Some of you know that one of my sons and his wife adopted a rescue greyhound.  He descended from a lineage of winners but brilliant dog that he was, he came in last in the few races he was in.  He was a lover, not a runner, so he was put out for adoption and they were the blessed ones who got this amazing dog. 

Because they both were working at the time and he could not be left alone, I was given the pleasure of spending days with him and introducing him to stairs and glass doors and simple things like that.  Senna, named after Aryton Senna, the race car driver, and I bonded in a way that I can’t explain.  I loved, and we all loved, that dog, and I use the word loosely, as clearly he was an amazing being.    

Senna passed away during shelter-in-place so I said goodbye on Facetime.  His human parents were with him as he passed.

Today is the first time I’ve been in their home in this time of shelter-in-place.  On the mantel over their fireplace is an altar to Senna – his paw print – his ashes in a ceramic box with his name on it, a beautiful poem, and a painting of Senna commissioned by a friend. There’s also a book of photos created to honor the life of this being we love.

I am so touched.  My heart is a merry-go-round with all the creatures who dance around on a carousel embraced and circling in gratitude and the generous trust in grace.  

In addition today I was with my grandson.  We were in the gazebo together.  This is Senna’s dad’s meditation place, and his mom’s yoga home.  

Grandson Keo went immediately to the statue of the Buddha.  Who knows what that means but my heart is so touched, so touched, so touched.  It’s massaged all the way through with Love.  

That’s all I need to say.  May we all meet and gather in love, trust, and peace.  Is there anything else that matters? No, nothing at all!!

The song, Summertime is with me, even though the fog is in and I need a jacket when I go outside.  

Iowa raised up until sixth grade, I’m also with the knowing “Fourth of July, and the corn is knee high”, and yet, corn has been in the stores for a month and of course July is moving along.

The big conversation these days among women my age is grandchildren and whether or not to see them other than on Facetime or Zoom, and if so, how close to get.  Is six feet far enough?  Too close?

Does one dare reach out and touch a sweet foot?  One touch.  One foot.  

Well, today is a test, and today I’m with tears, sweet tears, gentle ones, the kind that moisten and touch the Love we all share.  May this day bring the sun’s rays to touch, tickle, and tingle us all!

I’m moist with tears this morning, tears of beauty, love, gratitude, and loss.  I was up in the night coughing.  Steve took my temperature and it’s fine so what is going on.

Perhaps there are days everything hits.  Yesterday I watched a movie called Irmi.   The film is streaming through the Jewish Film Festival so I watched it in my home.  My interest was Irmi married Heinrich Selver, who was Charlotte Selver’s first husband.

I didn’t expect to meet another amazing woman: Irmi.

She lost her husband and two children when they were trying to escape Nazi Germany on a ship leaving Amsterdam for Chile.  The ship hit a German mine and blew up.  She was tossed into the waves and rescued.  She lost her husband, and two children, aged 7 and 2.  She also lost her brother and his family.

I can’t stop seeing and feeling that loss and yet after three weeks where she was catatonic, she chose to live. She rose from her bed and went on to have two more children, and create a beautiful and inspiring life.

I also watched Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass, two amazing poets discuss what it is to shelter-in-place these days. You can watch them here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/MillValleyLibrary

They pointed out that first we were in isolation and then we were hit with the clearly demonstrated knowing that Black Lives Matter.  It’s a great deal to absorb.  My heart and throat are sore.  I cough up the confinement of the past, and make space for change.  

This morning I read that John Lewis, the great Civil Rights leader. has died at the age of 80.

In June, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked Representative Lewis “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”

I pause to adjust my sails, bring them down for a bit, and grieve.  Sometimes I need a pause to propel me into knowing why I’m here and why I am so blessed.

I’m deeply grateful to be living, breathing, feeling, and sensing in my current form, surrounded by other beautiful forms who enhance, enrich, and celebrate my living and their own.

I have rooms full of bookshelves of books.

Today in looking for Mary Oliver’s book, A Thousand Mornings, I come to one I rarely open though it’s a treasure and rests in a sacred place.  

It’s A Light in the Mist, A Journal of Hope, Out of the Darkness, Into the Light. 

It’s a series of stories about transformation.  I open to a story about a young woman who, eating in a restaurant, dies of a peanut allergy.  Her parents had these words engraved on her tombstone: “God gave us memories so we could have roses in December.”  

The author who is anonymous often goes to visit the grave and sobs, but one day, driving away, though it was November, the scent of roses filled her car.  There were no flower shops around, and the fields were fallow and the trees were bare, and yet, “the fragrance grew stronger, and with it came a sudden sense of deep inner peace”.

Sometimes I smell my mother near.  Who knows what’s here that we share?

I open to another page and these words by Kabir Helminski.

… become ever more

subtle, softened, spacious,

penetrating.  

The house is empty, just me.  How rare that is these days.  The barely driven car had to go in for maintenance, and Steve took on the job of doing it.  How odd this is.  He was sent a checklist of how the visit would be handled, so as to ensure a measure of safety.

We’ve been together full-time with a few simple breaks for four months now, and I pause to feel this shift.  Both kitties are taking their morning naps; birds are singing, and there’s a place inside that feels and fingers the change.

When I watch my grandchild on video and see him in pictures, I see how his fingers are always apart, each one given space.  I do that now, feel the air as grace.

We’re used to being together, my husband and me, two hands clasped, and today a few hours allow an opening in our togetherness, an examination of wholeness as we each taste a wider space.  

Today my “baby” brother would have been 67.   I wake from a dream where I’m dressed in a green robe honoring Nature, Mother Nature.  I feel my brother close and I miss him, and I believe we’re tied, always tied, like the roots and branches of trees.

This morning I’m entranced with the smell of a gardenia I picked last night.  I go outside in the fog and exult in plants grateful for moisture, shared.

I’m perfecting a ginger brownie recipe, so a batch last night, pretty good, and a new one waiting to be cut, hopefully an even more perfect combination of butter, chocolate, fresh ginger, and such.

The news is mind-boggling, like being inside a pinball machine, so I nourish outside, pruning, weeding, watering, seeing how we rise, branch, and give.

I eat red plums from one tree, and yellow from another, both sweet!!

My mother passed away in 2005.  If she were alive today, she’d be 93.  Perhaps that’s why the day feels so sweet.  Love was her Light!

When the power went out today, I was glad I hadn’t waited until the last minutes to do my taxes.  I mailed them Monday.  Now, of course the power is back.  Meanwhile it was a respite.  

The outage gave me time to revisit quotes.  

Thich Nhat Hanh: People say walking on water is a miracle, but to me walking peacefully on the earth is the real miracle.

Jane Hirshfield:  There is only one way to travel and that is inward.  

Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, wrote in his book Alone which published in 1938 explored the five months he spent winter alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica.

On June 2nd, 1934, he recorded: The universe is not dead.  Therefore, there is an Intelligence there, and it is all pervading. At least one purpose, possibly the major purpose, of that intelligence is the achievement of universal harmony.  The human race, then, is not alone in the universe. Though I am cut off from human beings, I am not alone.

We are not alone!   

Frank Ostaseski, author of  THE FIVE INVITATIONS: DISCOVERING WHAT DEATH CAN TEACH US ABOUT LIVING FULLY shares his beautiful practice.  

He pauses and places both hands on his chest to feel the contact and the breath.  He says, “I choose Love!”

And in that choice is a pause to consider these words of Alice Walker.

She was someone who would not be rushed. That seems like a small thing. But it is actually a very amazing quality, a very ancient one …. She went about her business as if she could live forever, and forever was very, very long.

Form is not a distraction from emptiness. This movie of waking life is not a problem that needs to be solved, or some kind of cosmic mistake that needs to be transcended. It is more like a dance or a painting or a song to be enjoyed, sometimes in the way a comedy is enjoyed, sometimes in the way a tragedy is enjoyed, sometimes in the way a mystery is enjoyed, sometimes in the way turning off the TV is enjoyed. The body and this whole amazing world of apparent form is so beautiful, so precious, and so utterly fleeting. And the more deeply you enter into any apparent form, the more it dissolves into formlessness.

– Joan Tollifson

I’m sitting with this, this morning.

Sadness washed through me last night when I read that the county in which I live is tightening back up.  I hadn’t taken advantage of the opening except I had scheduled a haircut which is now cancelled.  I used to have long hair, and then, I went through chemotherapy, and had no hair, and then I decided I liked it short, and now, hmmm ….

I feel awake in some odd way.  Perhaps it’s seeing my grandchild on Facetime.  He’s almost 9 months old, and yesterday felt like he was playing his dad.  He loves to go for the phone, and his dad tries to keep it from him, and so, yesterday he would crawl toward something dangerous, and while his dad was moving to lift him away, he’d turn and head for the phone.  What a game, and of course I laugh and laugh because it is so fun, and now today, I notice the freedom in my breath from the laughter.  

We need to laugh and play as we adjust with curiosity and exploration to each new day.

This morning I read Heather Cox Richardson and try not to sink into what the Republican party is trying to do to education.  A democracy needs a well-educated populace.  We need public education, and we need to keep our children safe, safe in every way.

A friend works with children in Spain.  She can already see a tightening in their throat and jaw, a ring around to the occiput in back.  How are our children affected by shelter-in-place?   

I sit with that now, notice my teeth, notice how they sit in my jaw.  Am I offering the contraction of fear to that space, or the expansiveness of love?

How am I tasting what’s here?

I close my eyes and feel the caress of the layers of eyelids on the liquidity of eyeballs.   I rest there.  

Pir Elias Amidon writes: 

Your soul is not a thing.  

It is the fragrance of your life.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

The only news I know 

Is bulletins all day 

From immortality.  

In case you’re not Emily Dickinson, and are interested in the happenings of today, here’s the link:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-12-2020