Everything is connected, a carabiner story

Molly is under the blankets. The rain is hitting the roof with that round comforting sound. This is one of those charmed moments when life is as grand as it can be.  Isn’t it amazing that we live in a time when everyone is so aware of all the connections in the world?  I feel my preparation for this paradigm shift in understanding came from the song about the knee bone being connected to the thighbone. I didn’t know about Aldo Leopold at that time and his breaking open awareness about ecosystems. And I didn't know about Rachel Carson and her groundbreaking work about DDT and how it works its way through the chain of life.  Aldo Leopold wrote that you have to save all the pieces, because all the pieces are connected.  

It’s raining and less heady thoughts were prevailing until these thoughts took off without any warning.  The Johnny jump-ups and pansies have been bringing young, playful colors to the ground level and the tree line is popping with early blooms bringing the gentle spring colors to nearly every place you can look. Myself and everyone in these parts have been swimming through a sea of pollen. Graffiti artists are using the pollen to leave their autographs and some birds, unaware of the footprints have also been doing the same.  

We are lucky. Life is calm here and everything peaceful. I thought I’d start the day with a gratitude list. It can give your immune system a boost. Another thing to do to be healthy. The day starts with a to do from the self-generating “to dooz” list.  The thought of it this Sunday was too much to carry apparently and was lost as I remembered that I forgot my friend’s birthday. But as I was writing her I realized my great fortune for the simple pleasures of these past few days and hours. The gratitude list came naturally.  Somewhere amidst the writing and realizing I started a soup, made breakfast, had too many cups of tea and got back under the covers to sip the tea and take the time to write my friend.  

Along comes Molly, finding a circuitous route to the bed via my open nightstand drawer.  As she started to fall between the drawer and the bed she reached out with her paws and hooked her nails into my upper arm.  She fell through the narrow space between the bed and the nightstand. My arm became a carabiner.  Although she still fell, apparently I was useful in helping to ease the fall.  I did not hear a thud. The hole in my arm is another connection to Molly and the hydrogen peroxide. She tumbled down with as much grace as a person going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I still haven’t seen much truth to the business about cat’s landing on their feet. Maybe that takes place on the other side of the world?  All is good and quiet again. My arm stopped bleeding. Molly is back under the covers and I am still grateful for this rainy day.

Golden nuggets - without panning

It wasn't like I grew up in poverty. I didn't. But I did grow up in a home with few sayings and next to no homilies.  There have been times in my life I wish I did have the ready wisdom of a homily.  But the truth is I'd rather not have a bird in my hand. It's enough for me to know they're in the bush.  And this is not some misdirection from me to you. It is true that the bush by the garage has, at any given moment, one to four sparrows it in. I'd rather they stay there.  My cat appreciates it or at least seems to be excited by it when we're out walking together. Walking is really not the word for it, come to think of it.  It is more like stalking. When I'm out stalking with my cat I'm well aware that the bush by the garage is a busy bush and many a time I've been clipped by wings of a sparrow exiting and entering.

I have never liked birds flying about my head.  My cat, usually faster than a thought, even fails to capture these sparrows when it seems they've aimed for her mouth.  Although there's a lot to be said for the nuthatches in the late spring and early summer.  They're a might fast as well and again it seems that the bush is an optimum place for watching them. They don't go into the bush but they seem to fly between the cedars in the front of the house to the oaks behind the garage. The bush is right in front of the garage and right next to where I placed a stack of chairs. I sit high on the stack. You'd think I was a pat of butter.  But I'm just lucky to be there when the birds are.

These are some of the best times and they're free. I know that's a golden nugget too. Some things are true even if they've been around for a while.

Everything is Buddha-full

Everything is Buddha-full in its own way-ay  I can't help but be silly today  Pronouncements are bounding out of my fingertips before I can censor them.  Maybe it's the season. Summer is a release from winter pushed by the green green fuse of spring. Sure, that's a lot like Dylan Thomas.  What is more perfect than "the force that through the green fuse drives"?  Everything is moving through the cycles of the seasons and currents first warm than cold than warm again are touching the beaches with their foamy fingers.

The waves have been incredibly beautiful.  There's this pull back that you feel just before taking off. I heard a man explaining this to his young friend yesterday.  He was teaching her how to catch a wave. The riders were very pretty but  they were large enough that if you took one you'd be at the shallows too soon. It could be dangerous. I stayed out of the wave's tease until there was a small one, they came every now and then, and I felt sure and safe enough to go along with it.  But I had never articulated that before about the pull back. There is a pull back before you go forward. When it pulls you back, he was explaining, that's when you know you have it.  It's like being loaded into the ocean and becoming a part of the wave. It pulls back to get its curl and that motion becomes a sling shot which can carry you to shore.

How you move toward the shore is totally up to you. It’s a rider's choice. You can put your arms straight out ahead of you as if you were going to fly. You can keep your head down with your arms straight out or you can pull your arms back and along your sides and lift your head up. This sort of makes you look like the figurehead on the bow of ship. These days, for some, this could mean there's a thing or two causing drag and slowing you down. But you'll head towards the shore nonetheless. And, if you don't get tumbled you'll have yourself a beautiful ride.

Here's what happens then, and I can tell you this from experience.  You slide, you glide, and you smile and go with the flow. You head towards the shore and there's no such thing as time or chores. It's peace. It's as if there's nothing in your head, never was and that's okay. It brings you out of time and into your element. There's nothing better. Everything is beautiful in its own wave.

Heirloom beings

Someone I really respect once asked me, “Are you a human being or a human doing?” Up until I discovered heirloom beans I had the modern ability to make this question a dilemma despite time, experience and the overall aging process.  These days I feel as though I have found the answer. There’s a lot of great questions out there that arrest you and have you consider your life from a loftier perspective or if that’s too much altitude let’s call it a considering perspective. Questions can shed new light and open up doors and windows that had been shut down for the season. Even so, questions just like other life stiffening agents can box you in if you feel there’s only an either or answer. Most of us in this country are fortunate enough to be swirled with a world of responses to how we’d like our coffee; so why not a multiple choice option for our life defining questions?

Given my love of beans in the last few years, understanding that being and beans are probably closely related; that at some significant juncture in the history of humanity and other biota, the bean and being were probably so close that you could not tell one from the other – I would say that I am a human bean every bit as much as a human being.  I might not have been had it not been for the bean.  There is no sure evidence of what I feel to be intuitively true but isn’t it right enough to feel this truth, to own it and live it?  Today I live in a wonderment of heirloom beans. I feel that I have found my roots. At one point I thought my attachment to my roots because of time and circumstances were shrinking, now I feel as if they are growing and extending beyond anything I could have imagined.

Just a few short weeks ago another bean stole my heart. If you don’t understand how beans can do that than surely you are cold to the fact that beans and the history of beans is probably one of the most profound ways we have of understanding our time on this planet. I would not be surprised if the sirens singing to Odysseus on the rocks (That sounds like a drink doesn’t it? I’ll have an Odysseus on the rocks, please.) were Mediterranean beans moving in time with the tide and inking the waters with their messages of love and allure.

I would not have thought I would be a person to sing an ode to beans. But I am that person now.  I often feel a strong urge to sing the praises of the heirloom beans coming on the market and gripping my attention. Maybe I am descended from those very same beans that sang to the twenty-year traveler.  I only wish that I could speak to you of the depth and breath of beans the world over but this discovery is new for me and I am still swooning in a sea of recognition and renewal.  I have found the beans and the beans have found me. They feel as deeply a part of my heritage as my connection to the sea. But knowledge of my bean relatives is not as comprehensive as I would wish.

Only a few weeks ago the Santa Maria Pinquitos took my breath away. They flourished their hold on my palette and even stunned my partner’s ‘beans again’ chorus with an open chord of ‘that is the most delicious bean I ever had.’  It is unquestionably a case of recognizing the core relationship we shared with this bean – a way back feeling of knowing and meeting again after all these travels and trails.

You see, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you accomplished. Life is more profound than that and the gift of this life is not what we do but how we’ve bean.  I wish everyone could know the outright beauty of some beans. For myself and my home, I no longer need museums or visits to galleries or other forms of communion.  I am not trying to convince anyone to stay away from any art that feeds their soul or brings them solace by spending time with their people.  So many of the people in our world do not often get to see their reflection or their glory in the culture that can dominate our lives. In my own small way, I have found that the beauty of beans has brought me the sense of access that only people going to museums or visiting private collections of art or meeting with their people might feel. I have, if you’ll excuse the outright bragging, appaloosa beans, Anazazi beans, calypso or Orca beans, for instance, right on my kitchen counter. I have Christmas beans and I have butterscotch, cranberry and goat’s eye beans as well. I could go on but I would not want to breed jealousy.

I will never forget how the Anazazi beans were nearly hidden under a produce display in  the supermarket where I found them.  Their beauty and uniqueness were immediately apparent. They were in a turquoise package and sold as an expensive, gourmet bean.  Well, that was certainly true. They were rare, they were expensive and they were something someone recovered from the big agricultural machine to save a big piece of history along with a quiet, beautiful bean.  When I got home I let the music of the beans touching each other pour into my hands and thought of the Anazazi, here so long, gone so quickly, leaving so many questions.  It was an honor to hold their beans and they are so lovely.  I could not bring myself to eat them for years because I did not know if I would ever find them again. 

Ever since finding the Anazazi beans I have been keenly aware that there are few places that carry heirloom beans. But when I find them I remember. Remembering pulls something from you and connects that to a deep belonging. I am sure that the people that have been saving seeds and bringing heirloom foods to us are cultural heroes. I know that the story of beans will continue to blossom and bloom because of them.

Since the Anazazi awakened this love of the bean in me I also learned about less elusive beans that I never gave a thought to before. How many kinds of lentils are there in the world?  Quick cooking and each one unique, I am welcoming lentils into the fold.  Beluga lentils are beautiful and because I know they aren’t so rare, I managed to find out how delicious they are. The little traveling I do, I keep an eye out for food stores, even gourmet shops,  because they have become gateways to the beauty of beans. The first time I found Christmas limas I was in Delaware. Now I hear ‘Delaware’ I think Christmas lima. They used to call my mother Leaping Lena.  I wonder about the jumping beans and if some of that spring was in her leaping. I count myself a human in love with being and beans and know that I am every bit as much being as I am bean. That is my heritage and that is why I am an heirloom being. 

Island refuge

Melville looked for an “insular Tahiti”, a place of calm within that was not only shelter from the storm but your own private shelter, always accessible, always safe.  Many people find this through exercise or meditation, through qigong, or dancing or doing their art.  The island is both a metaphor and a real place because our interior space is both real and can be a destination whenever you want it to be. And you know what, that’s not a bad idea. The notion that you can go with the flow and be in the place that feels right is related to this island within your being, your insular Tahiti. There are so many things that pull on us you’d think we’d come with grommets for the strings. Well, when the storms come, there's shelter within. 

It's too bad that I didn't know about that built-in facility sooner. It would have been a blessing.  Today, in addition to the insular Tahiti I might add swivel caps for the joints so that some grease and go-juice could be added to sore knees until the snake oil kicked in. These notions are even less complex than the idea of painter’s pants I had, personalized for all of our needs, depending upon your sex and life cycle. And of course the electronic accessories of today did spark built-in pockets for cell phones far sooner than anyone ever thought to provide convenient ways to carry feminine hygiene products.

What causes me more wonder than ever are the cormorants on the phone lines. One came in for a landing as I was going over the bridge heading home. There is no fantasy I can ever imagine where I could fly and land on a phone line. Yet the corms do this and than stay there for hours. They aren’t small and weightless like swallows or sparrows. Even morning doves, normally awkward and precarious in flight or when landing, would seem a better candidate for the phone lines. Yet the corms defy imagination and find a home there, just above the small river waters, just above the bridge.  

There is a place within that is an island in the stream of things. Imagine it every bit as small as the phone lines for the corms but your ability to rest there every bit as good as theirs. Balance isn’t required.  Webbed feet might be as well as access to your webbed being and your inner streams. Corms colonize waterways. They aren’t ocean-going birds. The road within might be a river after all. If you find your way there, go with the flow. Remember, you always have this safe place, you always have this shelter and place of refuge and you don't have to wait for storm to go there.