Silence is so accurate.
– Mark Rothko
Tennessee Valley yesterday
A Day to Reflect
It’s a day to pause and reflect on the seed resting in darkness like the chick in the egg, resting and mobilizing to rise and break into even more radiant light.
This week, like all weeks, is Holy but for many there is even deeper intention to come together to celebrate in ways that honor the past even as we allow our own precious flow to unfold.
My friend Anna Shemin sent me two photos today. One is of her home decorated for Easter. The other is what she created from petals falling on her kitchen counter when she was arranging flowers.
Spring
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.
A New Month
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.
Leaping
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.
Pilgrimage
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.
Perspective
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
Balance and Harmony
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.
Reverence
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.
Weather
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.
