the ocean remains, the horizon remains, we remain

 I'm not seeking the eternal just the abundance of days that will come like the waves and bring the peace of a welcome repetition. Sometimes there are storms. Many mornings are quiet. Some suffer so much during these difficult times and I wish them the peace of the returning waves, the certainty of the horizon, the love they need and the food and shelter and then some laughter.  I realize how fortunate I am and how my book about finding hope in nature, riding the waves, rides with me every day. Riding is about moving from grief to the acceptance of personal loss through the cure of the seasons, the balm of the full moon still out on this cold morning, the welcome words of friends who care and recognize that we are all in this together. And what is this? It is the world where some have power over others and some seek to help and some find their own way and some wonder what they can do to make things better. 

I am writing a new book about nature and hoping you will find me. I will try to find you I'm grateful for all the good you do in the world. 

wishing everyone peace, safety, security, community

the heart map home

If you don’t know where you belong but have a sense of belonging, as I do, then is that enough of a place? I’m sometimes lost and looking for a community while all around it seems that there are people I know with families and children and grandchildren or if not that then places they visit with friends and stay a while. Then there’s me. Working. Sometimes saying I’m a working fool. But what I mean depends upon the day and how many stories I hear from all these people that are in different orbits than me. 

I sometimes feel as if I am spinning around my small life and everyone else is having a larger life. Relaxing more, communing more. All the things I long for and don’t seem to have in abundance. I could feel as if I did a bad job of making a life but the truth is different. Well, that’s the thing about truth, it is always different. It’s always different and it is what it is. 

I might feel as if everyone owns gravity and I’m just free floating. I have a friend that sees me this way. I think she does. Here I am free as can be and there she is saddled with her life and not feeling free. Now, I find that funny in a bittersweet kind of way because I see her as having a very full life; filled with people, children, relatives and friends too. Community involvement. Accomplishments in all important areas. She’s a great parent. I see her as belonging. And sometimes I see myself as someone that bounces against the earth’s atmosphere trying to get in. But then again, there are days I feel so much a part of everyone and everything, that my heart is full and joy wells up inside of me. I hardly know what to do with this sense of fullness. 

Why there are days that I feel so empty and alone; so out of it; and questioning why this and why that, I don’t know. How do some of the people I know manage to find so many spaces in their lives for great community activities and belonging? I have always been aware of the word ‘longing’ in belonging. A lot more than I’d wish. But then I have also felt belonging and I can hear in my friends that have all these places to go to and family and community the same things I feel on those days I feel alone. It is a strange thing and a wonder to me. 

Right now everything is good. I went through several layers of regret and envy and come to this moment where I feel perfect. I feel held by the world. I am even smiling at how often I get caught up in feeling that it’s a bit grandiose to say I feel held by the world but if I said I feel as though I belong to the earth that would also sound quite grand. And what I really mean is that I feel so lucky to have this feeling and to be safe here in the screen house hanging with Molly and writing this and knowing that as much as these friends of mine aren’t a deep and integrated part of my life as I used to wish for when I wished for community, they are that too. They are a part of my wider community.  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote about karass and granfalloon. Sometimes the same people can be both in your karass, your intimate soul community and they might sometimes also fit into your granfalloon or the group that you belong to.

On the days or in the hours I might feel alone I’ll find myself wondering if it’s because of choices I made; choices about how to relate to people and family. Or if I was not given instructions on how to create and hold the structure of family. More often than not I have found myself trying to reenter the earth’s atmosphere after realizing that the search for my karass was really closer to my home than I realized.  Whether it was a happy accident or not, I had a home. A solid community too.  Not as large as many I know but real. The truth, ever true but always evolving, is that deep connections, soul friends or family relationships are always evolving. 

If you were the person in charge of keeping the planets and stars in relationship to each other; dealing with forces like solar winds, gravity, magnetic pulls and stellar winds, can you imagine the magnificent talents it would take to keep everything in orbit and keeping a safe but relational distance? 

What we bring from our adventures with people and places, from the changing landscapes of our relationships and the unfamiliar places in our heart that, when we are brought to them, and remember that we were there once before, is a sense of connection. Some people I’m fortunate enough to know, and they are in my karass, bring me a real and live sense of what it’s like to feel belonging. To have your self and your sense of life deepened and heightened by these encounters is joy. It’s love. It’s a sweetness that touches you in all the spaces that felt empty. Today was quite a journey. It’s quite possible every day is a journey and I’m just not aware of the itinerary. But today was something special for me because I came home in several ways. When the world unfolds itself so that you can see all the layers and be a part of so many different places; and belong to all of them and recognize that they are always there but not all the time, that is treasure. That’s the pirate treasure I wanted as a kid. I still don’t have the map leading me there. But some of the elements that I know how to gather or become a part of help point me in the right direction. At least every now and then. 

More about resilience is available at the wild blue on Kindle at   http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i.

The mythical journey of the modern Odysseus is found at Conversations with Nic available at http://amzn.to/14jUNUs.

Attic to the stars, phone in the shower

We're planning to watch for the Leonid meteor showers in November.  Most people I know have not had a lot of successful meteor shower viewings in these parts. For one thing, they're not always reliable. And these days it’s hard to find people willing to lie outside in the cold and damp waiting for them with us. It's also getting harder to get up after lying on our backd in the dark and cold waiting for them.  But when the Leonids come along this November we’ll probably be waiting for them just as I did the year before. Some things just require faithfulness.

Another November day I shared the following notes:  When a meteor comes along it's coming with a guarantee that everyone there won't have seen it.  They go by so fast – it’s like phitt, phitt and they’re gone. When many were promised and you do get to see the phitt phitt everyone that missed it groans and says something like, "Really, I just turned away for second."  That means another hour or so of looking so they get a chance to see one too.  The bladder starts wanting a voice in how long everyone is staying out but you know that's only one small segment of the body clamoring for your attention.

I ended this day in the attic after a day of raking the leaves.  Dry weather, clear blue skies. The neighbor spotted not one but a pair of red tails just the day after one struck a squirrel in our yard.  It is squarely autumn here and there's nothing to do but give into the season and enjoy the leaf mold, sneezing, and those pure glycerin moments when the gold or red leaves are shot through with sunlight and just through that  window of beauty you get to see the bluest sky.  It's all here and then there's the raking.  There's really no good reason why a rake works better than a debris blower except for the fact that it combs the ground and the leaves seem to come along nicely.  I felt like a shepherd gathering the flock. It was after I had gathered the flock and dragged the flock on the tarp for, oh, I don't know, maybe three hours, that my back did appreciate the change of pace.  I changed the pace to sitting down and sipping a hot cup of tea.  I thought I'd appreciate the tea but my back liked it even more.

So that led to what seemed like early retirement, at least for the day.   But then I remembered that we were going to watch the meteor showers.  This means bundle up and get everything you own that's warm out of the attic and worry about the aches and pains on Sunday.  Here's the thing - crawling up the scrawny attic steps I realized that I'd have to crawl over everything that I've been tossing up there just to keep the downstairs free from the detritus of daily living. I discovered that a whole lot of tossing was going on. This meant a lot of crawling around looking for things warm and cozy for the meteor watching.  I realize that I can do this today but as the years go on I might want to have an emergency phone up in the attic in case I get stuck up there.

While I was raking the leaves I was thinking how much I missed a friend of mine. We hadn't spoken in over a week and I was wondering when I could call her. I was tired and needed a shower or be willing to face a citation from the township.  With all that had to be done today I thought it would be a great idea if I could talk to her from the shower. I would avoid a citation from the board of health and I could move onto the next thing.

Why is it that Saturdays have become an object lesson in connections? I have learned that the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone because my knee bones are really aching and my thigh bones can't do the walking without them. If I were to economize my motions I should consider putting an observation hole in the attic and wait there for the shooting stars while wrapped up in everything that's warm and within reach.  Once the telephone gets installed I could be set for the whole winter.  The Geminids are next and they're supposed to be reliable. So I’ve been thinking…

Sitting like a mountain

A mountain can be read like the Torah by a geologist. Each layer has meaning and the meaning builds upon the layer below it or speaks to the layer above and provides it countenance and relationship.  When everything feels too loose and nothing seems to be sustained by the eminence of its own weight or presence, think mountain.  The mountain in us that is still but storied. It speaks through its layers the way we do through our kin and kidding, our stretches and triumphs and the everyday, small journeys we accomplish in a world that notes everything except the quiet, difficult challenges we face moving from one place to another within.

What does it mean to be a mountain? Is it always about strength or about what remains after the great forces of the ground beneath shifted and shaped the land? The mountain rests on its legs, folded but not crossed, arms forming the strong sides but ready to move or roll or toss a tree down the side or create a river from new rain.

There’s times I’ve seen a mountain in me and times I’ve known that there’s no mountain within at all, just the scree is left or the place where the river washed out a path going down the mountain faster than it came out of the sky.  I don’t know why I don’t just accept these times as easily as I do the others; bow my head and be grateful for being safe and loved. There’s a struggle to feel like a mountain but that is a mythical mountain and not the real ones you see as the land rises toward the sky. Real mountains, no matter how they might be touched and worked by time and hands, have stories of strength; but also stories of enduring, of letting go, of washing out, of being frozen or broken or holy.

Today, feeling a bit afraid, not at all like I’d expect, I realize that there is comfort, if I let it come, in sitting like a mountain. There are no expectations, there is just the fact of it and that is enough for now.

Some of the voices in the song of the earth

Today, we know that major dams, the largest constructions in the world, can cause seismic activity. We’re talking earthquakes. But the earth’s health is not even just about this sort of thing anymore either. It’s about how we’ve become threatened by our own existence. 

     Every day we hear about new extinctions.

     How do you talk about this enormous loss that all of us are facing?  Those that have little ones. Those that like to think about futures.  Like to think about the summer sun or kitchen gardens feeding families in Kenya.  The movement of people and animals. Rhythms.  Maybe the drumming of the caribou influencing our music.  We don’t really know how any of the subtle or even the strong rhythms transform or change the flow of the blood in our veins. What we do know, we know so well that we’re starting not to hear it. We know that mountains in Switzerland have to be covered to protect them from melting.  We know that bugs that have natural enemies are free to destroy because the cold that would suppress them no longer does. 

     We know that our opposable thumb is unopposable. 

     How do you talk about this and relate this to the loss of someone you love without making it seem like you’ve made too much of a leap and that people aren’t important?  When people rank priorities of life, we’re always at the top of the list. Do people have to be the most important? Of course they are to you. Those that love you; those that give you meaning, and gravity and ground. But what about all those other beings and bodies living on this planet that sustain all that you love? What do you know about that?  How close are you to it?  Is your ear to the ground? 

     Enki, in ancient Sumeria, the place that gave us writing, meant wisdom. Enki literally meant your ear to the ground. Can you hear the smooth turns a salmon makes up a winding river?  While in the belly, salmon eggs learn how to follow the river and to mind their way back to the open ocean.

     Every day another extinction.  Aldo Leopold said an intelligent tinkerer saves all the pieces.  We’re losing the pieces.  Rhythms are changing.  Some of the sounds that make up the song are disappearing.  Some of the movement in the river is stopped by dams and diverted waters. We should celebrate our differences. But we have to distinguish between difference and loss.  We know that the Earth has tremendous capabilities of renewal. Some people call wetland habitats the earth’s lungs.  If given a chance wetlands not only transform toxic wastes but thrive again and become open invitations to ducks flying overhead to rest during their migration.  Every being is a significant part of this world. Every living being, every body of water, every parcel of land. How do we learn how to hear what we’ve put into the background?  We need to start listening again.

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