Yesterday I attended an all-day meditation retreat titled “With compassion, we turn the tide.” I can’t convey how it felt then and how it feels now, but I’m reverberating with the offering, the generosity and dedication of this group of nuns, and what each of us might bring to our lives and the lives around us. Here’s a documentary video to give a sense of the dedication a group of people choose in bringing generosity and compassion to their lives and the lives of others.
Forest Bathing
Today, a misty, slightly rainy day, I ended up above Muir Woods. I took the Ocean View Trail to the Canopy Trail down to Redwood Creek. After a visit to the cafe, I traveled up the Fern Trail back to the top. I offer photos of my journey.
In one tricky spot, I met three young people enjoying a snack. As I debated how to traverse the roots, one of the men offered two hands to help me down. I was reminded of years ago when on a hot day I’d walked from Pantoll down to Stinson Beach where, fully clothed, I walked straight into the Pacific Ocean and swam. When I emerged, a young boy stood there offering me a towel. Helpers abound.
Enchantment
I was at Rodeo Beach today. The fog was in and the beach was covered with Vellella vellella, a result of the recent full moon tides.
I hadn’t realized each apparent individual is a hydroid colony, composed of tiny, anemone-like creatures. Related to jellyfish, they are carnivorous, and catch their prey, mainly plankton, with tentacles dangling in the water.
A Pause
Today, I’m again overwhelmed with a president who, on an ever-changing whim, goes against the constitution to levy tariffs that affect each one of us and everyone in the world, and that is just one thing he does daily. Therefore, I opened Stay Inspired, Shelter in Place, 2020. It’s an expensive book but 100% of the profits are donated to NO KID HUNGRY.
This book is the inspiration of Lisa Dolby Chadwick, who is the founder of the Dolby Chadwick Gallery. You can order the book through the gallery. It’s a collection of poetry and art. Open to any page and find beauty and comfort, perhaps even laughter.
In Dean Young’s poem “Whale Watch”, I smile and recognize these words:
… I have seen books with pink slips
marking vital passages
but this i do not recommend
as it makes the book appear foolish
like a dog in a sweater.
Here’s the last line of Rilke’s poem “Sunset” translated by Robert Bly.
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
Again, I recommend Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “So Much Happiness” which can be found at poets.org.
Ken Wilber:
Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future: we enter with it into the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open the riches and glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by its content, but what what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere. And thus it undoes the agitated grasping in the heart of the suffering self, and releases us – maybe for a second, maybe for a minute, maybe for all eternity – releases us from the coil of ourselves.
This book is great art and releases us from the coil of ourselves.
Trees
I finished the book My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, Guardians of Nature by Martin Goodman. These guardians show us how to live when we honor and value interconnectivity, oneness, wholeness, and this world we share.
I spiral on the words on my Flying Edna Desktop Calendar. “I do not go to the forest to be alone. I go to be with the ones who speak without human words.”
As we’re inundated with stories of political horror, it’s important and essential to be with the beings who give us oxygen, and share our roots and nourish our soil and soul.
Rodeo Beach
Reading the news today, I felt called to the beach. Groups of school children were there through Nature Bridge. What a delight to hear them exclaim over rocks, shells, crab holes, and kelp.
I offer photos to energize a response to counteract those who are undermining democracy and trying to overthrow the Constitution.
Restoration
Today the African proverb comes to me. “If you think you are too small to make a difference you haven’t spent a night with a mosquito.”
Looking for ways to deal with the political news, I offer a photo visit to Bedwell Bayfront Park in Menlo Park. There are beautiful views, and as one man I passed said to me, “It’s hard to believe it’s built on a former landfill site.“
The park offers a Great Spirit Path with sculptures of stone that illustrate words in a poem. Birds have offered their in-flight contribution to the signs.
The Elasticity of Feeling
A friend tells me of a friend who with no hope and severe continuing deterioration of the brain drinks from a doctor-prescribed bottle of death. I don’t know him, and yet he is the age of my son, and I feel the grief of those who love him, and a deep carving inside.
It is said sorrow carves deeply into us like a log carved out to make a boat and so we float on the love grief brings when we let ourselves feel this boundary between the preciousness of life here and what comes when we let go to a wider float as the boat dissolves.
Renewal
Mushrooms are decomposers, recyclers, that nourish the soil. With the rain, they popped up overnight in our yard representing what works unseen.
Words, Bones, and Stone
There’s an old saying: Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. I disagree. I believe words can hurt, and they can connect, comfort, and heal.
In George Saunders’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he comments on Leo Tolstoy’s short story, Master and Man. He writes that “Tolstoy is proposing something radical: moral transformation, when it happens not through the total remaking of the sinner or the replacement of his habitual energy with some pure new energy but by a redirection of his (same old) energy.”
Saunders says we don’t have to “become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction”.
For example, if you are a world-class worrier, your worry energy might get directed at extreme personal hygiene, you’re “neurotic”. If it gets directed at climate change, you’re an “intense visionary activist”.
In the book, as a man is dying, he comes to realize “oneness”. The question becomes if he had lived after the realization, would he have returned to the series of lies that he told himself, lies that motivated him to go forth and prove he was better, best, “central”, “separate”, and “correct”.
On Christmas Eve, the family went to Bedwell Bayfront Park in Menlo Park. As we climbed up the hill to savor the views, we found we were on a poetry trail. Called the Great Spirit Path, the trail is a single poem broken down into 53 verses spread throughout the park. Each verse is represented by a large stone sculpture inspired by Native American pictographic art.
This “Stonehenge by the Bay” is a stone poem in four stanzas designed by Menlo Park artist Susan Dunlap and installed along a ¾ mile long trail. Each of the 53 rock sculptures represents a phrase in the poem. It is made of 892 rough natural stones weighing more than 505 tons.
As we enter this new year, we can choose where to focus, expand, and integrate. We can caress and reflect the bones of the earth, the bones in ourselves, and the words that bind and heal.
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