We were in Monterey this weekend with the rhythm of the tides. Here are anemones at low tide Saturday morning.
Nature
Full Moon
The July full moon is called the Buck Moon because antlers of male deer are in full growth mode. I woke in the night and the room was bright with moonlight. Look up tonight and savor reflecting within as growth comes.
Rising with the Moon
The moon symbolizes enlightenment to Buddhists, and you may have noticed the brightness of this full moon. It was a bright light both in the evening and in the morning.
Yesterday was the Day of Vesak, a day to celebrate Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death. Since I was at the ocean last week, I’ve continued to feel the waves in the oceans in me, the continents, the always moving change and flow.
Mark Twain wrote:
I am an old man, and I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
I’m with that this morning, laughing with the twitter-tweeting of birds. I’m eating my first cherries of the season, and yes, my life is a bowl full of cherries as I offer the pits to the yard wondering if one or two will choose to sink into the ground and rise as a tree.
The Gift of Scent
One of my Mother’s Day gifts was a bottle of perfume from Powell’s bookstore called “Eau de bookstore”.
I’ve missed being in bookstores. Browsing them is one of my favorite things to do and with the pandemic, that was out, so there the books were shut up inside, and I, on the outside looking in.
Of course my house is filled with books but there’s something about a bookstore, the arrangement, exploration, discovery, and excitement that I’ve missed.
Before I opened the bottle, we discussed what the smell would be. Would it be musty or filled with light? I sprayed the scent, and yum. The smell was pure delight.
The blurb says: “The riveting scent of books, with subtle hints of wood and violet, come together in Powell’s by Powell’s. Wherever you are, experience the comfort and nostalgia of Portland’s most iconic bookstore. You won’t be able to put it down.”
It’s true. I inhale and exhale the enchanting smell of wisdom and connection shared over the years!!
Receiving
When I went through chemotherapy, I learned that in receiving, I was giving. I didn’t have the energetic resources to give anything but reception and I saw the gift in that, the beauty of completing a circle of exchange.
Gracious acceptance is an art – an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about receiving things, which can be much harder than giving.
– Alexander McCall Smith.
My Guidance for Today
When the basis for your actions is inner alignment with the present moment, your actions become empowered by the intelligence of Life itself.
– Eckhart Tolle
It’s Spring!
The sun has officially announced that it’s spring thanks to our planet’s revolving and tilt on its axis. Though it’s spring, it’s 39 degrees here this morning and yet the birds are happily singing and looking for mates and places to build their nests. The shift is clear.
Yesterday I was on a Zoom call where the woman leading was alone in a beautiful landscape in Canada. She sat by a wood fire she kept feeding with sticks of wood. Wrapped in a parka, she was next to a snow-covered frozen lake that was lined with evergreen trees. I, and others, felt we smelled the smoke as it wafted up into the air, and I thought what is imagination and memory in our lives. I felt cold as though I, too, was in a frozen landscape. People mentioned hot chocolate and s’mores. I wondered what signals the smoke was sending, what message the logs were giving as they gave warmth and light and changed form.
I found myself with trees and space. I wondered how it was for the trees to watch a wood fire, and then, I wondered if that’s what we’re always doing as we see others and ourselves age. I shifted into a different landscape of transformation and change.
There was, and is, a oneness to the feel, trees, landscape, frozen lake, wood, snow, and sun that gives burning energy and warm assurance to our lives. Now, today, I look out on the sun-kissed sky as I welcome what this new day offers and brings.
Knowing Enough
Friends are going through chemotherapy right now which may be why I’ve wondered what to post. My experience comes back, and I remember the beauty of connection, the clarity and gratitude that we are all one and we do a great deal to save the life of another.
Lately I’ve been with the uniqueness of each one of us, the uniqueness of our experience and perception.
Recently I read The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. As reading does, it allows one entry into the mind of another, a man with Aspergers. It’s laugh out loud funny in places and yet there’s a deeper stream of compassion and strength holding it all together. Though it’s a trilogy, I only read the first book. It was enough, and I’m with enough these days, knowing enough.
I’m grateful to be alive and well and able to feel the reverberations of all we create and share as we balance the tides and embrace and release with care.
Thanks Giving
This morning I rise and realize I’ve made 47 Thanksgiving dinners, 41 of them in this house. This day honors tradition so I use my father’s recipes and the pans my mother-in-law gave us almost fifty years ago.
Two onions and a bunch of celery simmer in two sticks of butter. Giblets and the neck simmer also. They’ll come together in the dressing and gravy. One kitty and I will split the liver, a once a year treat. When my mother was alive, that was hers.
The day is exquisite with blue sky and a high of 65 predicted.
In Heather Cox Richardson, I learn that Thanksgiving as we know it was introduced by Abraham Lincoln to heal the wounds of the American Civil War.
Thanksgiving is about unity, about coming together, though this year we are advised to do it virtually, and we will. I read that people who serve and have served in the military are upset with people whining over not being able to gather when they were often overseas for the holidays, many times year after year. This year we’re asked to come together, separately for the health and well-being of us all.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Lincoln established our national Thanksgiving to celebrate the survival of our democratic government.
Today, more than 150 years later, President-Elect Joe Biden addressed Americans, noting that we are in our own war, this one against the novel coronavirus, that has already taken the grim toll of at least 260,000 Americans. Like Lincoln before him, he urged us to persevere, promising that vaccines really do appear to be on their way by late December or early January. “There is real hope, tangible hope. So hang on,” he said. “Don’t let yourself surrender to the fatigue…. [W]e can and we will beat this virus. America is not going to lose this war. You will get your lives back. Life is going to return to normal. That will happen. This will not last forever.”
“Think of what we’ve come through,” Biden said, “centuries of human enslavement; a cataclysmic Civil War; the exclusion of women from the ballot box; World Wars; Jim Crow; a long twilight struggle against Soviet tyranny that could have ended not with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in nuclear Armageddon.” “It’s been in the most difficult of circumstances that the soul of our nation has been forged,” he said. “Faith, courage, sacrifice, service to country, service to each other, and gratitude even in the face of suffering, have long been part of what Thanksgiving means in America.”
“America has never been perfect,” Biden said. “But we’ve always tried to fulfill the aspiration of the Declaration of Independence: that all people are created equal….”
Biden could stand firmly on the Declaration of Independence because in 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal of slave owners from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that promoted the common good.
And they won.
Gratitude
I wake with elves dancing in my chest and stars twinkling in my ears. I believe in Santa Claus, in love, giving, receiving, and peace. We can have this when we pause for a moment, and before we know it, each pause is fully aired with love, gratitude, and peace.
May we each radiate in our own precious and only in this moment, startling and momentous ways.
