This weekend I pause, reflect, and connect the present which encompasses honoring the past and what we create now.
This morning I was drinking my coffee looking out the window at the redwood tree which is one at the base and rises as two. I watched a squirrel scamper up, then, turn around, and perch in the sun. When I went to get my camera I figured he or she would be gone, but there was my friend still there even as I opened the door and went outside.
Velcro was patented in 1958. I discovered it in the 70’s as a wonder for children’s shoes. Spiderman and Superman shoes were easily entered and clasped.
Dave Barry said, “Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro.”
Certainly now there’s a different parameter for listening to those who lived before computers, the internet, or smartphones. How is knowledge categorized? Where is wisdom found?
I resonate to Rumi:
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
And Brother David Steindl-Rast:
It’s not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
And these two dogs, rescue greyhounds, who earned a living and now savor retirement with ecstatic motion and gratitude, though in this moment they capture the ease and joy of repose.
I was at the Farmer’s Market yesterday so we’re feasting on abundance: asparagus, strawberries, peaches, and blueberries. The visit reminds me of the work of producing, planting, harvesting, and bringing nourishment closer to me. I’m fed by a hard-working and intricate web of connection.
Wednesday morning I was at the Bayside Cafe for breakfast. A little boy about three or four emerged from the bathroom with his father, and the child was saying “Happiness”. He then walked through the restaurant and out the door repeating “happiness, happiness, happiness” with a slight pause between each word. I’m carrying that with me, such an ease-filled way to be and ripple in the world.
As Cheri Huber shares:
When you think you’re the center of the universe, you’re a misery. When you realize you’re the center of the universe, you’re a blessing.
This morning we were awakened by a little bird singing into the camera placed outside. At the Chandler Nature Center, a part of Phoenix, we saw white ducks, a coot, and a Great Blue Heron. It’s a time of unfolding, a living birth.
I’m in Phoenix visiting family which is a delight. I’m minimally involved with the news but seeing our democracy in danger of destruction, has me aware. I read this from Heather Cox Richardson today:
“I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act,’” lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm defends democratic election laws, wrote today on social media. He added: “I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”
In contrast, we sit outside watching a saguaro cactus in which a woodpecker meticulously maintains a home for her babies. The babies pop their heads out of one hole for feeding , which she alternates with opening another hole on the other side.
It’s Earth Day, as is every day since we, this planet, and our environment evolve as one. Last night I was out with the almost full moon, a reminder of the movement we share.
Heather Cox Richardson is again strong with her substack post. I pull this from it:
The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.
The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.
Let us honor the Earth we are, the Earth we share, as we celebrate the Earth each day.
I drove to Stinson Beach this morning. I was early enough to be alone on the beach at low tide. When I lay back on the sand, I heard the waves from underneath and all around, pounding jets, surround sound. Sandpipers skittered and one turkey vulture enjoyed a breakfast of decaying seagull.
“Awakening is truly nothing more or less than being right here in this moment, just as it is, and just as we are.”
— JOAN TOLLIFSON
The other day I watched a little girl struggle to open a heavy door at Blue Barn restaurant. Her father kept offering to help until finally she allowed it, and when the door opened, she closed it, and went for it again. Finally, together they again opened the door, and entered the space, but she wasn’t finished. She turned around and pushed from the other side.
My grandson likes to be the one to open the door to their home when we arrive. We knock and wait, as we hear scurrying and discussion inside. Perhaps it is the energetic feel of the movement of the heavy door, the power involved, or something about inside and outside, but I find it intriguing to consider how I might pause before I open and close each door. How do I transition each precious breath?
This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.
– Mary Oliver
Last night I watched the Worm full moon as it began to eclipse, and then, this morning there it was, a full disk shining through the trees. In two weeks, we’ll see a solar eclipse, and meanwhile the increasing light is beckoning buds to emerge, and birds to mate and nest.
Alan Watts:
You are something not that comes into the world, but comes out of it – in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant, or a fruit comes out of a tree. You are an expression.
The news is so depressing on many fronts that sometimes I wonder what to post and then I read these words of Emily Dickinson and feel inside, and go outside.
Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.
I’m up in the night with a moon almost full, and a huge circle around her. The Pittosporum are blooming offering scent to a magical world.
