All is good

Imagine taking a few minutes each day to contemplate your wildest dreams for yourself and the world – and to make this a part of your life. What if everyone were to make this a daily ritual?  Some of my recent wildest dreams were: universal respect for all traditions and cultures; boundaries honored; time and mental peace for pleasure; quiet where you want it and music where you want it in your life too.  More items on my list included babies and children at work places so that their specialness and frailties will always be a part of the work we create and the systems we design. The same for elders and anyone else that needs special care and attention – the same for all of us.

Realms of being and thought often have what feels like stages or hierarchies of being. Spiritual, mental, emotional, physical. Eventually, many things come down to the physical realm. But how it comes down and how we shape the thought or energy or whatever it is in the spiritual realm through the mental chute, through the emotional seas and rivers and streams through to the physical shores where it is incorporated into our lives – that’s the journey.

For however we have lost people we love; or homes and communities we all become aware of and feel as if a hole is in our lives.  When something is missing from our daily lives, it could be a visual cue like a tree lost in the storm; or the kingfisher gone from the lines over the small bridge on the way to work – whatever is missing is felt deeply and takes an effort to move past into the new rhythms of your days.

Even a change in seasons can bring about a profound sense of loss and sadness. It’s really not all the wild to dream of peace. The sense of calm and wholeness, of all being as it should, that is peace. Those people or places or animals or landscapes missing from our dreams cannot be replaced. But they are also not lost. The same ideas that guide a healthy ecosystem guide an entire culture. Bring all the elements together and we might be guided by a greater sense of wholeness. Bring the babies to work along with your parents and grandparents. Bring the stories of the late summer and early fall Carolina wrens housing in the bush next to the garage along to work with you in the morning. Last weekend the kingfisher was flitting about with another and that’s the first time around these parts that dance has been seen.  It’s a great morning. Early fall sunlight has created lighter shadows around the thinning plants. The cricket’s tin music is a constant pulse outside my office window. There’s a plane droning in the background. Some bees are working the flowers on the coleus plants. Right now, right here, it feels like everyone is here. All is good. 

Cheddar and apples

Why are Stayman Winesaps all around in the markets at this time of year?  Are they now shipping apples from Chile as well?  If they are, at least a well known New York apple from another country still goes well with cheddar cheese. If you can’t tell, I’m completely avoiding the concern over the Gulf.  But I will slip in this brief note.

My good thoughts and well wishes go out to the fish and wildlife living in the region.  Same to all the people involved in trying to do hands on help for the animals, waterways and well, everyone and everything in the Gulf area. Also, a deep bow to the dolphins that live in those waters. The turtles and whales that live and visit there too.  Imagine swimming through your world. Diving through the warm and cool currents. Riding the waves behind boats.  Looking at the sky from underneath the water.  No taxes, no retirement plans to worry about.  Just how you might play with the beams of light coming through the water or how you might jump out of your home and splash back in.  Dolphins represent what we think of as joy about as good as any living thing on this planet.  Far from that troubled area, because I can’t reach in and give a hand, I’d like to try to send a message of caring and concern.

I can’t remember if it was last year or the summer before that we saw a pod of dolphins swimming and jumping and churning the water right in front of us.  The water glistened on their bodies.  Then all of sudden we noticed that there were fish jumping straight out of the water too.  When we understood what was going on it just about was ending.  But clearly the dolphins were heading out to NYC for the day; decided to stop and gather a meal, and then continue on their j0urney. We saw them head back south later in the day.  But they just headed straight home.  Just about took the same exact route and distance from the beach as the last time.  Maybe they caught a good current. You have to wonder if their time back was an hour shorter than their time out to the city like the Vegas trip.  Ater a full day they just cruised along, easily slipping through the water going and coming back.  I wish my day’s energy were as even from stem to stern as theirs.  I just can’t get myself to eat fish.  That’s probably the answer but I can’t do it. 

I can manage some extra sharp cheddar with a really good apple though.  What a beautiful combination. You have to wonder who first discovered these great synergistic foods. Lettuce and tomato on toast with mayo. Was it the early Deliman?  Barely mentioned by anthropologists; hardly known through the fossil record. I mean, how well do you think toast lasts through the millenia anyway?  But Deliman certainly discovered the egg cream after a long day of making Woolly Mammouth Reubens for the whole tribe.  Apples and cheddar are a more modern invention. Lighter, less tools, no need for swirling deli counter chairs.  Portable and satisfying, the cheddar apple combination no doubt a product of a nomadic civilization.   Here’s hoping everyone’s journey, including the bay dolphins, be smooth and healthy.

Counting glories

There's been times I have been in love with spring and fall.  Those were surprising days considering summer is really it for me. It has been it for my whole family as well.  Until recently I never thought of families being identified with one season over another.  To be honest I never thought of my birthday as being in summer until this very minute. I was a September baby and once I grew up September seemed like the end of everything I wanted because it was the beginning of school.

Now that I mention the phrase "to be honest" I have to tell you that this one has always made me wonder how it came about.  Are there times when people are talking where it's the custom to spout lie after lie?  And then when you're ready to say something true you go "to be honest." It could act as a verbal signal to pay attention. When you're just shooting the breeze, not really saying anything true blue, well, the other person doesn't have to listen.  To have someone really listen to you is golden and why would they want to waste their riches of consciousness on you if you're just yakking.  Yackative people are good company but you know, silence is golden and if you're giving up some of your gold to listen to yakkers you might want to measure how much you want to give up. Therefore, you listen in and out. This allows your consciousness to get a rest. You don't spend yourself so much on yak yak yak and when the person that's yakking really wants you to pay attention they signal you. "To be honest."

I wasn't honest about the counting of the morning glories to my friend that has flower envy.  I told her I had ten and I did. But seven were on the backyard trellis and three on the structure. She's been so taken with these flowers that she started a contest and would give me the counts now and then. I'm the one that gave her the small plant to begin with. Her one orphan plant produced far more blooms than mine. But combined my plants are finally pulling ahead of hers.

If you look into a morning glory you can understand why a bee would walk all the way down that blue highway to get to the center of the flower. To be honest I'd like to go in there as well. It would be like playing fort within a flower. Just wait. Just wait and see if your cat or your brother or sister can find you down there under that blue blanket. Just wait. It will be summer again. This time I'm starting morning glories from seeds and I already told my competitor that I would share the seedlings with her. But she's not allowed in my fort.

Compassion with ya

I would like to be tethered by the idea that you travel together in groups or communities like a field of flowers blossoming together in the spring.  People so often feel alone and feel the pain of this aloneness because being solitary and being human seems to be incompatible estates.  Our friends and family, if we have any of each, would feel different without our presence.  Without you, all is different.  This idea is also a feeling that holidays and other notable days, both public and private, bring home in a swift and relevant way, often when we are not looking for it.

If you are taken by surprise by feelings of isolation and aloneness, you are being kidnapped and should report it to any person you are close to or feel close to. Short of that, remember that compassion toward yourself is an understanding that you are also accepting yourself as part of the human family and not isolating your particular instance of humanity from the rest of the folks that populate your world. You probably have to be reminded of that because it seems that people growing up in this culture, and growing at various rates and in different time zones means that you are at various life stages at various times with many instances of overlap and re-occurring growing. This means that you are young and old and in your teenager phase at the most inopportune times or these stages are cohabiting with your infant and mature stages while you think you're just riding along on the linear clock that is your life Monday through Friday. We all know that much as we like to believe we're in the flow, we are segmented creatures of time and cannot help but distinguish who we are on the weekends from our Monday through Friday selves. If you can, count yourself a rare bird.

For the rest of us that are humans and not rare birds - it is compassion for others, that ability to suffer along with someone, to be in their difficulty and their pain with them, in your heart, in your imagination, in your real and virtual body and mind, that is the soul of compassion.  What lies at the root of compassion is the notion that you can also suffer along with yourself, you can lift the burden of your pain by being kind to your self. Compassion, to suffer with, is a way toward easing the shoulds and should nots that crowd your head and leave so little room for joy and focus.  Your compassion toward others, your ability to see another's pain and be there with them in some way that tries to lift their pain, to ease their burden and let them know that they are not so alone, is a kindness that we rarely afford ourselves.  Why we have to be reminded to be good to ourselves?  The myriad ways our inner negatives supplant our natural joys.  But once you identify the beasts of your inner burdens you can share the wealth of heart and soul you have with yourself. Nobody can see that you're doing this. It's totally discreet, inside, protected and safe.  Melville referred to an "insular Tahiti", a place in the mind that was secluded but also healing and free from the messed up miseries that you or the world might want to pile on your head.

If you're an inland person and not on an island or near a body of water or the shore than an "insular Tahiti" might be the perfect solution to your need for renewal and contact with that part of yourself that is easy on your soul and a Bodhisattva of kindness.  Compassion isn't just something you leave to others or give away. You can hold yourself within the embrace of compassion and if need be thank another for the peace you deserve.

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.