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Today I am the dance of spring.
Plants reach to stroke the notes left by birds.
I am invited by Jane Hirshfield to be porous.
The Supple Deer
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
– Jane Hirshfield
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The reading in Gualala went powerfully well. I see there is a hunger to unite in understanding the power of being fully with each moment, whether one is dealing with illness or wellness. In some ways, it is harder to be present when the energy is there for anger and impatience.
I had the flu this week and was back to lying on the couch content to notice my breath.
I recommend a wonderful book, another great one by Diane Ackerman. It is called One Hundred Names for Love and is about her husband’s stroke. It is a testament to the power of healing. Her husband’s brain scan looks like he would be in a vegetative state, but instead, through work, attention, intention, love, and care, he is able to walk, swim, laugh, joke, and write books.
Yes, there is regret and loss, but there is also a new richness in their lives, and she writes of the importance, as a caregiver, of caring for yourself.
I am in Gualala, at the Breakers Inn, looking out from the Maine Room, watching the waves break. The gulls are ecstatic as am I.
I think of chemotherapy, a poison injected into the vein, so a person may live. I have been given an extension. I soften on the gift, reach out like a caterpillar at the end of a leaf. What now do I taste?
How is the air changed?
I breathe sandwiched, feeling layers of in and out.
I now light a fire, honoring all the elements, earth, air, fire, water, and space, space to pause and consciously notice each breath, each as unique as each wave.
There is a structure on the beach, built of driftwood. Hands carefully took wood found on the beach and created a place to enter, to go inside. Being here, I do the same.
Jane and I are going to be in Gualala this weekend to read at the wonderful book store, The Four Eyed Frog. If you are in the area, drop by the store this Saturday at four. There will be cookies.
To prepare for the reading, I am going back through notes to remind me how I inspired in my journey with breast cancer.
I come across these four quotes:
Pema Chodrun:
It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice. It’s like a cartoon I saw of an astonished-looking man saying, “What was that?” The caption below read, “Bob experiences a moment of well-being.” The ordinariness of our good fortune can make it hard to catch.
Viktor Frankl: What is to give light must endure burning.
William Butler Yeats:
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
Full moon, where will you be going from here? Into a retreat. Why do you take a retreat after fullness? To make myself an empty vessel in order to be filled again.
Earth laughs in flowers.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I read those words and laughter blooms inside, the scent and stirring of being alive.
The rain continues, a steady strumming that matches an inner alertness. I feel like a robin looking for worms.
I open Mirka Knaster’s wonderful book, Living This Life Fully, Stories and Teachings of Munindra.
Munindra wrote that “When mindfulness is there, all the beautiful qualities are nearby.”
He emphasized that whatever we are doing, “everything should be done mindfully, dynamically, with totality, completeness, thoroughness.”
When I was in cancer treatment, It was easy to be mindful; it was necessary. I couldn’t rush around mindlessly. My energy was limited. Each task invited attention. “I am brushing my teeth.” “I am placing a plate on the table. My arm absorbs the weight of the plate as I swirl in movement, aware of inner and outer as one.”
Now, I am “well,” and mindfulness is more challenging. I distract and judge. The voice is back, “I’m not doing enough,” and then, I ask, “What is enough?” and the mind is off and running round and round a track, and yet, today, as I listen to the rain, I come back to myself, and remind myself to do this again and again.
As Charlotte Selver, my teacher of Sensory Awareness said, “People who don’t love the moment are always trying to achieve something, but when one is on the way, every moment is it.”
It is a new year and that means different things to different people. Some, right now, are dealing with pain. I come to these words of Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Go with the pain, let it take you … Open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like a tide, and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then, retreating, leaving you empty and clear …. With a deep breath – it has to be as deep as the pain – one reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain, as though the pain were not yours but your body’s. The spirit lays the body on the altar.
It is the first day of the New Year and the light feels delicate, fragile, as though it needs beckoning.
I feel light also, wash and dress carefully, aware there is something precious about beginning.
The air is dewy here today. Rain comes and goes and I feel lifted like the lotus from the pond, aware the lotus, according to Wikipedia, has the “ability to regulate the temperature of its flowers to within a narrow range just as humans and other warm-blooded animals do”. A flower regulating its temperature? I didn’t know. What else will reveal this year?
It is said that children enter school as question marks and come out as periods. May each of us begin and end this year with curiosity intact as unfolding blooms in an open-petaled probe.
The time between Christmas and New Year’s is, for me, a time between, a time of rest and renewal, of honoring and preparing for the year to come. I notice more deeply the light and the dark, and I sit with a book in my lap and a cat, and I look out and within. I notice what is happening inside; I feel what stirs. What is mine to bring forth?
This is a time to receive, to receive my own needs.
I love this time of year. In the northern hemisphere, these are the shortest days of the year, the longest nights. It is a time to light candles and reflect, a time to feel the intricacies of the night. It is a time to nourish awe.
One cannot help but be in awe when contemplating the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
– Albert Einstein
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