to touch and be near me. I feel drawn into noticing and the curious intimacy of individual and group play.

I appreciate the children’s choice in their array of clothes. I wasn’t sure about my grandson’s choice of red sequined pants for the day but then I saw another in his Christmas pajamas and girls waltzed by as princesses and fairies, and I realized every day is what we perceive of as Halloween when you’re four. The hair of some of the girls dances with barrettes, ribbons, and bows.

I brought grandson a book on the eyes of various creatures, showing the different eyes that see us, from owls to dragonflies, snails to cuttlefish, parrots to gorillas, horses, dogs and cats. We are seen even as we’re seeing and the world is rich with collecting rays of delight.

Posted on December 2, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Trees: Monitors of Change

This morning as I meditated I looked out on the redwood tree that rises and grounds our yard. She is my teacher, my guide. The wind waves her branches as breath moves through me. Sunlight filters through.

Yesterday I was with friends at The Lumberyard in Mill Valley. Until recently it was a lumberyard. Mill Valley had a mill. Much of the wood came from the neighborhood town of Corte Madera which means cut wood.

One massive tree is still preserved at The Lumberyard which now hosts a restaurant, a bakery, and assorted gift shops. I’m with impermanence and the beauty in change.

The shifting light this time of year makes sacredness so clear.

Many of us cut down trees and bring them into our homes to then recycle and transform. Again, so precious is this life we’re given for a time, a time to breathe and connect as we deal with what for some is horrific, and allows us to see that with time we move toward change.

In his 1994 novel “The Crossing,” Cormac McCarthy creates a character who says that “the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it.” In fact, “men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.”

We are seeing the wicked begin to be held to accountability. May that continue to be so.

Even in December, fuchsias bloom in a neighbor’s yard

I see two tummy buttons in the trunk of this saved tree.

Posted on June 25, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Pride

All forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many forms as possible.

– Alan Watts

So many ways to grow, connect, survive and thrive

Posted on March 8, 2023 by Cathy Edgett

Balance and Harmony

I continue to read Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Lyndon Johnson wanted to provide education and medical care to all, but he also knew if he let the Communists take over South Vietnam, he would be seen as a coward and the nation as an appeaser and then we couldn’t accomplish anything for anyone around the globe. He believed, as did my father at the time, in the Domino Theory, that if we’d stepped in sooner, we might not have had to fight World War II.

My father died before he might have changed his mind on that, but being a pilot of a B-17, he certainly knew what it was to be in a war. After innumerable missions, his plane was shot down on the border of Austria and Germany. After parachuting out and being captured, he was placed in a prisoner of war camp. He never judged the guards. They were all caught up in something bigger than themselves.

Johnson said, “Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society.”

He goes on to state his suspicion of the military, of “how they’re always so narrow in their appraisal of everything”. Of course, Eisenhower who knew the military inside experience warned of the “military-industrial complex”

On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address of less than ten minutes, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a “military-industrial complex.” It’s worth reading the transcript here. Yes, we need defense, and we need oversight and balance too.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address

I’ve stayed away from politics as much as is possible these last six weeks, but now I feel stepping stones emerging. May we balance on appreciation of this world we share.

Coming and Going, Near and Far – an easy crossing of paths – space and balance for all

Posted on December 21, 2022December 21, 2022 by Cathy Edgett

Solstice

A day to pause and rest as light and dark meet in the delight of seasons and change. The days grow longer even as our roots sink into connection beneath what is easily seen.

Etty Hillesum:

Through me course wide rivers and in me rise tall mountains. And beyond the thickets of my agitation and confusion there stretch the wide plains of my peace and surrender. All landscapes are within me. And there is room for everything.