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!
A Great Blue Heron
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.
Spring
This morning as I meditate, I feel spring in my heart, the opening scent of flowers, the invitation to unreel the layers of the bud, build a nest, fill it with eggs of creativity, and birth what’s here.
Yesterday, Steve and I decided he needed an x-ray of his arm, swollen and bruised from a fall and so we rushed out of the house even before I could grab a Kindle or book. I waited outside of the medical office and meditated and took photos of flowers lining sidewalks and streets. I realized I was near a library but it closed as I walked up, so I sat on a bench and sat, and felt, and thought of porches with rocking chairs and benches, and how enclosed life can be with ATM’s and self-checking, and everything delivered and left right at the door.
Because I watched and enjoyed The Wizard of Oz with my grandson this week, I came home and watched Pollyanna. Okay these movies are fantasies, very colorful fantasies, escapism, and yet, what is it when so much has left technicolor for a darker view of life? Another shooting – oh, my!
How do we balance what we view, and how we involve and evolve with immersion in the flowers blooming everywhere, except perhaps Tahoe which continues to stay white with snow. Yesterday I appreciated the gift of sitting outside with nothing to do and nowhere to be. Steve is fine, just swollen and bruised, and I feel the opening call of spring even as I more firmly root.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve.
May Day
As a child, we made baskets for this day and filled them with candy and flowers, and hung them on our neighbors’ doors. This morning I read that baby swans were just born at the Las Gallinas ponds, so out I head for a May Day celebratory treat.
Sausalito
After rain in the night, I rise to go to Sausalito and immerse in the sounds of the bay. I meet some people who’ve come down from Tahoe. After a winter of white, they want to see green. We have green, blue, purple, and pink.
Visit to the Past
Yesterday we went to Felton to ride the Roaring Camp and Big Trees steam train. We went last year, and our three year old grandchild was excited to go again, as were we. What a thrill to go high, high, high into the redwoods and back down to stroll among the trees in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.
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