Unchanging

This morning I drank Peet's Coffee, Major Dickason's Blend, described as rich and complex, and yummm! I agree. Since B. prefers a lighter roast, I brewed that one cup just for myself. I sat with treat in hand, settled against cushions in the east-facing window seat, aware of the joy of being.

Instead of facing out, as usual, this morning I faced in. The early play of light and shadow on the interior walls fascinates me, and today I watched them shift minute by minute. That sunrise gift, leaf-shadow pattern-play on the walls, changes so quickly that it's easy to miss if one goes about normal routines. Today I had the luxury to just sit and watch and enjoy.

All this, and running water, too.

Asiatic Dayflowers are blooming; I saw them as I walked home from the top of the hill this morning. I've known the look of them for years, but the name of them will not stay fixed in my memory, so I spent a delightful hour browsing among my friends, the common wildflowers of Maryland.

Fleabane, wild asters (both white and purple) yellow bellwort, sawtooth blackberry, bloodroot, blue-eyed grass, black cohash, Joe-pye weed, chickory, Queen Anne's lace, clover (both red and white), buttercup, black-eyed Susan, common day lily, elderberry, cinnamon fern, tulip poplar blooms, dogwood, all sorts of violets and wood sorrel, and more, and more and more.

Each flaunts its wonderful wildness in its season; each illustrates that which is constant: change. The natural world perfectly illustrates the constancy of change, shows the unchanging truth that everything always changes.

Ordinary Conversations

Part of the small-l-liberal tradition says that for one's life to go well, one must have freedom to live by standards one chooses, standards one believes in.

In the process of respecting one another, of living peaceably together, we need to have ordinary conversations in the public square where we respect each individual's basic right to live by his/her chosen standards. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, says that the trouble is that, partly because of our present way of using communications technology, we tend to have millions of private squares instead of a public square. We must interact with people we disagree with and simultaneously get along with each other.

Where and how do we meet? What shall I do?

I believe I will continue to talk to neighbors and family with whom I know I differ politically. I will have ordinary conversations that sometimes go deep. Have conversations. Hold peace in my own heart and mouth. Know in my gut that just because you are right does not mean I am wrong. And vice versa.

I, for one, notice and converse about the weather and my immediate experience with the natural world. Last night we had warm rain, and this morning the overarching sky is smooth, medium gray; the air is warm and heavy; the light is muted, shadowless.

Do you remember discovering your shadow when you were a small child? Did you run, try to step on your shadow head? Did you laugh when you got tall and twig-thin at dawn or dusk?

I walked down the old lane to the mail box, picked up today's Baltimore Sun, walked along the road in the open, non-wooded world, to our new lane. Horses graze so peacefully in the meadows the neighbors mowed just last week. Did they shelter during the actual rain fall? Perhaps, but they don't always. They seem impervious to the kind of easy rain we got last night, sometimes even seem to enjoy it. I can't say for sure, of course, for I don't know these horses well, we only have the most surface, casual, silent conversations, observing one another. I pay more attention to them than they pay to me.

I can not forget the terrible, brown and dying vegetation I saw on July 24 in western Berks County. I know we are blessed with rain, clouds and shadowless skies, and I am thankful.

Ordinary Joy

One day back in late June while browsing in the cleaning supplies aisle in a local store, I found a pair of gloves made from fuzzy, dust-cloth fabric and bought them. Because of habit and illness, I opened them and first used them just last week: suddenly, an unexpected boon. The experience of cleaning shifted from an effortful, practiced process to an experience of enjoying my ordinary stuff.

Dusting books and miscellaney on the shelves turned to a process of stroking all these collected things that I use and/or consider amusing, charming, or beautiful. It was easier to reach out and run a finger or full hand over window shelves and baseboards, lamp shades and tables, when no attention was diverted from the item being touched, no attention was given to the process of simultaneously holding dust cloth and also holding the item being cleaned. Ah, the dirt I collected. And it was so simple.

My belly tickled with glee as I noticed that I was having fun handling, touching, my collected household stuff. The stuff that routinely supports my life; the stuff that, therefore, demands its reciprocal support in the guise of maintenance.

I was pleased, felt blessed, so happy to find myself experiencing the joy of being through the process of using my new dusting gloves. I laugh aloud with the odd, silly, ordinary pleasure of it.

My friend who intentionally and deeply notices the world writes of her work-a-day life as it exists within her total life, work hours too often filled with "created drama and false urgency; the mystical and absurd, galloping apace side by side."

There's nothing wrong with our games and movies and news media, our surface-thought Twitter and Facebook and text messages. Unless they become our primary focus?

Is it possible that our personal desires for the excitement, the quick fix technology offers, has led us to a political "created drama and false urgency" that overwhelms ordinary good sense? Perhaps by seeking out drama and urgency, holding it high and giving it full attention, we have the politics that we as a society have asked for? Right, left, middle, we all seek drama?

What can I do? I voted; another candidate won the congressional seat that also represents me; I write to my congressman but he plays to and votes for his dramatically extreme base (though the election was very close). I am no wealthy donor. I have lost my power in the national public arena.

What can I do? I believe I will practice Lao-Tzu's "peace in the heart." I will continue to return to my quiet place, to recognize the ordinary joy and pleasure of using my dusting gloves.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” writes Leonard Cohen in the chorus of his song, “Anthem.” I love that notion.

"The good news is things change.... The bad news is things change. Can you? How quickly can you accept change? How gracefully, how even-temperedly can you pivot and twirl, move forward and step backward? Or are you paralyzed by obstinacy? (Karen Maezin Miller, Momma Zen, Trumpeter, Boston, 2007. 48.)

"Exhaustion is not a strategic spot from which to defend your turf. It's not the best place to start drawing lines and setting limits. It's not the prime state of mind for calculations of any sort. It's not a power position. And therein lies the extreme benevolence of it. Be tired. Be so tired you will let the troubles and turmoil wash over you. Be so tired that you stop measuring the length of your hardship and stop looking for an end. Let the encroachments advance. Lose ground.... (G)ive way." (ibid. 53-54)

So it is my present challenge to regain balance and regain balance and again and again and again. When we experience normal health, we make the subtle changes to retain our physical balance when we're vertical without a conscious need to pay attention. And physical balance is only the beginning. Everything requires balance. Everything.

Our breath, also, usually flows, ever changing, without our conscious need to pay attention. Meditation time creates an intentional space from which to pay attention to what is usually ordinary and under the conscious threshold. Meditation creates a new awareness, creates a new brain-wave pattern, according to researchers who have studied the question.

A simple, daily time of quiet to observe the changing flow of breath will change one's view of the world.

The cracks in my way of being, showing in the guise of illness and aging, allow my life to flood with the light of being. Just being, and through the cracks, ever changing light comes in. Too exhausted to resist change, I let encroachments advance, I lose ground, I give way. Drama quickly overwhelms me, does not entice me. Let my peaceful soul shine from this, my place; let peace radiate into the world around me.

Will such a simple, do-little-and-give-way stance keep me out of trouble?

Bugs, Blessings and Joy

This morning I walked again, the mile and a half from the top of the hill. I was just between the last two houses before the big down-hill when a bug slammed into my head so fast and hard it actually entered my right ear. Oh, oh, oh! An accident for us both.

Its high-pitched buzz resonated in my skull. Its legs-- or feelers or something-- moved around inside my ear canal. I noticed little else.

I kept walking, noticing that bug, and imagining what next. Oh my vivid, silly, terrible imagination! Deaf, I could go deaf in one ear. This bug might chew and crawl right through the ear drum right to the sphenoid sinus. Could that happen? Could have a living bug crawl into my brain? Doctor, doctor, help me soonest, there's a bug in my ear! Then a smile and a modest, real hope for natural resolution began to bubble in me. And indeed, after perhaps a third of a mile, having explored, it felt to me, as far in as it could get, the bug backed its way out again.

An ear without a bug wiggling and buzzing in it. One does not appreciate some blessings until they suddenly disappear. The blessing restored, today, I am so thankful for no bug in my ear.

There was a breeze as I walked today, absent yesterday. In summer heat, a breeze is better. I can no longer take much heat. Does that mean I get to stay out of the kitchen? No, I think it means I get to create delicious food that asks for microwave cooking or no cooking. Delicious summer food.

My friend sent me this, affirming for me that I already experience the joy of being: the intricacy, the persistence, the brazen invasion of joy as it blooms.

(Untitled)

A blessing from my friend Dana Knighten

These few words
cast upon the wind
like leaves drifting down upon you
or petals
falling soft on bare skin

like morning sun
like the light of a predawn moon

like the hands of one
who wants
to bring you peace.

And so I wish you flowers,
field upon field of wildflowers,

to bring reminders
of intricacy
and persistence
and the brazen invasion of blooming.

Outdoors, walking

Today, for the first time in two full weeks, I walked outdoors for a significant time, about a mile and a half from the top of the hill down Gibson to Hoopes and home, about forty-five minutes. Slow, and yet, ah! the marvel.

I looked and looked at all the colors of green and sky blue, and the rainbow of flowers, their tints, shades, textures. I breathed deeply the smell of growing, green, woodland things, the scents so intense I could taste them. Sensations flowed across my skin: a breeze here, sun heat there, cool, moist air by little creek rushing and splashing over rocks. Cicadias vibrated their particular, rhythmic, bone-penetrating hum, and here and there a bird still sang. A gold finch flew across the meadow like a sunstreak through shade. My steps dragged and my body trembled by the time I reached home, but joy filled my being. I felt so successful.

"If I'm stuck in a wheelchair, at least park me in the sunshine," I've said in the past. Better is to park me in the outdoors. Best is to not need a wheelchair, to move myself freely, to enjoy my embodied self, walking, part of the natural world.

Here in the country we can see stars, too, and many times I step outdoors in the dark just to gaze a little while, to breathe in the visible universe.

Here follows a writing I love that I very liberally transcribed from ideas in Anne McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey's book Dragon's Time, Ballentine Books, NY, 2011, page 48:

The stars are beautiful tonight.
Even in darkness shines this light.

We are stars in the darkness.
We burn bright, beacons for others.
We cannot see our own lights,
We can only see the light of others.

We are reflective.
Our light lights others
As their light lights us.

While there are stars, there can never be darkness;
in the darkness, there is always light.

Let Us Be Glad

The first acorns from our black oak tree lie on our deck. One year I measured a 23" leaf from that tree. Some leaves cling to the branches long into the cold time, and the fallen ones feel tough, leathery in the hand. In this summer heat, the living, breathing tree arches over our roof, shades our tall, vulnerable windows, shares its way of being with us. The tree simply exists in parallel with us in space where we also exist.

False sentimentality might claim the tree as friend, as one which loves us. In fact, that tree with its three large stems simply follows its life directive to survive. In fact, the tree branch that reaches farther over the roof every year will either be trimmed or fall on us one day.

"There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. So I commend the enjoyment of life, because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 8:14-15, New International Version. Sentence accent added.)

Change and change and change, and in the midst, in this marvelous moment, as the oak shades us from heat and acorns begin to fall, let us be glad. Moment by moment, let us be glad.