We are on approach to the Solstice, the longest day of the year.  I find it astonishing how early it is light, how late.  Last night I was enveloped by the fullness of the Supermoon.  This morning an owl was still offering a who-who-who even though day was coming to  light.

I’m reading a book on how the brain harvests and processes grief.  We can know the person has passed away, and still our “brain-map” feels them here.  We are divided in one way, and expanded in another.

I’m with these words of Louise Erdrich from The Painted Drum.  We are here to feel.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.  

In the night I was awakened by the brightness of the moon.  It was so bright I could see the fog beginning its slow creep over the ridge.  The fog horn blew.

I woke this morning feeling the cool breeze and lay there like a flower opening its petals grateful for the touch.

I was enchanted with and comforted and reassured by Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  Now, from Maria Popova,  I learn of Susan Cain’s latest book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.  

A friend today asks how I speak and write joyfully and easily about death.  I don’t fear it.  I feel it as part of the whole, the living and dying happening all the time, enriching our moments, our lives. 

The fog is light today, a soft blanket.  I sink into knowing and appreciating the birds that are birthing and the flowers that are opening, knowing I, too, fall away and change. I’m touched with tenderness as I circle, reflecting like the phases of the moon.  

We’re having a heat wave so last night I went outside for two reasons, one to cool off and two to listen to music from a high school graduation party down below us.  The music was fantastic, a live band, vibrant with the rise and fall, the depth and expansiveness of full, generous voices.  The music crossed genres, and soulfully felt like a night in New Orleans.  The last song at ten was The Saints Go Marching In.

When I heard the music beginning at seven, I brought a blanket and pillow out and lay on the deck looking up at wispy clouds and blue sky that became the rising of the moon and the first star. As day turned into night, I turned inside and out, massaged on life so easily and blissfully shared.  

I woke up this morning shimmering like a tuning fork, grateful for each breath, the in and out, lungs so beautiful in their handling of and care for air.  Our little bird friend is still resting on her nest, and yesterday I was at a friend’s house where a mourning dove nests like our little wren.  Meanwhile flowers are everywhere.

Though I watched the committee hearing last night, I’m still stunned as I read the morning reports and Heather Cox Richardson.  Does democracy always walk such a slight and sharp edge?  I’m grateful for those who’ve come forth, especially Officer Caroline Edwards.  I can’t imagine what she went through that day and all these days after.  We see courage in action and I sit today, almost immobile with gratitude for all she represents.

The summer issue of Orion Magazine is on Nature and Culture, our essential need for nature.  Look outside.  Walk outside.  Rest; renew, blessed.

E.O. Wilson, a writer, biologist, and naturalist wrote: 

Planet Earth will enter a new era of its history,

cheerfully called by some the Anthropocene, a time

for and all about our own species alone.  I prefer to 

call it the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.  

Rachel Carson  in Silent Spring wrote:  “Our origins are of the earth, and so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.”

On Saturday we were blessed to be in DeLaveaga Park in the rain.

The family gathered in the Santa Cruz mountains to enrich and nourish with redwoods and oaks.  We took the Roaring Camp steam engine train through old growth redwoods and enjoyed the sea lions in Santa Cruz.  I’m with the words of John Squadra as we circle round like a cathedral of redwoods navigating birth and loss.

When you love, you complete a circle, when you die, the circle remains.

When a redwood dies, her descendants spring up around her leaving a circle in the center.

This morning at 5:07 I felt the house shake. Earthquake.  It was a little shake but noticeable, and another wake-up call on the preciousness and fragility of each moment. 

Years ago I was at a memorial in Inverness.  The pastor was new to northern CA and said he now understood why people here tend to be more open-minded.  The earth literally moves under their feet.  

I’m with these words of Pir Elias Amidon:

Between the river banks of your heart

an emptiness flows, sparkling with light

from nowhere. Push your body boat

into the current, there’s no need to row. 

The clean-out continues.  A friend says we should knock out one wall and create an open space – kitchen, dining room, living room – one space.

I sit in the living room comforted by a wall of books, and wake this morning feeling what they mean to me.  They hold memories and are easily seen and accessed.  They beckon, titillate, and calm.  Each book offers entry to another world, perception, space, time.

I think of Abraham Lincoln walking through snow to bring home books to read by the fire.  A Kindle may be named for fire but doesn’t offer that.  

The birds continue their song and my ears perk all the way along the eustachian tube to my nose, lungs, heart and feet.  The air vibrates, the ground.  I hear flight, vibrate inside.

Grateful, I wonder if gratitude is like a bird, singing and fluttering the air we share.

I read that Love is an energy, not an emotion.  It’s the tissue of life itself.  Oxygen enters through a wet surface and the heart moistens when we feel love. 

Thornton Wilder in The Bridge of San Luis Rey wrote, “There is a land of the living, and the land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survivor, the only meaning.

And so it is! Let the bridge be long!

It is said when someone dies we lose a library.  A friend passed away Monday night.

I reflect on his gifts, on what he leaves.  He was a gatherer and creator of community.  He loved to cook and garden and offer those gifts, bringing together the wider community we share.

I read these words of Simone Weil, To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. I think of how he was rooted, and now, physicality dropped, essence expands and soars.

I’m still cleaning out “stuff”, perhaps will be until I pass.  Today, going through papers, I read Etty Hillesum, who in 1943, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp.

She wrote: Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell.  And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day.

My small wren friend continues to tend to her nest.  I think of what it is to be one of her eggs, so cared for within the shell, and soon there will be tiny chirps as walls pecked through, drop away, and tiny beings learn to fly through air, fragrant and clear, and buoyed with plant and animal exchange.

As Jack Kornfield says: Those who are awake live in a constant state of amazement.

May we all live amazed.