Years ago, I concluded each day by answering three questions devised by the philosopher Spinoza.

He suggested asking at the end of each day:

What inspired me today?

Where did I experience peace, balance, comfort, or satisfaction?

What made me happy today, what, not who?

This morning inspired by the sunrise, I began my day with those three questions.  What inspires me? Where am I experiencing balance and peace? What makes me happy?

Answering springs gratitude. I plan to continue the practice.

I wing on the words of Brenda Ueland: 

It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
  

What comes?

I’m grateful our new president speaks of feeding all children, not just a few.

Viktor Frankl wrote:  What is to give light must endure burning.

As a world dealing with crisis, we’ve been doing that.  Now we energize change.

Embracing and beckoning, I rise early these days, receive and integrate what roots in the dark.

Mark Twain said:  A better idea than my own is to listen.

William Butler Yeats wrote: We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

I cultivate quiet and remember back.

In 2006, my cat Mandu passed away after I finished nine months of cancer treatment, chemotherapy and radiation.  I felt he stayed with me to absorb the poison and help me through it. I wrote this poem for him.  

Essence

Cat Mandu allowed us entry to his death,
stayed under the table on the rug
where we watched breath slow,
a final moist purr come to rest.

We wrapped him in a blanket,
carried him outside and dug
where Coast Miwok once lived,
and deer now stand, soul sentries

for all that is past. I placed a stone
engraved with words, Hidden Treasures,
then simmered in the sound of air,
a door passed through.

I pick up a stick,
touch like a wand the nerve running
from ring finger to heart.
A chime gathered, departs.

Though the fog was thick this morning, a white wrap, I could hear birds tweeting welcoming spring.  I looked down off the deck and saw my Camellia beginning to bloom.  I startled a squirrel as I scampered downstairs for a picture and the squirrel climbed up and through the trees.

Then, the fog began to clear and another tree revealed.  

A friend recommended the book The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell.  I’ve felt a bit adrift, so sat down and asked myself “What is the block?”  I’ve been wanting to go through journals of the past, and yet I don’t.  The answer came from within, an invitation. I rose and went downstairs, and am now ensconced in a treasure trove. 

Gratitude sweeps through, gratitude for invitation and embrace.  

Years ago I bought a print by Brian Andreas called “Center on Wheels”.  A colorful drawing was accompanied with these words: I spent a long time trying to find my center until I looked closely one night and found it had wheels and moved easily in the slightest breeze, so now I spend less time sitting and more time sailing.

I’m trying not to be obsessed with the news and …. So I keep coming back to this image and these words on centering on wheels, which brings me to lateral gliding, and the essential nature of not holding my neck like a rod. I don’t have bands of brass around my neck, though I may feel that way at times, but then I notice. Might I play with change?

I move my head on my neck gently back and forth and round and round. 

I read that strengthening the neck muscles begins with moving the shoulders in circles forward and back, so I begin there and visualize my neck moving like a snake, as I sail, slide, and skate, a squirrel scampering, a bird winging, through branches, and up and down trunks of trees.

You can find the image at https://www.storypeople.com/collections/classic-prints?page=3

In the last few weeks, three friends have requested help with someone they love going through treatment for cancer.  I offered my book Breast Strokes: Two Friends Journal through the Unexpected Gifts of Cancer.  Today when I received thanks from one of the women, I opened the book for myself.  

I opened to an experience I shared with my three year old friend Zach.  He was running around with his arms out proclaiming, “I’m an airplane.”  When he came to a speed bump painted white, he flew over it and said, “Look at that cloud!

I smile at the image, and feel my arms float up and out.  “Look at that cloud!”  

I see now why Trump wouldn’t concede and why he’s been, and still is, so cocky about “winning”.

You probably all read Heather Cox Richardson but just in case, here’s the link.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

Sobering. Our new president has so much to deal with when he enters office especially with the Trump administration doing all they can to stop him but this was an attempted coup and when I read this on the wife of a Supreme Court Justice, it seems there may need to be some housecleaning done there too. Hopefully Thomas will just resign.

HCR: With the details and the potential depth of this event becoming clearer over the past two days—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, tweeted her support, and state lawmakers as well as Republican attorneys general were actually involved—Americans are recoiling from how bad this attempted coup was… and how much worse it could have been. The crazed rioters were terrifyingly close to our elected representatives, all gathered together on that special day, and they were actively talking about harming the vice president. 

And there’s this: Refusing to stop the attack on the Capitol might have been more nefarious, though. A White House adviser told New York Magazine’s Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi that Trump was watching television coverage of the siege and was enthusiastic, although he didn’t like that the rioters looked “low class.” While the insurrectionists were in the Capitol, he tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Even as lawmakers were under siege, both Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani were making phone calls to brand-new Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) urging him to slow down the electoral count.

Tragic and sad!

The news today flows freshly through as liars are shown for who they are as they learn there are consequences for what we say and do.  

This morning my cat Bella lay next to me in bed and I felt her breath moving up and down, and in and out, softly, gently, wholly, fully through the entirety of her being.   She is my guru bed buddy.

The news of the day is allowing  breath to flow through me fully.  I hadn’t realized how much I was holding my breath with the dread of reading what Trump had done each day.  A fresh wind blows gratitude through.

Inspiration this morning comes from Stephen Hawking who when he was 21, was diagnosed with ALS and given two to three years to live.  He was hospitalized in the same room as a boy dying of leukemia, and that woke his resolve to wake up and live.  He lived another 55 years and contributed greatly as we know and appreciate.

 He said: “For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.”

We’re listening now to speech that is true.  Those who’ve lied are scuttling away.  I’m thrilled that Josh Hawley’s book contract is cancelled and that Sidney Powell is being sued by Dominion for false claims about their voting machines.

I don’t know why it’s taken so long to expose these people and their falsehoods but perhaps what we saw on Wednesday has shaken us all to our core, and in the core is where we connect as one and for the benefit of all.

I go to poetry when I’m distressed.  Today I open the book Together in a Sudden Strangeness, America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic.

It’s odd to realize how long this pandemic has been going on.  There are poems about how to deal with Easter and then the Summer Solstice.  

The title of the book comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda “ Keeping Quiet”, a poem that requests a stop, a come to silence for a second.  The poem was written in the 1950’s.  

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

I feel us all together in a “sudden strangeness” today.  

Nancy Pelosi takes charge with her response: “The president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America.  In calling for this seditious act, the president has committed an unspeakable assault on our nation and our people.”

Even though this assault has been happening, my heart and gut still reel at this open and violent betrayal. 

I’m trying to wrap my mind around it when I open the book to the poem “Elder Care” by Ron Koertge.  The poem is about senior shopping hours in the grocery store and how the music at that time of day is  geared to seniors.  “Mashed Potato Time” plays and “The Loco-Motion”.  Elders in the grocery move a little faster in time with the music, and then comes Joey Dee and the Starlighters with “Peppermint Twist”. 

I read the words and feel a wiggle, a twirl, a twist, a smile.  

We will come through this “sudden strangeness” as we have come through upheavals before.  

I was at UCLA when tanks thundered down Wilshire Boulevard to plant themselves on campus.  

We orchestrate change.

My local community has been working to support Black Lives Matter.

Today, at my beloved Good Earth grocery store, I saw this:

I was with my grandson yesterday, my Super-Joy, so missed what was going on as it happened.  I discussed it with my sons but couldn’t take it in, and then, this morning I watched and read and I sit here now sobered and sad.

I believe Trump should be impeached or the 25th Amendment invoked.  Will that happen now that the adrenalin has subsided?  

The damage Trump has done is impossible to calculate.  I reach within my toolbox, find an etch-a-sketch there, and want to erase his last five years, and that can’t happen and shouldn’t.

Each of us is touched by what’s happened.  What leads us now?  What guides?