Feeling a bit on edge this morning, I went to Rodeo Beach to balance where water meets rock and sand.
Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far. Jodi Picoult
Counterbalancing the News
Freedom
It’s worth reading all of Heather Cox Richardson today but tears come as I read the conclusion.
President Biden spoke yesterday when world leaders and more than two dozen U.S. veterans of D-Day gathered to commemorate D-Day. They met above Omaha Beach at the Normandy American Cemetery, where the remains of 9,388 Americans, many of whom were killed on D-Day, are buried.
Biden: “Let us be the generation that when history is written about our time—in 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 years from now—it will be said: When the moment came, we met the moment. We stood strong. Our alliances were made stronger. And we saved democracy in our time as well.”
During the ceremony, the past and the present came together. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky shook the hand of a U.S. veteran in a wheelchair. When the man tried to kiss Zelensky’s hand, the Ukraine president instead stooped and hugged him. “You’re the savior of the people,” the man said. Zelensky answered, “You saved Europe.” The exchange continued: “You’re my hero.” “No, you are our hero.”
As the crowd cheered, the old man turned to look at the younger one and said, “I pray for you.”
Embraced
I read these words of Richard Rohr and feel the long neck of immersion and experience, the fluidity, strength, and agility of birds on land and in flight. His words are ballast, support, inspiration, and guide.
Going to the deepest level of communication,
Where back and forth has never stopped.
Where I am not the initiator but the transmission wire itself.
— Richard Rohr
Memories
Yesterday, I was thrilled to receive a new laptop computer. My son said it should last me ten years. I thought then this could be my last computer, a rather sobering thought, and then I wondered what the world will be like in ten years.
A few years ago in a Sensory Awareness workshop, an elderly woman said she felt the past like the force of gravity, supporting her. A discussion ensued as to whether for the young, the future is a force like gravity pulling them forward. Perhaps the mid-life crisis is that place between, a place of balance and choice, an awakened urgency drawing us to pause, reflect, create and absorb.
Today I feel like I’m balanced in the center of a teeter-totter, arms spread in honoring the joy that is life continuing at my age. It rained in the night and now the sun is a light in the clouds. It feels like a torch, an Olympic torch that lights the games we play as we honor individuality, cooperation, and the spirit that unites family as team.
I went through photos last night. Here’s a taste of the past, a wee taste.
A Great Blue Heron
Today I was waiting for sandwiches I’d ordered when looking out over the bay, I thought I saw a beak. Yes, a Great Blue Heron. What a gift!
Contemplation
I’ve been immersing myself in meditation, specifically in Satipatthana meditation, with a current focus on the anatomy of the body, the parts, and the elements of the body, earth, water, fire, wind, and space.
I had blood drawn early this morning after fasting since yesterday afternoon. It went easily and well, and when he finished, he asked me to write my whole name in cursive, then, print, and then write who I was signing for. Since I was clearly the one whose blood had been taken and the one signing, I felt unclear on what to write, so I asked, “Do I write me?” “You write self”, he said. Self.
My meditation is currently on not-self, no-self, not-me, no me. Of course I know not to take it literally, so I can function in the real world, but somehow in that moment without my morning coffee, I felt the obvious as unclear.
He’d just drawn beautiful red blood with its lovely qualities of fluidity and cohesion into two tubes, and labeled it as coming from me, and it will be analyzed to determine my health, so why did I struggle to consider the word “self” to document my experience.
That brings me to an Amy Poehler joke on aging. “My memory is like a cat. It doesn’t come when called.”
Another piece of this was I could hear and feel his steady breathing as the blood flowed into the tubes, so I matched mine with his, and I threw in a little calm, as I knew he had a full day ahead of him, and I felt we were bonded in an act of intimacy for a time.
This act of meditating has me viewing life differently, and I see that as a good thing whether I’m me, this man, the lab, the rain when I walk outside and the ripening sky as day comes to light.
With gratitude, I listen and receive, honoring I’m, “constantly being re-created”.
Brenda Ueland:
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really
listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that
we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.”
Sausalito This Morning
We woke up with an impulse to greet the morning in Sausalito.
Emily Dickinson:
Wonder is not precisely knowing.
Lanterns
This morning I was out in the dark with the stars and the moon. Brightness in the dark – Lanterns in the heart.
Upon needing to move from one home to another, Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend:
I am out with lanterns looking for myself.
This time of year, autumn, fall, reminds us to look for lanterns, even if it’s the orange of a pumpkin carved to better see the light within.
And as we toast, then eat the pumpkin seeds, we enter more deeply into the night light of meditation. Each moment seeds the web that connects.
Ram Dass:
Meditation offers an opportunity to have a different experience of consciousness, not as a separate individual but as part of an interconnected web of life.
CuriOdyssey
Yesterday we spent time with our grandson at CuriOdyssey, an entertaining and educational place for children and adults at Coyote Point Drive in San Mateo. I tried to catch photos of sleek and curious river otters but they were too fast for me. My immersion in time is slow so I went for a focused child, turtles, and bobcats.
Passage
A friend, Ben Parker passed away easily this week, his sense of humor and incredible intellect still intact. He was 102. His last words were “the dewdrop slips into the shiny sea.”
“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”
Comforted by that, I open Yehuda Amichai’s poetry book Open, Closed, Open. to the ending of a poem in a section on The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds.
And there’s all that talk about Till death do us part,
Even death will not part us, it will bind us
somewhere in the universe
in a new encounter that has no end.
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