Trees need space for light and air to move through just as we do.
I admire the men who climb up into trees and cut branches by hand.
Tree Pruning
Generosity of Sound
In meditating today, I hear the sounds of children playing. Generosity of sound comes to mind.
There must be a party as adult voices provide a background for the textured aliveness and enthusiasm in the voices of children.
Generosity touches the air, strokes connection moving and shared.
Ears open, clear, and stretch in the generous outpouring and generation of sound.
In his book The Joy of Living by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes about perception using the example of an experiment with a T. Individuals are shown a T, a T with both segments the same length, but people see the segments differently.
Those who live in flat areas like the Netherlands see the horizontal line as longer. Those raised in mountainous regions like Nepal see the vertical line as longer. I live where it’s flat and there’s a mountain, so I wonder how my eye integrates the expanse in the arm and leg of the T.
Right now, I listen to the sounds of children as their voices rise and fall like waves landing and sinking into the sand of my day.
Listening
It’s the time of year where we turn more deeply into ourselves even as we gather and celebrate the precious carving of dark and light.
I notice how softly I can move the air through which I pass through. I blow kisses like the wind, center the chimes of enchantment within.
I’ve changed the colors in my home from autumn gold and orange to red and green. Inside reflects outside as the branches on the trees are bare but berries shine red and share space with pine cones on green wreaths.
Circling.
Helen Keller wrote: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.
Feeling with the heart, celebrating hearts gathered everywhere.
Day 9 – Earth Day
I wake and rise. The moon shining along the wood floors invites me to receive its beams outside. I come back in and sit as light streams into the room and the moon appears to move across the sky.
When I was going through chemotherapy and radiation my friend Jane and I spoke every morning and then wrote. The book Breast Strokes came from our talks and my posts on my Live Journal blog.
Because Jane spent the first three months of this year at Tassajara Zen Center, today was the first time we touched voices in almost four months. Handwriting back and forth was our form of touch. When we spoke at 6 this morning, we watched the movement of the moon from different sides of the bay. We spoke of touch, the ground of being, touch, an honoring, each day, earth day.
I’ve been going through photos for my brother’s memorial. My tears are sweeter now, softer. There is sadness at times, a piercing, but the piercing is a puncturing as though my heart will one day be completely open to flow, no blocks or rocks in the stream, though Carl Perkins says the rocks in the stream make the song. Perhaps my song will come to silence, vibration so widely spread, it will be a blanket of calm.
This photo in particular strikes me because though we thought, at the time, we were adults, we were young with so much before us, and that continues for me, and I believe for him too. He has simply changed form but perhaps he is more accessible this way. I feel him close as though I’m absorbing his essence, and in doing so, augmenting my own.
I continue to feel a deepening, widening, more substantial connection to what I call Source, and some call Nature, and others call God.
I was married in 1971. My brother walked me down the aisle because our father died in 1969. I was 21 and my brother not yet 18. Perhaps we walk a different aisle now, or maybe all aisles are one.
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