My son informs that yesterday was Pythagorean Triple Square Day!
9/16/25 is 3 square, 4 squared, 5 squared.
Yesterday I went with a friend to circle the top of Mt. Tam and discovered a Monarch Butterfly Creek Garden in Mill Valley. Fall is on the way!
Today I read the news and then I balanced it with the poem “Thanks” by W.S. Merwin. You can read the poem here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57937/thanks
He ends with:
we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov:
Love every leaf…. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an abiding universal love.
Yesterday I had a tooth extracted, and a bone graft put in place. In four months, the bone will have integrated with my own bone, so I can have an implant. For now, I am aware of the integration, the curiosity of my bone with this, what may seem like an intrusion, and the care with which the procedure was done. My dentist’s son, who is 18, wants to be a dentist, so I gave permission for him to be there, too. Sometimes I close my eyes for dental procedures, but yesterday when I opened them, I saw three faces peering in, the dentist, the assistant, and his son. Three people were taking care of one small area in the rear of my mouth. How amazing is that?
Yesterday I read an essay by a father, Dave Kim, who was surprised how much his 8 year old son loved the book Heidi published in 1881 by Joanna Spyri. He and his son went to the village where the book is set, Heidiland, and again, his son loved exploring and understanding whether it was a real little girl, or a composite who lived there.
His son was especially enchanted with these words which I remember reading as a child. It’s sunset and Heidi is with her goatherd pal, Peter:
A golden light lay on the grass and flowers, and the rocks above were beginning to shine and glow. All at once she sprang to her feet, “Peter! Peter! Everything is on fire! All the rocks are burning, and the great snow mountain and the sky! … Look at the rocks! Look at the fir trees! Everything, everything is on fire!”
Dave Kim writes: This was one of his son’s favorite moments. “Do rocks actually glow in Switzerland?” his son asked him one morning.
I’m with that as I consider which books my now five year old grandson responds to. One favorite is Ziji, The Puppy Who Learned to Meditate by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Torey Hayden. When he spends the night, we read it before he goes to sleep.
Yesterday a friend was here and pulled a book off a shelf, The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. They made a “spell book” to conjure up lost words that were left out of the most recent edition of the Oxford-Junior Dictionary. Words like acorn, bluebell, dandelion, heron, kingfisher, newt and otter were replaced with attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.
The outdoor and natural were displaced by the indoor and virtual. Most of us interact virtually each day, and this morning I read a poem on-line by Wendell Berry about watching one leaf fall, and I felt that leaf falling through me bringing peace, integrating all the ways we perceive.
This week my friend and colleague Karen Roeper gave an inspiring speech to the graduating class at the Roeper School in Michigan. The school was founded by her parents in 1941 when they were forced to leave Nazi Germany. Already involved in education, they came to America in 1939 vowing to establish a school that would educate children to participate in the world as caring, humane adults.
Karen’s theme in her speech is love.
She shares an excerpt from an interview with the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. He was asked, “If you could change one thing as Surgeon General that would be immutable for the long haul, what would it be?”
He responded: “If I could change one thing, it would be: I would want us to very explicitly, and unapologetically place love at the center of our lives as a galvanizing force in our society.”
He continued on to talk about how our current society is locked in a struggle between love and fear.
Karen quotes her mother from her 2007 commencement speech: “If you really love yourself, then you will love life itself and you won’t want to hurt or harm others.”
Buddhist Jack Kornfield offers a practice: “When you are walking around the world, see every person as once having been a newborn child.”
Yesterday I spent time in my neighbor’s beautiful yard which is an offering to serenity for all who come, plants, animals, birds. I share a taste.
Cathy's Blog! 