Yesterday Monarch butterflies accompanied my walk and today birds were out enjoying the early morning marsh.  I saw avocets, willets,  egrets, ducks, gulls, and smaller birds.  The special treat was a Heron in the reeds.

Yesterday I went to the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts to see Holly Wong’s Guardian of the Spirits,  a “suspended installation of cellophane, dichroic film, silk and polyester organza, gold fabric, vinyl tablecloth, transparencies and thread”.   That may sound strange but it’s a beautiful, flowing, clear and patterned airiness.  It moves as one walks by, and then, guarded by the spirits, one looks up to the second floor, and there overhanging is a long gun sticking out from the turret of a tank.  Walking up, one sees the tank with a teensy-tiny Russian flag atop is breaking through a wall.  The flag of Ukraine hangs from the gun.

Art! 

Heart stops and beats even more receptively again.  

This morning is dark and cold, well, it feels cold to me.  It may still be August but the smell and feel of Fall fills the air. 

I’m celebrating and integrating these words of Audre Lorde: 

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

This morning I was using seeing as part of my meditation, so focusing on an object.  I was focused on the oak tree outside my window which sits in front of the redwood tree.  I could see morning light through the trees still untouched by  light as our house faces south on a hill on the side of a valley.

When I closed my eyes to rest them from seeing, and then opened them I saw a squirrel sitting outside the window on a branch looking in at me.  He or she then scampered away.  Perhaps my attention scampered, too, as I reflect now on the gifts of pausing to see the dimensions in liveliness, to honor and savor the connected realms in which we live.

I was so focused on the tree and dimensions and light that I had forgotten all that hosts where I live and how we twine. Of course, my pause might be of interest to a squirrel outside, and it could have been my imagination, but I don’t think so. It was part of a bond, a momentary branch.

Pema Chodron: 

If your everyday practice is to open all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that – then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

This morning I notice that I feel differently than yesterday morning.  Impermanence is beginning to land in me, to float, in this moment anyway.  The tides move in and out four times a day – high, low, high low – each day different, each moment, and so this morning I look out on sunshine and feel reflectivity guiding me.   I allow myself to feel the moon moving toward Thursday fullness, the sturgeon moon, a Supermoon, the last Supermoon of this year.

Thoreau:

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

If you’re looking for inspiration read The Hummingbird’s Gift by Sy Montgomery. 

“Hummingbirds are less flesh than fairies. They are little more than bubbles fringed with iridescent feathers – air wrapped in light.”

Hummingbird nests are woven with spider silk so the nest stretches to fit the tiny creatures as they grow.

“These little bubbles of spunk inspire extraordinary tenderness. One autumn, a ruby-throat, on its lonely, five-hundred-mile migration – a journey across the Gulf of Mexico, which can demand twenty-one hours of non-stop flight – landed, spent, on a drilling platform on the Mississippi coast. It was too exhausted to continue. The oil company dispatched a helicopter to fly it to shore.  The hummingbird spent the winter in a gardener’s greenhouse, then left fat and healthy, on its spring migration.” 

Watch this video and be inspired.

We have ⅓ of an acre, most of which we keep natural for our fellow creatures.  A part is fenced though to contain and protect a Japanese garden.  Yesterday afternoon we noted movement over the fence, and here is our new friend.

We have four maple trees with red leaves. When grandson was here, he asked how we painted the leaves red. The question made me even more appreciate the variety in nature’s palette.

This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.

– Mary Oliver