This year we have an extra day to mold like clay.
I’m with the words of Mary Oliver:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
I have an eye appointment and then head south to spend time with my grandson.
Yesterday I scraped my hand and watching blood surface and flow thought of how when we mature, our skin becomes thinner and thinner. We become more and more permeable to the moment, to the beauty, joy, connection, and sharing of each day.
Yesterday I walked down Tennessee Valley to the beach. Access to the beach is currently closed due to the threat of storms breaking through the dam, but I could see and hear the ocean, and was accompanied by the sounds of chortling streams, birds, frogs, and a gentle breeze.
Yesterday I saw two Great Blue Herons resting by the path along the bay. Today I went out Tennessee Valley planning to walk to the beach but there was a troupe of elders yakking away so I turned right to visit Hayseed Camp which is closed for the winter.
Memories flooded in. When we moved here 46 years ago, Chris was almost one and Jeff was four. In an exploratory mood one day after moving in, I followed a narrow road to the end and parked. Putting Chris in his stroller, and holding hands with Jeff, we went wandering down the path. A cow came over and nuzzled Chris in his stroller.
It’s changed over the years, and now there are no grazing cows. The area, a national park, is kept natural for the plants and animals, with some winding paths for the two-legged.
I used to take Jeff and Chris to a pond that was up and beyond the camp but it’s overgrown now so again the land is kept sacred and quiet for the critters.
My meditation today was on the elements. What a gift to see and be so clearly earth, water, fire, air, and the space that allows it all to move, grow, create, and cohere.
Today I felt drawn to return to the place where, yesterday, I saw the Great Blue Heron. I felt she was the one I bonded with last February when I stayed on a houseboat in Sausalito. I met a woman who also feels bonded to this bird, and said yes, the bird is here at low tide, and in the place I met her last year at high tide. The woman said, “I love her”, and I said , “As do I”. I share more photos of life in the bay.
Monday the power was out for many in the Bay area, so because we have a generator grandchild arrived in his Halloween skeleton pajamas. No problem. We went to Old Mill Park where he found a tree into which we both could climb, a tree with two rooms so we could separate our tasks into cooking and a tool shop. At one point the tree became a pirate ship, and the wind came up so we needed to “batten down the hatches”.
I sit with it now, climbing in and out of the opening in the tree , especially when the land below became the ocean into which we each went scuba diving to commune with squid.
After I’m with my grandchild living in the land and sea of his imagination, when he leaves, I miss him, and feel slightly dizzy as though my world is set to organize and his is in response to what he sees and creates.
I’ve been to Old Mill Park innumerable times, and never realized the possibilities in this tree. Maybe I never even discerned it as separate from the multitude of tall trees. When I go back by myself, will this tree still open itself to possibility? Will I feel silly climbing up into a tree to view the world from its open enclosure? Will I feel silly swimming in the sea grandchild saw below it?
We were there to view the rushing creek, exuberant with the rain. And yet, for him, in those moments, the invitation was from the tree.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
The feeling that any task is a nuisance will soon disappear if it is done in mindfulness.
Since today we’ve had rain and sun, changing so quickly I go from windshield wipers to sunglasses, I wonder how Punxsutawney Phil, the renowned groundhog who’s been predicting when winter will end since 1887, predicts an early spring.
I would expect a 50-50 change of accuracy but according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “on average, Phil has gotten it right 30% of the time over the past 10 years.”
Today we celebrate our love of play and joy in noticing the passage of seasons and time.
Today I was with a little boy who is one year, one month, and some days. He is walking, even running, with an occasional drop to crawl.
I find it amazing to realize I made all these leaps, too, and though at my age, the leaps might not be visible, I believe they are also miraculous, enlivening, and strong.
Albert Einstein:
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
And, of course, everything is a miracle.
The temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers
– Matsuo Bashō
I’m re-reading Toni Packer’s wonderful book The Wonder of Presence: And The Way of Meditative Inquiry.
She writes of when she and her husband saw Krishnamurti speak. Her husband “grew up in a puritanical family and was raised to be modest and honest, imbued with a strong drive for bettering himself. The idea of improving himself, of becoming a better person, was a strong motive in his family.” When her husband heard Krishnamurti speak about “human beings’ everlasting endeavors to become something or somebody in the future”, he was struck. He ran to her laughing and light. “Here I’ve been attempting to become a better person all my life – ha ha ha ha ha.”
I’m reminded of when I heard Marion Rosen, my teacher of Rosen Method, say “Perfection is static.” I nearly fell off my chair. What? I’d been trying to be “perfect” all my life and now I was hearing that it wasn’t something I should want or desire. First, what is “perfect” and second where is movement there.
Toni Parker describes this as direct insight which is indescribable, but then she goes on. “It is that wondrous state of being in which the conditioned personality reveals itself for what it is – conditioning giving way to wholeness without lack, all things, people, mountains and oak trees being wondrously the way they are, nothing to be faulted, nothing to be improved.”
I don’t always remember this about striving and perfection but I do think walls have fallen around my perception of who, or what I, the crazy-making I, might be.
Since my walk at Muir Woods, I feel myself curving in delight, immersing in a place where time is just a concept imposed on a beautiful living, changing world we share.
Last night I watched the documentary Muscle Shoals. It’s about perseverance, hard work and the connective and collective power of music guided by the sounds of the Tennessee river in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The native people call it the Singing River.
I lived on the Mississippi River for fifth grade and part of sixth so I returned to the rhythm of living by the movement of a river, the momentum and ease in watching life flow by. My mother said it was hard to get anything done when the river called like a friend to be listened to, and to listen and soothe.
It’s raining today. I made a fire and sat by the fireplace, finding my own rhythm reflected in the elements of which I’m made and with which I flow – earth, water, fire, wind, and air giving space.
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