My son was out walking in his neighborhood in San Jose, and took this photo. I’m reminded of a book I love, Make Way for Ducklings. Abundance abounds.
Now I know a little more to the story. They were actually walking down the center of the street when my son and his two rescue greyhounds, gently nudged them to the sidewalk which was a safer place to be.
This morning during meditation I hear birds tweeting and singing as day begins to come to light. Perhaps, spring finally arrives on April Fool’s day.
Allen Ginsberg wrote that the three lines of haiku ‘make the mind leap”. A good one lets the mind experience “a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God”.
Natalie Goldberg says a photo can do the same.
A loving project can do that too. Here’s an inspirational story on saving Monarch butterflies.
The kitchen is completed to where I can bring dishes back in from the garage to the house. Because they are so precious and delicate, my grandmother’s dishes sit in a heavy box on top of other boxes. They are labeled “fragile”.
The box is too heavy to lift, so I take out cup after cup, and carry each one up five steps, unwrap it, and go back down for another. I feel it as a pilgrimage, not as strenuous as walking The Camino de Santiago, but still each step mindful as I carry and cherish my grandmother’s dishes. She passed away when I was 13, and my mother gave them to me when I was married at 21.
Now, I learn they are worthless to others, that they can’t even be given away. The suggestion is to use them now, so they might as well go into the dishwasher, though it could risk their rims of gold. Instead I think of the beauty and mindfulness in hand-washing them, the caress and connection between present and past, the cleansing and renewing of ancestral memory.
I wash them by hand and place them in a sacred place, cup by cup, plate by plate, breath by breath, step by step.
When I left the house on Monday to have cataract and lens replacement surgery on Tuesday, I saw a Great Blue Heron standing in front of my neighbor’s full-size playhouse. I took a photo and it looks like the Heron is bigger than the house. I saw it as a good omen for my surgery.
The ophthalmologist was clear this experience would be different than the one two weeks ago because it was a different surgery and the brain is complex in its processing. I agree. Today is again a recovery day.
What makes me laugh though is this article on penguins having my same surgery. I asked the ophthalmologist about it and she said vets have done cataract surgery for many types of animals and even big fish. Who knew?
The aging penguins with their “new” eyes became more active and exploratory, so I’ll see what happens to me. I feel like I’m emerging from a tunnel wondering what the changing combinations and layers of light and dark bring now and now and now.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/asia/penguin-cataract-surgery-singapore-bird-park-intl-hnk/index.html
I continue to read Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Lyndon Johnson wanted to provide education and medical care to all, but he also knew if he let the Communists take over South Vietnam, he would be seen as a coward and the nation as an appeaser and then we couldn’t accomplish anything for anyone around the globe. He believed, as did my father at the time, in the Domino Theory, that if we’d stepped in sooner, we might not have had to fight World War II.
My father died before he might have changed his mind on that, but being a pilot of a B-17, he certainly knew what it was to be in a war. After innumerable missions, his plane was shot down on the border of Austria and Germany. After parachuting out and being captured, he was placed in a prisoner of war camp. He never judged the guards. They were all caught up in something bigger than themselves.
Johnson said, “Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society.”
He goes on to state his suspicion of the military, of “how they’re always so narrow in their appraisal of everything”. Of course, Eisenhower who knew the military inside experience warned of the “military-industrial complex”
On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address of less than ten minutes, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a “military-industrial complex.” It’s worth reading the transcript here. Yes, we need defense, and we need oversight and balance too.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
I’ve stayed away from politics as much as is possible these last six weeks, but now I feel stepping stones emerging. May we balance on appreciation of this world we share.
This is my last day housesitting, so there is extra reverence in rising, coming down stairs, making coffee and sitting in a chair to look out at the bay. I used to think a cloudy, rainy day was gray but now after being here and on the houseboat I see the intricacy in grays, the layers and interplay. This last almost six weeks has been an adventure I didn’t expect. It’s rained almost every day so I’ve been entertained by an elemental exchange and an awareness of the touch of light inside and out I didn’t have before.
Meanwhile a bird is chirping outside the window announcing very clearly it’s spring and it’s time to build a nest and reproduce.
I see how trees respond to a chirp of a bird. Oh, yes, let me bring out my leaves and buds and bloom. Now there’s a symphony of birds chattering, so one bird, then, many. Worms have been aroused by the full moon so there is food and aerated soil for all.
The Wednesday morning commute has begun. I see car lights traveling west on the bridge and the Larkspur ferry ventures out with an early load pass San Quentin and beyond. I look out on it all with awe, touched, noting how differently lives intertwine in what I’m seeing and hearing, people encapsulated, birds set free, and frogs singing in the fresh-water marsh on Ring Mountain.
And now the school bus comes to stop at the corner and pick up children ready for a new day.
It’s a full moon, the worm moon, named for the time of year when in some places rain taps the soil to wake the earthworms to rise and aerate the soil.
We certainly have rain. Yesterday was dramatic in turning the moisture of the sky as earthworms turn and open the soil.
I become more and more aware of how differently each of us perceives and sees the world as my vision continues to open, pause, immerse, receive, and rest. It’s such an adventure, this living, an adventure of stimulation and change.
Pico Iyer: “Let Life Come to You” –
Like happiness or peace or calm, paradise is not found by looking for it. Instead, it comes upon us, or we put ourselves in the right place where it can visit us.
When my youngest started kindergarten, I trained to become a Terwilliger nature guide. My site was Ring Mountain, where I am now. This morning I stepped out and passed two houses to cross a stream and enter the sacred site.
This is Coast Miwok land. The Nature Conservancy bought it when the Tiburon Mariposa Lily was discovered to grow here and nowhere else. There is serpentine at the top surrounded by sandstone so flowers developed and then were caught as though planted to keep this land always open in honor of the native people and plants.
I couldn’t go far today because of the mud but I know there is a midden here and a hole in the rock where the Miwok people ground their acorns. It’s under a buckeye tree which loses its leaves in the winter and grows them back in the spring. Therefore sunlight is moderated, and it’s next to a stream, so acorns are leached so they can be pounded and eaten.
Salem Rice, an expert on Bay area geology, said that there were more different kinds of rocks on Ring Mt. than across half of the country. It’s a paradise of rocks and because there’s no pollution lichen grows luxuriously on the rocks.
In those days, I lead fifth and sixth graders on field trips on the mountain. I showed them how one could survive right here. Everything was provided. The bay provides clams, crabs, fish. Quail run free and can be caught in special traps. Boats can be built from the tule grasses if one wants to venture across the bay. Tule also provides housing, and soaproot provides soap. It’s a paradise and the road below is actually called Paradise.
With the children we also discussed the modern day. People need homes so how do we balance the natural landscape with that? The children understood. They are wise, like owls. Last night, I was entertained by the hooting of an owl.
At the top of the mountain are petroglyphs facing west. This is a sacred place. My photos only give a taste of a small part about 2/3rds up as I couldn’t walk very far along the trail with the mud, but more days come along with rain today.
Today I drove for the first time since the surgery. What a thrill to see so clearly road signs and lines, to differentiate and define.
We lose sight gradually, and then, like that, the gift of return. I feel new, like a child, or a flower lifted in spring.
