A friend recommended a book, Morning Altars by Day Schildkret. Last night I began reading it, entranced and soothed by photos of mandalas made from flowers, leaves, shells, sticks, and rocks. Day suggests a journey into nature where you gather objects lying on the ground, and find a place that calls you where you practice the art of arriving. Sit until you know “I’m here.” Then, clear a space, a circle, with your hand or a small broom. When ready, begin by placing an object you’ve gathered in the center of the circle, and then, gather your objects around it in a way you feel called. Circle the objects around to create a mandala. In doing so, you are clearing a space within, and creating a visual representation of what’s happening in you now.
Leave it there, and perhaps come back to visit, and see how the natural world has altered your creation.
Reading this book, I’m able to center, and read Heather Cox Richardson. In 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, in counteracting the lies and hatred of McCarthy said, “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Last night, Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey told host Jimmy Kimmell, that Republican senators are indeed unnerved by Trump’s behavior and the actions of the administration. The problem, Booker said, is what Thomas Jefferson said: “‘When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty.’”
Where I live, a Buckeye tree is often a place where the native people, the Coast Miwok, gathered. Losing its leaves in winter, the sun shines through, and growing them back, it provides shade. Adaptation and impermanence, and now we adapt to changing conditions, and speak to defend our nature and the nature in which we live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Let us build altars to the beautiful necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece.
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