Where I live we are moving into a loosening up as more people are vaccinated.  When might we get together?  How will that feel and be?  We’ve been cocooned, and what is it now to open up and out and spread our wings?  Trees are budding and flowers are blossoming.  Spring is in the air.  I’m reminded of Wind in the Willows when Mole smells the fresh air and goes to the river where he meets Rat, and they fool around in a boat and become friends.

I woke this morning thinking of the famous picture of the two people kissing at the end of World War II.  There was a clear end.  This is different, will be and has been a gradual opening and then closing, and of course, we’re hoping this opening will continue to expand.

Meanwhile it is for each of us to feel our way to how we step back into a wider world of personal touch and connection.

I’m with these words from the Gospel of Thomas. 

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

May we all bring forth what is within us, honoring there.  

The De Young museum is opening up in San Francisco.  I feel such hope when I’m in a museum and then walk outside to see what we endeavor to capture in a frame or form. The museum is presenting a conversation between Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso.  I’ve always related to Calder, especially his mobiles.  

Alexander Calder wrote: “The Universe is real, but you can’t see it.  You have to imagine it.”  

In 1951, Calder observed: “At that time and practically ever since, the underlying form in my work has been the systems of the Universe, or part thereof. What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.”

Picasso in Life with Picasso wrote: “If one occupies oneself with what is full, that is, the object as positive form, the space around it is reduced to almost nothing. If one occupies oneself primarily with the space that surrounds the object, the object is reduced to almost nothing. What interests us most – what is outside or what is inside a form?“

I sit here now, a perceived form, feeling size and shape, texture and vibration, moving in and out celebrating the changing fields I influence and am influenced by.  I swing and am swung, interacting fields of exchange.  Gratitude ribbons the chains.

John Muir – “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

The world is opening up.  I got my teeth cleaned yesterday and I’ll get a haircut today.   Yes, we’re still wearing masks but there’s a little more space in these longer days.

I asked my dental hygienist how his children were doing with the pandemic.  He said his seven year old daughter had been doing well and then a few months ago became hysterical and they couldn’t calm her down.  She kept saying, “The hospitals are full.”  They took her to a behavioral psychotherapist who through talking and having the child draw discovered that the child remembered when she was four years old and had respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.  Now, she feared it would happen again and the hospitals would be full and she would die.   The therapist assured her she is older now and stronger and will be okay.

I think it’s good the memory of her trauma was uncovered, discussed and aired. I think of the healing in putting it on paper. In chemotherapy, I drew an image of my body, and the therapist analyzing it, pointed out what she saw and what I might not be seeing and feeling in my experience. I can’t remember what I drew, but I do remember how her analysis hit home. I walked out feeling “seen”, and of course, it was really me seeing myself.

I sit with how our children have been and are being affected by all of this. Yesterday, my hygienist put it in perspective. He said that though this may be hard on our children, it’s not like life in Syria.  Yes, it’s true.  And I wonder what they say.

I’m with words of Jane Hirshfield: “One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read — in such a moment, anything can happen.”

Yes!

I’m with the fullness of the moment, the fullness of the breath as I assimilate and reflect. My passage expands like the twittering and flight of birds, a reverence ringing inside and out. I am the bell, the space, the lamp, the light, the chime.

Harvest and meaning gong!!