Last night we sat outside expanding on starlight as we watched for meteors. This morning it’s raining. My father died 56 years ago tomorrow. Memory rides on beams and beads of light.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
As you inhale, fill your heart with compassion, and as you exhale pour the compassion over your head.
Silence is essential.
We need silence, just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Yesterday I read about and visited a new park in Greenbrae called “Alex’s Playground and Discovery Gardens”. Alex was 7 when nearly five years ago, he died in a horrific and tragic accident at his school.
Several months before he died, he told his mother if anything ever happened to him, he would be a baby hummingbird so that he could be with her.
The day after he died, his mother saw a small hummingbird in their garden who was there for a brief moment and then flew off with a friend.
Recently his mother was attending a show by the Lego sculptor Sean Kenney when she saw a giant hummingbird built with 31,565 Lego bricks, its bill in an equally large Lego flower.
She was able to buy it and now today it sits in a new playground that the family is donating in memory of Alex.
I think of the gazebo in Blackie’s Pasture in Tiburon and the playground in Boyle Park in Mill Valley, both honoring the loss of a child. What a beautiful way to honor the loss, to create a place where children gather, laugh, and play.
The sculpture also is a reminder of the Hummingbird Alliance, a nonprofit the family formed after Alex’s death to push for stronger gate safety rules.
If you’ve been reading this blog for years, you know my love of Great Blue Herons, so when I read about Jarod K. Anderson’s book, Something in the Woods Loves You, I knew it was for me.
The book opens with this:
“There’s an old story about Great Blue Herons. It says that while hunting the twilight shallows, herons can produce a strange, luminescent powder, pluck it from between their feathers with their spear-like beaks, and sprinkle it on the dark water to attract fish.”
He says yes, it’s a myth, and yet, picture how this is to the fish. “The fish are not curious in an intellectual way. It’s a physical thing, their bodies called forward to witness the inexplicable. There, in the shallow winter waters, they are ready to believe in miracles.”
The heron allows Anderson to build the meaning he needs for the moment. “Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices. I sing my portion. The heron sings hers. The harmony is woven and meaning exists in the world.”
I’m feeling the joy of exploration these days, an inner walk to explore what connects, how evolving connects and expands.
I’m with these words of H. Richard Niebuhr:
“Pilgrims are persons in motion – passing through territories not their own – seeking something we call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit’s compass points the way.’
I had never heard of The Moth but a friend recommended the book How To Tell A Story and now I’m intrigued. I read the Foreword and stopped to contemplate, and then, the Introduction, and another pause. I was caught on the alignment that occurs when we tell and listen to a story, and discover and uncover the theme.
“Sometimes you have to figure out who you’re not before you can become who you are.”
Those words affirm my belief that we’re here in a testing ground, exploring, interacting, responding, and learning the steps to climb to higher ground.
Reading the stories, I thought I had no story to tell but then I read: What are the moments from your life, big or small, that stick with you?
Immediately I was in Mexico City at the age of 19 when I learned my beloved, healthy father had died in a motorcycle accident. Alive, then dead.
There’s a saga in the challenges of my return, and a three month break from school as my mother, brother, and I navigated logistics and loss.
Even now, 55 years later, my heart swells with the increasing moisture of love and tears come.
At the time, and even now when someone I love dies, I feel space open up as though life here is a matte painting, and they are showing me what’s beyond container and containment.
There is much for me to explore in continuing with this book, and so I ask you now:
What moments come to you that you want to examine and share, with yourself, and perhaps in that, with others?
Today I’m with how much my life, our lives, are influenced by the flow of water, the cycle of water. In my case, I’ve known and ridden on the Des Moines river, the Mississippi river, the Intercoastal Waterway, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the San Diego and San Francisco Bay.
When we lived in Des Moines, Iowa my father built a boat in the garage so we could go out boating. When we moved to a house outside Bettendorf, Iowa we had that boat for floating and water skiing on the Mississippi river.
We moved there when I was nine. I named our new puppy,, a Weimeraner, Mr. Sippi. My grandmother gave me Mark Twain’s memoir Life on the Mississippi to read. One may know only a part of a river, and yet be influenced by the whole.
Today I perused Wikipedia to learn: The Mississippi River begins as a trickle flowing out of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota. From there the river flows 2,348 miles until it pours into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. The Mississippi River drains 33 states and its watershed covers one-half of the nation.
The Missouri river, the longest river in the US – North America flows 2,341 miles from its headwaters at the confluence of the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson Rivers in the Rocky Mountains at Three Forks, Montana, to its confluence with the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Missouri. It crosses seven states: Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.
If we consider the Mississippi-Missouri river system, the total length forms the world’s fourth longest river, after the Amazon, Nile, and Yangtze rivers.
The song This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land comes to mind. Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. at a time when a man who foments division is receiving votes.
A tender is a small ship that carries people and supplies to and from a larger ship and shore. How can we tender and be tender with ourselves as we navigate the rivers that connect, and sometimes divide?
In the movie Muscle Shoals, Blacks and Whites are shown playing music together with no noticing of skin color at all. A river reflects the ground beneath and the colors of the sky. May we, too, unite in meeting what comes with tender eyes as we trust the landing, integration, and fluidity of water and light.
This quote comes my way today and brings a smile to lips and cells.
Yes, Mary Oliver, yes!
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
Our family is in a discussion of death these days. It began with the passing of Thich Nhat Hanh and then my daughter-in-law’s mother. What does each of us want, this moment, now?
How do we deal with grief?
For comfort, here’s Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful words on mother.
“The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.
I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet… wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.
From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
This morning I’m with the beauty and wisdom in this Carol video, O Holy Darkness.
I remember taking a course in Child Psychology at UCLA when I was 18. In 1968, we were propagandized that the “Communists” were programming their children. We had to fight back against that threat. Of course, our own propaganda was that we were the good guys and our children were allowed and given complete freedom and possibility in this “land of the free”.
Angela Davis, an avowed Communist, came to teach and there was turmoil and concern. In order to work as a tour guide on campus, I had to sign that I was not a Communist. I doubt I knew what that meant at the time. I knew my father believed in the Domino Theory and not wanting another World War II, he thought we were right to be in Vietnam. He didn’t live long enough to learn the truth of that.
Now, we are trying to teach our children a more whole history. Watch this beautiful movement into the embrace, the holy embrace, of wholeness.
I’m writing postcards reminding or perhaps encouraging Democrats who voted in Virginia in 2020 to vote again in the upcoming VA election.
I think of the joy of writing a letter, hand-writing, then folding and placing it in an envelope to sail through the mail, and then, envision it unfolded and opened by another.
Shared touch that seems different than a text or email though information both ways is shared.
I’ve been noticing how sunlight lights and sparkles the line of quartz in rocks I treasure. I have a children’s book that describes rocks like this as “Wishing Rocks”. Therefore, I move my finger along the line circling the middle of the rock and wish even as I imagine what it is like to be enfolded in a different kind of stone.
Each morning I read a poem written daily by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer. Her son took his life recently, and she took a break from writing and sharing her poems, and now she writes of love and grief. Her poems break open my heart, and sometimes I can’t go all the way through, and then, because I know it is essential, I do.
You can read her poems here:
The news – what can I say, but poetry comforts me in every way.
Yesterday a friend introduced me to this poem, “Above the Paradox Valley”. May it allow stillness to open the wisdom in the spirit of your dance.
Cathy's Blog! 