Posted on by Cathy Edgett

The Power in Language

My four year old grandson has been staying with us.  He loves words, and is fluent in our language and a language of his own.  It’s clearly fun to play with sound as air winds round and round and plays with tongue and mouth as meaning and nonsense resound. 

Today I removed the Christmas books from the wall system, and browsing through the bookshelves re-discovered The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. 

They wrote it as a “spell book”, to conjure back twenty words lost from the most recent version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Words like acorn, adder, dandelion, newt, otter and willow had been replaced by attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.  The outdoor and natural world had been replaced by the indoor and virtual.  The lost word that most surprised me is “otter”.

The page on otter ends with this: 

Ever dreamed of being an otter? That 

otter underwater, thunderbolt, that 

shimmering twister?

Run to the riverbank, otter-dreamer, slip

your skin and change your matter, pour

your outer being into otter – and enter 

now as otter without falter into water.

And so now on this last day of 2023, do just that – “slip your skin and change your matter”.  Today and tomorrow are days to conjure new ways to speak, be present, and play.

 

Otters play in the sand at Abbott’s Lagoon
Mother and baby otters swimming home
Mother and Baby Otter
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Passage

My youngest son is 46 years old today.  It’s a warm, sunny day with so much twittering it sounds like spring, but the Monarch butterflies are flying about which means fall.

Perhaps a day of celebrating birth unites all the years, brings the seasons together like a womb holding and preparing for emergence of a new coherence and birth.

I read recently that when two sand dunes approach, come together, and part, they leave behind a tiny sand dune. I’ve never observed this for myself but I immerse in the image of connection, separation, and birth.

The windows are open, unusual for here, and in the night I heard all the critters that come out to explore and feed in the dark.  I forget how active the night is, and perhaps that’s another entry into appreciation of where life leads me now as I age and mature. What am I coming to see that I didn’t notice or acknowledge before? What fills and guides me now?

I just finished reading Returning Light: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael by Robert L. Harris.

The book is a poetic meditation on his 30 years as a caregiver and guide on the Irish island of Skellig Michael.  He’s there from May to October, observing and living with thousands of birds, especially puffins, and the memories of the monks who a thousand years ago built on this rock a place to isolate and meditate.  It’s a place for the waves of light to unite loneliness and belonging.

Harris writes: Emptiness. And light changing, and changing, the vision of ourselves.  

Light! Change! Vision!

Who likes it?

I do!

Iris in early morning light
Iris as the sun rises
Circling

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Winter Solstice

It’s the time to celebrate the return of the sun, the light, even as we enter winter.  

Henry David Thoreau said: “In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.”

Pathways Call

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Autumn

This morning I was out watering at a time in the summer it would be light but instead the darkness was lit by the moon and stars. All was quiet and still, and for some reason, Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence moved through me.

My cat Bella is now on antibiotics and eating a few bites, but in my worry I’ve been with the words that complete the poem “In Blackwater Woods” written by the late Mary Oliver. 

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Recently I learned that the strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.  This tells us why we must be so careful with our words, words we say to ourselves and to  others.

And now, be with The Sound of Silence!