Rilke in The Book of Hours translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows:
All becoming has needed me
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
Rhythm pulses in me!
Becoming
The Sky
I’m entranced with the morning sky these days, the whole expanse and the parts. It’s a Rorsach test for my inner-outer mood, for the movement of breath in and out.
The Morning Ripens
I arrived early for a medical appointment today which offered immersion in sky, earth, creek.
Our Precious Heart
I wake up noticing it’s still dark at five. We’re moving into a new season, and yet, warmth is still to come before the light dims to transition again.
A friend has received a pacemaker. It saves a life and changes it, so he’s with a series of limitations right now.
In this, I feel, nourish, and invite an extra tenderness to my heart today, as it beats loyally between my lungs.
I remember walking in Muir Woods in the winter rain. There was no place to sit as the ground, plants, and benches were wet, and I felt myself moving like the stream.
My cousin who is in Hospice now was told by her oncologist to read Eckhart Tolle. I thought it odd to suggest reading at this point but then I came across these lines of his.
Through death you will find yourself because you no longer identify with form.
I’m alive right now, identifying with form, and gratefully appreciating the rhythm of my heart, and that is this moment, now.
Peaceful, the gentle beat!
Life of a three, almost four year old
I spent the last two days with my grandson living in the realm of the imagination. The playground was closed so we settled under a tree with beautiful green leaves. We stretched our necks to become giraffes, and even now I feel my long, flowing neck and lips gently nuzzling and ingesting leaves.
A coyote is howling this morning. Perhaps it’s waking from a dream of the Supermoon last night. My meditation these days is “Beyond Multiplicity”, and I ground in illusion as I juggle, snuggle, crawl through, and open to rainbows in play.
Journeying
We drove to Santa Barbara on 101, a reminder of the work involved in growing our food. We passed fields lined with people bent over picking and pruning.
On the way back, we took country roads. In 2012 my sons did the Faultline rally and crisscrossed the California fault line in a vintage Datsun with other pre-1976 cars. They traveled mainly on narrow and challenging roads, not passable in wet weather, which it wasn’t then or now, and discovered uncrowded beautiful landscapes, another example of the variety and complexity of the state in which we live. Our destination for lunch was the Parkfield Cafe, worth it for the atmosphere, food, and apple dumplings.
I didn’t take pictures inside the restaurant as it opens at 11:30 and immediately fills with hungry people, all a little more weathered than we. It felt intrusive to gawk and take pictures of saddle stools and the giant fireplace. We ate outside as we do when we travel with Ebi and Ginger, two rescue greyhounds who attract attention wherever we go.
I offer a taste of our trip yesterday.
Embracing the Whole
We leave Santa Barbara today. Our visit has been exquisite and I want to share another side. As is clear, I love taking pictures. I thought I was taking a picture of a rock with some local history on it but a man in the far distance started yelling at me because he thought I was taking a picture of him. I hadn’t noticed him, as there are homeless people here, and so there is the usual honoring of quiet respect and awareness of the disparity that we sadly know. Back at the hotel, I realized yes, I had captured his image in the background and I deleted it.
Today I post images of rocks and sand, movement, dwelling, connection, and change.
Sunrise in Santa Barbara, CA
Branching, Branched
I’ve now cleaned everything out of one room except the moveable bookshelves. The closet is empty and now when I speak, the room echoes. Nothing catches or holds the vibrations of my words.
I take that inside. What if I’m not holding onto memories, especially judgments and/or grudges? I feel I need some anchoring within, some awareness of my travels, connections, and pilgrimages, so I can respond with the wisdom of lessons learned through experience, and yet when is it too much? When is there a need to open and cleanse?
How much do I need to hold onto to feel connected and safe?
Might I choose to be like a bird with the warmth of a nest and the ability to fly through a sky bracketed with branches like shelves? What wisdom does the bird harvest from grasses and leaves?
Majesty
I’m reading The Starship and The Canoe by Kenneth Brower. He writes about two men, a father and son. The father, Freeman Dyson, is a renowned astrophysicist who designs a spaceship to explore the stars. The son, George Dyson, lives in a tree house and explores the coastal wilderness and waters of the Northwest in a canoe he designed and built.
At one point, George is camped by the Icy Strait. He is alone as the full moon rises when he hears wolves howling near him.
“Wolves had come down silently from the forest and had infiltrated the beach grass. It seemed to George that the sound went straight to the center of his being. It passed through the center and out the other side, traveling over Icy Strait toward the moonlit mountain.
All his sensibilities quickened. Now and again, when the wolves stopped for a moment, George heard each grass blade rustling, each wave lapping. Waiting for the wolves to resume, he heard the blowing of humpback whales as they swung in close to shore.
The wolves were ending their song, when, from the sea, the whales answered it. George swears that this is true. The whale music was, he says, like whistling, trumpeting, and singing combined. It resembled no work of man he knew, but it blended perfectly with the chorus of the whales. The forest’s mournful ululations mingled with the brass winds and wood winds of the deep. The Earth was singing to its moon, and the sea was harmonizing.
George sat silent in the middle of the music, yet did not feel left out. It seemed to him that the two worlds, land and sea, were coming together in him. This morning he had padded, like the wolves, in bare feet on the mossy forest floor, and this afternoon he had paddled Icy Strait, like the humpback whales. A triumvirate, they praised the moon: lupus, George, leviathan.”
Cathy's Blog! 