How do we stay sane amidst the cruelty, tragedy, theft, greed, and lies of the Trump administration?
My grandson has been staying with us, so I’m with the beauty of this world. Together, he and I watch the light change in the sky as we observe the squirrels, birds, and trees.
John O’Donohue:
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
Shunyru Suzuki:
In the Beginner’s Mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.
Today as I was folding sheets, I remembered going through radiation treatment in 2006. The man who handed us our robe always made sure it was warm and said a prayer for each of us. I think of how we do anything, is how we do everything.
In that, is fulfillment and completeness, wholeness.
Nisargadatta Maharaj:
Don’t hold on, that is all. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you.
Today I read Wislawa Szymborska’s poem “Miracle Fair”.
The poem begins with:
The commonplace miracle:
that so many common miracles take place.
And she begins a list, a way for each of us to view, expand, and embrace what comes to us as we meander through night and day.
A miracle that’s lost on us:
the hand actually has fewer than six fingers
but still it’s got more than four.
A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.
An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~
I balance that with the Israel attack on a Gaza hospital killing 20, including journalists and medics. One needs fingers and toes to count the number of dead. One needs a see-saw to balance joy and sorrow, gratitude and grief, as we center in the heart that holds it all.
My son sends me photos of his friend, a red-shouldered hawk, he sees on his morning walks.
Today in my meditation, I saw and felt the day turn to light as the earth turns on its axis and we move around the sun. Yesterday, I got my hair cut and asked my hairdresser why one side flips up and the other side curls under. I learned that our hair spirals in a circle around our head, each of us with a swirl as individual as our fingerprint.
I’m swirling in movement today, anchored in the cord of impermanence, change.
At the park, I saw a little boy, perhaps two or three, laughing and waving, but I couldn’t see anyone there. Then I realized he was playing with his shadow, waving, laughing and dancing with his own image. If only we could greet all aspects of ourselves with such joy and glee, no hiding, only reception and awareness of all that’s right here for us to see, receive, and be.
A friend tells me of a friend who with no hope and severe continuing deterioration of the brain drinks from a doctor-prescribed bottle of death. I don’t know him, and yet he is the age of my son, and I feel the grief of those who love him, and a deep carving inside.
It is said sorrow carves deeply into us like a log carved out to make a boat and so we float on the love grief brings when we let ourselves feel this boundary between the preciousness of life here and what comes when we let go to a wider float as the boat dissolves.
In Sensory Awareness, we often ask ourselves or another: Have you landed?
And usually I feel how much more landing can occur, how much more “coming down” and feeling energy, movement, and exchange there can be. How present am I?
Today I’m with transitions, noticing when I walk through an entry or doorway. I pause and contemplate as I invite immersion to journey within me as I enter a new room, a new place. Moving from indoors to out, or outdoors to in, is revelatory as to integrating liquidity and solidity in space.
I try to avoid politics here but lately it seems to require even more landing as I try to digest how close Trump came to a coup, and how even now he continues to try to destroy this democracy.
From Heather Cox Richardson today:
The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”
Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”
It is for each of us to continue landing within what we know is true as destructiveness and lies dissolve in the swelling oceans of truth.
As we come down and root we rise like a flower or tree. The maturing process brings one more and more into release, into the grounding rise that produces, distributes, and returns to the ground.
This morning I’m with these words of William Blake.
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
Our family gathered on a ranch 1000 feet above Half Moon Bay to celebrate Steve’s 75th birthday.
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