Nature! – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Geologic Plates

We’re in West Marin, in Marshall, on a house literally on Tomales Bay. I am bathed in the sound of lapping and waved in beauty as I sit on one continental plate and view another across the water.

What a contrast to reading Robert Hubbell today. Here’s an excerpt:

It is about whether Congress will retain its authority under Article I of the Constitution to lay taxes and appropriate funds through legislation. As of October 1, 2025, that remains an open question.

On Wednesday, Trump and his sidekicks announced billions of dollars in “cancellations” of funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. Trump has no authority to cancel those appropriations, but the GOP-controlled Congress is apparently willing to cede its control over the power of the purse—one of its chief constitutional duties.

But it gets worse. Not only does Trump claim the authority to cancel congressional appropriations, he also claims the authority to raise revenue through illegal tariffs.

He goes on and comes to this: If Democrats needed any further evidence that compromise with Trump is foolish, the president began canceling grants and projects in states that did not vote for him in 2024.

Withholding funds appropriated by Congress is unlawful in the first instance. But doing so to exact political revenge is among the most corrupt presidential actions in the history of our republic. The withheld funds do not belong to Donald Trump and should not be used for political purposes. Those funds belong to the United States of America, to be spent as directed by Congress.

Posted on September 6, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Fountain Joy

Posted on July 20, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Relationship

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov:

Love every leaf…. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an abiding universal love.

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Movement of the Tide

We’re at Nick’s Cove in Point Reyes. We made our usual stop at the bookstore in Pt. Reyes Station, and I bought Brooke Williams book, Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment. It’s a meditation on nature and connecting our inner and outer worlds through observing and being in the natural environment. It advocates a planetary and individual need to re-enchant.

Meanwhile, we’re savoring our current abode on the north side of Tomales Bay as the tide comes in and the tide goes out. It’s June and almost the new moon, so the change is dramatic. When the tide is high, the waves pound underneath our deck and lodging. Looking out, it’s like being in a boat. At low tide the eye is stretched and the other side seems closer. An egret feeds, and I, too, am nourished and fed.

Posted on June 13, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Networking

Researchers have found that land plants evolved on Earth about 700 million years ago and land fungi evolved about 1,300 million years ago. Fungi connect with mycelium; they network.

In reading Robert MacFarlane’s book Is a River Alive?, I learn about Giuliana Furci who is known for her advocacy and research into the fungal kingdom. Her relationship is such that she can be in a car in a dark forest and sense a certain type of mushroom.

She says about hopping out of a car to discover a colony of Avatar-blue mushrooms, “I didn’t see the mushrooms, exactly. I heard them. If you know how to listen, fungi just … tell you where they are. I’ll get this feeling that there’s a fungus around. I feel, no, I know, that there’s something – no, somebody – who wants to see me. You get a call-out from them.”

“The fuzz in the matrix. That’s still the best way I can describe it. I can say very definitely that it’s a communication – a two-way interaction. The fungi know I’m there, as well as the reverse. Fungi have a different vibration to plants and animals. The colours move differently, I find. And fungi has a … shine that’s different to the shine of plants. It’s more … opague. And they have a very different energy than plants – much more of a watery or liquid feel.”

And now we organize a fluid energy to protest against dictatorship and cruelty. We connect and infiltrate to destroy their plans.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote: “This is the only way, we say, but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.”

We are radii, connecting through the environmental webs that nourish and sustain us all.

Mushrooms on the Oakwood Trail in January

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Centering

A friend recommended a book, Morning Altars by Day Schildkret. Last night I began reading it, entranced and soothed by photos of mandalas made from flowers, leaves, shells, sticks, and rocks. Day suggests a journey into nature where you gather objects lying on the ground, and find a place that calls you where you practice the art of arriving. Sit until you know “I’m here.” Then, clear a space, a circle, with your hand or a small broom. When ready, begin by placing an object you’ve gathered in the center of the circle, and then, gather your objects around it in a way you feel called. Circle the objects around to create a mandala. In doing so, you are clearing a space within, and creating a visual representation of what’s happening in you now.

Leave it there, and perhaps come back to visit, and see how the natural world has altered your creation.

Reading this book, I’m able to center, and read Heather Cox Richardson. In 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, in counteracting the lies and hatred of McCarthy said, “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

Last night, Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey told host Jimmy Kimmell, that Republican senators are indeed unnerved by Trump’s behavior and the actions of the administration. The problem, Booker said, is what Thomas Jefferson said: “‘When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty.’”

Where I live, a Buckeye tree is often a place where the native people, the Coast Miwok, gathered. Losing its leaves in winter, the sun shines through, and growing them back, it provides shade. Adaptation and impermanence, and now we adapt to changing conditions, and speak to defend our nature and the nature in which we live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Let us build altars to the beautiful necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece.

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 23, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Connecting with Water

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

Barry Lopez

Posted on January 12, 2025January 12, 2025 by Cathy Edgett

Impermanence

I went to Rodeo Beach early this morning where it was sunny and warm, no wind. I watched the changing waves, some flat, others crashing and flaring. I saw a Great Blue Heron, bluebirds, and otters in the lagoon. Sitting down on a “bench”, I learned from a passerby that the bench wasn’t there yesterday, and yet there it was, for a moment, today.

Posted on November 12, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Reception

Yesterday I read an essay by a father, Dave Kim, who was surprised how much his 8 year old son loved the book Heidi published in 1881 by Joanna Spyri. He and his son went to the village where the book is set, Heidiland, and again, his son loved exploring and understanding whether it was a real little girl, or a composite who lived there.

His son was especially enchanted with these words which I remember reading as a child. It’s sunset and Heidi is with her goatherd pal, Peter:

A golden light lay on the grass and flowers, and the rocks above were beginning to shine and glow. All at once she sprang to her feet, “Peter! Peter! Everything is on fire! All the rocks are burning, and the great snow mountain and the sky! … Look at the rocks! Look at the fir trees! Everything, everything is on fire!”

Dave Kim writes: This was one of his son’s favorite moments. “Do rocks actually glow in Switzerland?” his son asked him one morning.

I’m with that as I consider which books my now five year old grandson responds to. One favorite is Ziji, The Puppy Who Learned to Meditate by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Torey Hayden. When he spends the night, we read it before he goes to sleep.

Yesterday a friend was here and pulled a book off a shelf, The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. They made a “spell book” to conjure up lost words that were left out of the most recent edition of the Oxford-Junior Dictionary. Words like acorn, bluebell, dandelion, heron, kingfisher, newt and otter were replaced with attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.

The outdoor and natural were displaced by the indoor and virtual. Most of us interact virtually each day, and this morning I read a poem on-line by Wendell Berry about watching one leaf fall, and I felt that leaf falling through me bringing peace, integrating all the ways we perceive.