Nature! – Page 3 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on June 22, 2024June 22, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Love

This week my friend and colleague Karen Roeper gave an inspiring speech to the graduating class at the Roeper School in Michigan. The school was founded by her parents in 1941 when they were forced to leave Nazi Germany. Already involved in education, they came to America in 1939 vowing to establish a school that would educate children to participate in the world as caring, humane adults.

Karen’s theme in her speech is love.

She shares an excerpt from an interview with the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. He was asked, “If you could change one thing as Surgeon General that would be immutable for the long haul, what would it be?”

He responded: “If I could change one thing, it would be: I would want us to very explicitly, and unapologetically place love at the center of our lives as a galvanizing force in our society.”

He continued on to talk about how our current society is locked in a struggle between love and fear.

Karen quotes her mother from her 2007 commencement speech: “If you really love yourself, then you will love life itself and you won’t want to hurt or harm others.”

Buddhist Jack Kornfield offers a practice: “When you are walking around the world, see every person as once having been a newborn child.”

Yesterday I spent time in my neighbor’s beautiful yard which is an offering to serenity for all who come, plants, animals, birds. I share a taste.

Posted on June 17, 2024June 17, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Ritual

I’m reading the book Wintering by Katherine May.

As we approach the excitement and celebration of the summer solstice, I’m with these words of D.H. Lawrence:

We must get back into relation: vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe … We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last.

Honoring the ritual movement of sun, moon, and tides

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Living Wholeness

I’m struck by this quote and invite my voice to reveal my immersion in and reception of the breath.

From Philip Shepherd’s book Radical Wholeness.

A person’s voice is like an MRI that reveals immediately how much of her body is available to the breath—and so, too, how much of her being is available to the Present. When the body is liberated from its divisions, it becomes a fluid medium through the entirety of which the breath travels like a wave. Like a living graph, the voice reveals the progress of the breath through the body—and the ways in which the body blocks that progress—to everyone within earshot… If you crave sensation and awareness, you don’t need a magnet in your finger to provide it. The whole of the world lives through you, expressing itself in an avalanche of sensations within. If you could find your way back home to the body, to the breath, to yourself, you would liberate your awareness into the realm of a felt mystery from which you can learn in ways limited only by your willingness to attend to it.

Grandchild finds a Roly-poly or a Roly-poly finds him.

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Earth Day

It’s Earth Day, as is every day since we, this planet, and our environment evolve as one. Last night I was out with the almost full moon, a reminder of the movement we share.

Heather Cox Richardson is again strong with her substack post. I pull this from it:

The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.

The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.

Let us honor the Earth we are, the Earth we share, as we celebrate the Earth each day.

With awareness and care, a place for All!

Posted on April 18, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Each Moment

Today on an early morning walk down Tennessee Road to the beach, I was delighted to see a Great Blue Heron standing regally next to the path. Then on the way back up, I watched him or her catch, tenderize, and swallow a snake. The beach was completely different from the last time I was there, less than a week ago. Each moment received with the gusto of a heron harvesting and digesting a snake.

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Spring

The news is so depressing on many fronts that sometimes I wonder what to post and then I read these words of Emily Dickinson and feel inside, and go outside.

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.

I’m up in the night with a moon almost full, and a huge circle around her. The Pittosporum are blooming offering scent to a magical world.

Posted on February 28, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

A Taste of Spring

Yesterday I walked down Tennessee Valley to the beach. Access to the beach is currently closed due to the threat of storms breaking through the dam, but I could see and hear the ocean, and was accompanied by the sounds of chortling streams, birds, frogs, and a gentle breeze.

Pussy willows appear along the stream looking like caterpillars

Mourning Cloak butterfly of which there were many

Posted on February 9, 2024February 9, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Peace

Yesterday’s news sent me into nature. I planned to go to Stinson Beach but the road down is closed due to the storms. I curved my way up Mt. Tam to walk, sit, cleanse and reflect.

Home, I read about Aikido, founded in the late 1920’s by Morihei Uyeshiba. When he watched hoodlums beat up his father, he vowed to train in the martial arts, and he did. After winning, he began to examine what it meant to dominate others. One day he was challenged to a duel by an expert swordsman, a naval officer. As the officer continued to charge him with the sword he simply moved out of the way until the officer, exhausted, sat down.

Uyeshiba walked to a nearby garden and sat down. He reported:

I felt that the universe suddenly quaked, and that a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body, and changed my body into one of gold. At the same time my mind and body became light. I was able to understand the whisperings of the birds, and was clearly aware of the mind of God, the Creator of the universe. At that moment I was enlightened: the source of budo is God’s love – the spirit of loving protection for all beings. Budo is not felling the opponent by our force; nor is it a tool to lead the world into destruction with arms. I understood: The training of Budo is to take God’s love, which correctly produces, protects, and cultivates all things in Nature, and assimilate and utilize it in our own mind and body.

The secret of Aikido is to harmonize ourselves with the movement of the universe. It’s a way to live and harmonize as one family. We recognize the only opponent is within, and we work to correct our own mind. Obviously, that’s not easy to do. It is a practice, but more and more I see the value in honoring the practice and dedicating myself to harmony and cultivating peace.

The view begins to open to ocean and sky

Looking east to Angel Island, Tiburon, and Belvedere

Posted on January 19, 2024 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Moss on Trees

When I was a Girl Scout in Des Moines, Iowa, I learned that if I was lost in a forest, to look for moss as it would be growing on the north side of trees. Yesterday at Muir Woods I saw moss growing 360 degrees around a tree. There is moisture at Muir Woods and maybe it is for us to feel and invite fluidity flowing 360 degrees around and in us too.

As to judgment, Ram Dass had this to say:

When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all of that. And you are constantly saying, ‘you’re too this, or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

Yesterday I saw a man setting up his violin to serenade the trees. The creek was so loud I didn’t hear his playing but I’m sure the trees felt the vibrations and intention stirring through their cells. Today I receive myself as a tree.

Posted on January 19, 2024 by Cathy Edgett

Muir Woods

Yesterday I wanted to see if the salmon were in Redwood Creek so I parked above and walked down. The path was wet and it was narrow with roots, so I was careful but coming back up, I slipped, and so as not to fall into a well of redwood trees, grabbed a tree, wrenching my leg and foot, and wrenched it further pulling myself up to stand firmly on slanted ground. Slowly and painfully, I limped my way back to the car.

Today I rest, leg propped up by a fire with books as comfort and support. I come to Simone Weil’s book Gravity and Grace.

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter when there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

Yesterday, I learned from a ranger that though I didn’t see a salmon, one was seen three days ago, and the big push may come with this next rain. The creek has to be just the right depth for the salmon to make it up to reproduce. There’s a number to call at Muir Woods to get the news on the salmon, and there’s something so exciting in knowing what this next storm brings, that I feel currents flowing in me, inviting what’s new as I open to the grace in empty space.