We continue to have fog, the mist giving a sense of mystery and an invitation to delve within. I’m with the words of Dag Hammarskjöld in his book Markings.
The longest journey is the journey inward.
That leads me to John Muir’s words found in his journal after his death.
“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
This morning I’m with these words of Thich Nhat Hanh:
We don’t have to go anywhere to obtain the truth.
We only need to be still
and things will reveal themselves
in the clear water of our heart.
That brings me to my son and his wife’s whale watching trip. I thought they saw 20 whales but my son informed me that they saw three feeding groups, and one group had 35 whales in it. I’m feeling the magic, joy, connection, individuality, and serenity – fluidity. A wave of sea lions joined in to feast on the fish swarming in. Celebration is happening all around us.
Whales have complex brains. Like humans and other creatures, they feel complicated emotions. They grieve. One mother orca carried her lifeless calf around the globe for 17 days. She traveled more than 1,000 miles. Once on land, they returned to the sea, and now they come close so we can see more of what we are, and can be. We’re learning from trees and whales, and what’s revealed is inside the “clear water of our heart”.
Yesterday one son and his wife were on a whale-watching boat in Monterey. She took 18 videos and 87 photos. They saw 20 humpback whales and 200 sea lions and birds and waves. The whales were jubilant, jumping and spraying rainblows and waving their tails. It can only be joy and an intention to share. One whale came within five feet of the boat. A friend was in Baja this winter to be with the whales and their babies. The mothers want people to touch the babies. They’re reaching out to us.
I contrast that to a must-read book I’m reading. It’s an easy read. It explains what feels so hard to understand as we watch those in power seek to divide and destroy. I highly recommend End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor.
We can fight fascism when we understand what’s going on, the groups that have united to destroy the world because somehow they think they’ll be saved. Ego, anyone?
I tried to insert a video but I’m told the file type isn’t supported here. Visualize whales jumping and showing their tails, and spouting rainbows. An amazing experience.
I’m reading a book, Do Glaciers Listen? by Julie Cruikshank. She’s looking at how differently Westerners and the local Indigenous peoples in the area of the Saint Elias Mountains where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory meet, view and respond to glaciers.
One woman, Mrs. Annie Ned, speaks about “human and environmental history from her own experience of hunting, trapping, and living there for almost a century”. Her advice is to “listen for different stories”. The author then writes, “Eudora Welty, an American writer who, like Annie Ned, lived well into her nineties, also maintained that there is a distinction between listening to stories and listening for stories. “Long before I wrote stories,” she reflected in her autobiography, “I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”
The Indigenous people in this book view glaciers as living entities. They interact with them and treat them with respect. Perhaps we, too, can listen for stories in what surrounds us where we live. What speaks and resonates?
I was at Rodeo Beach this morning. The Snowy Egrets were feasting and enjoying the low tide as the tide rolled in.
It was a beautiful low-tide morning at Rodeo Beach. Driving there I saw an egret standing on a branch on a tree surveying the view. I think of the ecosystems we share, the richness of connection, the variety of allies we nurture and need.
This morning I woke to the sound of rain. Yesterday a friend and I walked back and forth to Tennessee Valley Beach. Though the weather was iffy, we felt the call, and then the colors in the gray were another call, another stroke of the gift of life in water, earth, air, and stone.
I’m re-reading Gretel Ehrlich’s book, The Solace of Open Spaces. She writes of the dances of Native people, the gatherings, the connection with sun, rain, earth, our breath, our steps.
Thursday evening, my grandson and I were at Filoli Gardens visiting Rose Wonders, the troll created from nature by Thomas Dambo. It was quiet, just us.
Haruki Murakami:
Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.
I’m reminiscing on my six year old grandson’s attention to detail at his nature camp. He had been nervous as he was going to a camp where he didn’t know anyone. I know the feeling but then we saw deer as we drove in, male and female deer, and that was the beginning to an inclusive letting down.
The children were directed to a picnic table where “tree cookies” were laid out, rounds of tree trunk, and there were bins of colored pens so each child could make their own nametag. He carefully wrote his name on his tree circle, and I thought that was it. I handed him a green string to put through the hole of the tag, but he wasn’t finished. He then outlined the three letters in another color, and then, another and meanwhile I’m thinking he’s done, and we’re moving along, but then he carefully colored the whole round in, and I thought of how I might have done it. I might have just written the letters – no elaboration or gift of time and flow. He put the string through and tied it himself in a double knot though other children went to the counselor to have it done.
I’m still with the experience as I come to Ellen Glasgow’s words: “Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I had felt at twenty.”
I may not have the energy or agility of the age of twenty, but there’s such a beautiful continuing way of learning. My grandson is my teacher. I’m older than sixty, and yet here I am expanding my age rings that may one day be cut into cookies, in which children write their names.
When I picked him up from camp, the nametag was turned around, with the word “LEF” on it. They had played a game where he became a leaf. I wondered if it was worth mentioning that “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”, but then, I realized it doesn’t matter. He was thrilled to be a leaf, a nurturer. He shared that other children were a slug, or a bug, but as a leaf he provides food and beauty. We were careful on the way home to not step on any leaves, an almost impossible task where they live, and yet, my heart is tender in reflection, in caring for the ground on which we walk, and what’s underneath.
As I gather age rings like the trunk of a tree, I feel myself expanding into widening rings of youth. I branch and leaf. I’m free. And the children’s song from Marlo Thomas and Friends comes to me: Free to Be …. You and Me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCUGMMEF2Zk
Years ago, my family took a tour at Abbot’s Lagoon with Megan Isadore, who co-founded the River Otter Ecology Project, to learn about and see the river otters that live and thrive there. This time of year you can see the new babies. Today there’s an article on a new behavior. The otters are augmenting their diet with pelicans. Researchers are wondering how the pelican’s capture and eating behavior spread from Rodeo Lagoon in the Marin Headlands to Abbott’s Lagoon in Point Reyes, a distance of fifty miles.
I’m reminded of Sutro Sam. In late 2012 and early 2013, Sutro Sam showed up in a protected freshwater-fed pool within the ruins of Sutro Baths in San Francisco. River otters hadn’t been seen in San Francisco in decades but there was Sutro Sam frolicing in glee because the ruins were stocked with large pet goldfish released by locals. Because he had a tracker, they knew he swam across the bay from Marin.
Recently I learned of mice who were caught in Nicasio and released near a Mill Valley creek. They found their way back to Nicasio. The proof was on their tails that had been spray-painted pink.
When I read the article, I thought perhaps the information had spread through some special otter news network, but remembering Sutro Sam, I thought of Louis and Clark, and adventurers like George Mallory who wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it is there”. Sir Edmund Hillary said, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves”. Otters, like humans, are curious animals, and they’re showing us they, too, like to explore.
Or maybe it is a certain individual, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or one who links to the Australian Aboriginal rite of passage where a young one goes out alone on a Walkabout, a spiritual journey to become an adult.
Here’s the article: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/otters-pelicans-point-reyes-22361117.php
This morning I noticed the darkness at 5:15. Yes, the fog is in but still there’s that sense of the tilt toward fall. I’m with the plants and creatures that survive at low tide, and then, again in the high tide, the covering, renewing, feeding, fertilizing.
