Today it’s raining. I listen and think of the salmon now able to swim up into Muir Woods along Redwood Creek. What a gift!

Yesterday, my son, grandson and I went to the Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco. What a visit to Fantasy, Fairy, and Dream Land. I’m still circling on my toes, lifted into the air. We also went in City Hall where many weddings were taking place, to the Fairmont Hotel to see the decorations and walked around Union Square. Today I balance on integration and knowing enough.

This time of year the stars seem more pronounced in their appearance and influence.  Our sun, the nearest star, moves quickly across the sky, and then darkness comes.  Last night, I was outside watching for shooting stars, when one flashed brightly and appeared to almost swoop into my blanketed lap.

Sound carries this time of year and I hear the leaves fall.

I’ve been buying eggs from Vital Farms, a coordinated collection of family farms.  From their information on the hens, I read “Henku” and peruse  a photo of “Clever Carla” finding a worm. Even hens sleep in on these cozy winter days, rising at 7, rather than 4.  We are influenced by light as we turn tenderly to care, self-care, and compassion for those around us on this earth we share.

My guidance these days is to rest the mind on the breath, as I consider what a hen might say in a haiku.

Nestled in winter,

Sun softens, beckoning, still

Quick light lays inside.  

We say it’s a day when really it’s a week, a month, a year, all gathered in a cornucopia of gratitude.  I find myself with memories this week, past gatherings, and celebrations of the fall of leaves.  I miss my parents as this day approaches.  I miss all those who’ve passed and aren’t here at a table we share, and yet I feel the expansive clasp.  The table is vast.  

Wednesday night I got up around 2 AM and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.  When I turned on the light, a mouse jumped and ran across the counter.  I jumped and shrieked, then went into the bedroom and shut the door from an invader that seemed huge.  

Last night, having ignored the situation, I debated what to do.  I cleansed everything and put all the food away.  I emptied the bin and left it without even a bag.    

This morning when I  looked in the bin, I saw what I thought was either a sleeping or a dead mouse.  Then it moved.  I had time to observe it wasn’t gigantic and wasn’t a threat.  I realized it had been able to climb out when there was a bag there but without it, it was stuck in the bottom of a slippery-sided bin.  I covered the top and carried the bin up to the road and into plants and weeds, where bending the bin down, the mouse scurried out with room to hide and feed.  

Last night a friend recommended a book her seventh grade granddaughter is reading.  The book by Lois Lowry is from the series The Giver.  At first it seems to describe a perfect world, but then you learn what’s sacrificed to create such peace.  

I think of the mouse released from what might have seemed a perfect environment with warmth, safety, and food into an outside world into which there’s freedom and also hawks and cats.   

No judgment on either realm, though another opportunity to examine what freedom and safety mean to each of us.

As I spray  peppermint oil around the house to deter other mice, I listen to chainsaws as a neighbor cuts down even more trees.   People worry about fires so they cut down trees, and then they deal with flooding.  We live interdependently and in a world of complexity as we navigate the challenges and opportunities each day offers and provides.

I recently re-read the book High Conflict by Amanda Ripley.  I highly recommend it.  I’m with how the novel Lord of the Flies which most of us read in high school took a real-life incident where some boys were stranded together and worked peacefully to survive, and turned it into a book showing the opposite.  I wonder why.  May this world move toward and evolve in peace.  

I woke this morning, feeling shaken, like small earthquakes were moving through me.  I rose as though shaking sand out of my clothes after being at the beach.

This week my Tergar meditation is focused on The Wisdom of Multiplicity.  The more I feel multiplicity in myself, the more I feel it in the world, and in that, comes a deep appreciation of the preciousness of being here, and the awareness of how we’re continuously balancing on a beam of life and death.  

ETTY HILLESUM:

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

Etty was murdered in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943.  She was 29.

She inspires in demonstrating how to meet what comes from an inner core of support that doesn’t judge or divide into good and bad.