Healing – Page 2 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

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.

Greet the morning with a swim in Angel Lake

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

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.

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

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.

What animal is this sleeping in the sea?

Posted on February 5, 2025February 5, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

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.

Posted on January 20, 2025January 20, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

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.

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Renewal

Mushrooms are decomposers, recyclers, that nourish the soil. With the rain, they popped up overnight in our yard representing what works unseen.

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

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.

Stone by Stone, Articulation of Bone, Step by Step

Posted on January 3, 2025January 3, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Compassion

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.

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Silence

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

Posted on November 2, 2024November 2, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Gathering, Honoring, Sharing

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.