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.
At the Hiller Aviation Museum, even bears can fly!!Grandson’s new puppy – Life!
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 inescapableearth.
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.
Growth on the trunk of a treeContemplation on a SlantReflecting the turn to fall
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.
Light and DarkDancing our heart like a kite at the end of our armsReceiving and being with sun and shade
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.
Ice plant growing on rockDriftwood gathered on the beachFlight
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.
CirclingA deer in our lower yardOne planet we share
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.
Our family gathered on a ranch 1000 feet above Half Moon Bay to celebrate Steve’s 75th birthday.
Pacifica on June 1Quail on the propertyA Pair of QuailView from Pigeon Point LighthouseInside the Lighthouse MuseumWe saw seals but no whalesAnd pelicansRocks and wavesFire in the custom fireplace morning and nightPrayer flags wave in a Tibetan temple above us Looking out and down at the fire pitA sense of the view – mesmerizingChanging skyBeauty and EaseLove caught thought
The moon was still in the sky when I rose this morning. The moon influences the tides and I knew yesterday would be a low, low, so I went to the marsh to see the mud exposed where water often flows.
I think it’s clear these are challenging times, and as I walk by houseboats sitting on mud I think of how clearly those who live there know the rise and fall four times a day.
I’m with these words of Mark Matousek, from “A Splinter of Love”.
In grief we access parts of ourselves that were somehow unavailable to us in the past. With awareness, the journey through grief becomes a path to wholeness.
The marsh in JuneStranded Seaplanes Stranded boats for now – wait a few hours for the floatLifted as fairy tales do The Leaning Eiffel TowerCrossing from one path to the nextAbove it All!
I’m reading a friend’s book, Sara Bragin’s The Living in Her Dying. It’s about the time she spent with her mother as her mother was transitioning. It shows how much we need an advocate at such a time, and the learning that occurs when we show up to be with the loss of the womb in which we came.
The end of life process is with me these days as I feel the approach of a change over which I may not have control.
Last night I had one of those experiences that takes one out of their body and into awareness of so much more. My cat Tiger is getting older, and needing body warmth, comfort, and support sleeps snuggled in with us at night. When I got into bed last night, he came over with a look that lit the room, that was more than his huge eyes. I felt the gift of this livingness, this gift of being in a body for a time.
I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s words about being on a street corner, and …
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”
He uses the word God. I might use the word Spirit or Light or Grace but the feeling and knowing, believing and honoring – that is the gift.
What’s happening in Ukraine is with us all. We are united in this. We feel the attacks; we share the fear and yet Tiger gave me such an invitation with his eyes, and way of being. I wake as light, flowing light, light that is both particle and wave as am I.
Tiger A Portion of Our YardSerenityAnd the wind chimes
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