Gratitude! – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on October 5, 2026October 5, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Meeting What Comes

We spent the weekend with our almost seven year old grandson. That meant being coached in soccer and baseball. He found it astonishing to learn that I never played soccer in school. The sport is new to this country, well, new if you’re my age, which brings me to age. I feel young, though this morning when I rose from bed, I realized that swinging a bat, reaching for that satisfying connective thunk, involves more muscles and flexibility than I recognized. Morning invites a stretching back out.

It’s odd to realize the years ahead of me are not what I’ve left behind which makes them even more precious and valued. It’s a new and deeper experience of the passage of time. It’s as though each cell in the marrow of my bones is jumping up and down, and cheering, “You’re here! Congratulations! Celebrate!“

I’m with the words of Alice Walker: The more I wonder, the more I love.

I’m wondering and loving, as the words of this Tibetan prayer reverberate through me.

May I be at peace. May my heart remain open. May I awaken to the light of my own true nature. May I be healed. May I be a source of healing for all beings.

May I be Kind.

Looking through the rising and branching of trees

Learning to take a stance to hit a ball out of the field and over the fence!

Learning to run with exuberance and joy to kick the ball to meet the goal!

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Nature’s Gifts

Last night, a full moon night, I looked up at 5:36 and saw colors playing with the clouds. The sun was to the right, and the moon had not yet risen, and yet, I saw a palette of color, specifically yellow, brightening the sky.

Then this morning I went down to the bay to look for river otters. No otters but what a realm of beauty on which to feast.

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

A New Year

I’m up in the night, awake, as the fog blows in and the wind rings the chimes that surround my home. I light candles for scent and flickering brightness. One candle holder has Japanese Kanji characters, and I reach for meaning. I see Sky and Sun and then a square that when I look it up has multiple meanings. At first, I’m enchanted with one meaning, Opening, yes, perfect, and then, I read another meaning, enclosure. Enclosure. I’m feeling safe and enclosed, blinds down though the view is private, but it’s fall now, and though we carve pumpkins for light, the pumpkin encloses its seeds, and I feel seeds inside ripening.

The Kanji square can also be perceived as Mouth, yes, the mouth, opening and enclosing, ingesting, which brings me to the image of the mouth of a river where water that’s been enclosed and held flows into a larger body of water, meets the sea And so do we, as we breathe in and out in an exchange of connection and renewal. Life! And it’s a new moment, a new Year!

Posted on July 11, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Early Morning Low Tide at Rodeo Beach

Two Altars – one natural and one human-made.

And the swells come in as the tide returns.

Posted on April 21, 2026April 21, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Noticing What Is

Yesterday I sat in the park watching clouds as I waited for my son to emerge from a medical procedure. Today I was with a falcon in the park.

Krishnamurti: The ability to observe without judgement, is the highest form of human intelligence.

I augment: “all intelligence”. The clouds, falcon, medical procedure, medical personnel – all One.

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Serenity

I meditate to the sound of birds chirping and feel how the vibrations of their sounds invite the leaves of spring to come. My insides leaf and reach.

A blanket placed creates a shelter for grandchildren and grandparents to gather in shade.

Posted on February 14, 2026 by Cathy Edgett

Motion and Stillness

We didn’t have internet at our house for three days so I enjoyed going to our local libraries, and seeing how well-used they are. Community. I also had more time for meditation and reading. I see what a habit it is to come to the computer first-thing, and throughout the day, and feel the necessity to know the latest news. This morning as I read what the Trump administration continues to do, I feel like I’m going to vomit, so I’ll post this and return to reading a book I recommend: Can Poetry Save the Earth, A Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner.

What a contrast to the Trump administration dismantling environmental protections and reveling in the billion he got to do so.

From Felstiner’s book:

Motion and stillness, a changing constancy. “The early American painter Thomas Cole saw in waterfalls a “beautiful but apparently incongruous idea, of fixedness and motion – a single existence in which we perceive unceasing change and everlasting duration.” A poem, like a painting catches life for the ear or eye, stills what’s ongoing in human and nonhuman nature.

Richard Wilbur writes of windblown bedsheets on a clothesline, “moving / And staying like white water”.

Of course, for many, this may be an image from the past and so we unite in the stillness of memory as it waves in us like bedsheets on a line.

Posted on December 19, 2025December 19, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Blessings

This is the last stanza of William Stafford’s poem “Grace Abounding”.

I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen

friends, or times when only a glance

from a passenger beside me, or just the tired

branch of a willow inclining toward earth,

may teach me how to join earth and sky.

Posted on December 4, 2025December 4, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Gifts

Our six year old grandson has been here visiting, so we’ve enjoyed a grand old time, including fatigue, as some of us are older and more energetic than others. Tuesday was a perfect beach day. A friend asks if my grandson still believes in Santa. It seems so. He knows the Santas at the shopping centers are fake, but he seems to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Santa are up at the North Pole orchestrating the making of toys with the elves. Well, I believe it is so, so maybe that’s why. If you haven’t read, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”, you must read it. Santa is as real as love, and truth, and giving, and gifts.

Also, my grandson and I love the book, the Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien didn’t always have the money for gifts, but he had the gift of intellect and wit, and so letters were written explaining each year why the gifts were destroyed by the North Polar Bear, a most wonderful affectionate, and generous, though clumsy guy, and so, perhaps, for some, no gifts that year but a wonderful letter of explanation. Check out the Tolkien book of Father Christmas Letters on Amazon, or maybe in your local independent bookstore. I had to go to England to get my copy but that was many years ago. Now, it’s more readily available.

We are with the King Tides that accompany the December full moon. Grandson was enchanted with water over the path in Sausalito, and the designs in the water as he sat and observed the ever-changing gifts.

Posted on November 18, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Complexity

I read about Ken Burn’s offering on the American Revolution, a look at the complexity that led to the formation of the United States. Part of the motivation was a want and desire to expand beyond the Appalachians. I’m reading The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng. The book begins in 1939, in Penang, and looks at the circumstances that led to WWII in Asia, so focuses on Malaysia, China, and Japan.

We teach children simplicity, good and bad, and that’s necessary at first, like teaching how to get along in society, but then, we mature and learn the complexity of relationship, complexity in ourselves. We learn to navigate, move, and integrate the pieces we are.

Right now, the United States is divided by those who gain personally in division. We need to expose our shadow, to look openly at our history and in exposing, embrace a history that is complex. Hiding or denying doesn’t help us now.

In looking at the whole more clearly, we further honor the planet we share.