You are a cell in my body

 

Together

I’ve been thinking this weekend how every person we meet has the potential to change us, to widen our world, to prompt us to let go what no longer serves.

How each friendly or shining spirit can lift us up when we’re faltering, when we’re unsure.  How we can energetically add support to each other by our simple presence, our loving words, our sunny hello, our humble offerings.

How even each frowning or ignoring face has the possibility of either hurting our tender hearts more deeply–or perhaps redirecting our attention to our own inner light.  We are sometimes bruised by what we perceive to be rejection, or perhaps we’re called to ponder what might be causing them pain, what causes them to shut down their own tender hearts.  I’m sure we’ve all traveled both paths.  The path of closing our inner doors in the face of travail, or the path of opening even though it hurts.

Horizon Envy (once again)

Long shadows at sunset

Dear readers,  I am having a wee bit of a challenged week both physically and mentally, and keep surfing the Big Wide Internet searching for distractions to soothe my spirit.

Some of you long-time readers & friends may remember this post.  It’s the third time I’ve published it.  Because, oh just because, it seems to express something important about horizons and lack of horizons.  Larger views and smaller views.  How we can change our perspectives to recognize the gold that shines in things we don’t particularly like.

The first time I published this was in 2009.  The second time in 2011.  I am guessing probably some of you haven’t considered your horizons recently.

I am reconsidering mine as we speak.

Love, Kathy in 2018

Here is the formerly published post:

 

Magnificence of sunset clouds

Breathing with trees

Yesterday I sat with my back against an ash tree.  Its top branches waved in the wind about 85 feet above my head.  Barry had pointed out the ash earlier as we peered at it from the kitchen window.

“Look at the ash this year, Kathy,” he said.  Its crown holds feathery-looking seed pods.  Most of the leaves have fallen unto the earth, but the seeds linger on.  Wikipedia says they’re samara seeds whose shape enables the wind to carry the seed farther away than regular seeds from the parent tree.

Call the seeds wingnuts, or helicopters, or whirlibirds or whirligigs.  There they fruit on top of an 85 foot ash, pregnant with baby trees.

Longing

Autumn leaf underwater

Do you ever wake up on a Tuesday morning with an undefinable longing?  It palpitates near the heart, perhaps, beating its insistence with a red drumbeat whispering, “Please, please, please.”

Of course a mere human can’t figure out what longing wants, can she?  We can only feel the red threads of fire, the way they rise and fall like matches sparking logs into conflagrations of rising flame.

Longing–and her twin, restlessness–have been my companions these many years.  Do they visit you in your little house in the woods or city or suburb or small town?  Do they come in unexpectedly and wipe all your pretty organized well-behaved china teacups from your cupboard? Do they smash into your perhaps contented moment and demand attention like a petulant two year old?

I have been eaten by caterpillars & other early September stories

 

This morning a leaf beckoned me to open the deck door and walk outside.  Come, come, it whispered.  I am covered with dew.  I am a harbinger of autumn, even though most of your leaves still sing in green.  I have been eaten by caterpillars.  Perhaps even the caterpillar that fell on your hand that fateful night last week, Kathy.

It’s a caterpillar versus leaf world out there.  More accurately, it’s an interdependent ecosystem out there with each precious organism depending on another for its very lifeblood.

Rant from the “seat of my pants”

It may come to this. Ha ha! (Nothing to wear, that is…)

Spoiler alert:  This is not a rant about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket.  It’s not a rant about how we sleep at night with starving children in Sudan.  It’s not a rant about Trump or politics or congress folk or the environmental value of wind turbines.

This is what has annoyed the heck out of me this week.  (Well, to be perfectly honest, it’s a multi-year feud.)  And it’s utterly trivial–and utterly important in its own trivial way.

Are you ready?  Jeans.  Jeans have caused me no end of grief recently.  Do you remember the days when you traipsed into your favorite JC Penney’s or Yonker’s or Kohl’s and grabbed your Levis or Lees or Riders and delightedly hurried up to the cashier to purchase?

It’s life and death for them today

Carrots

Fingers in brown sandy soil thinning crowded avenues of carrots.  I used to despair thinning these deep tap roots stretching down past undulating worms.  How could one decide carrot life or death?  How could one presume to kill this one or that one?

**The murderer poised her fingers between seedlings, yet another Hitler.**

These days it’s different.  The fingers simply pluck, pull, tug, weed, dance between the overcrowded green carrot fronds.  Something more is glimpsed than the random death march.  You can feel the life march, as well, the relieved sigh when dirt-space reveals itself.  Ahhh!  The remaining tiny carrots snuggle in the expanded space, desiring to puff outward, to grow fat, to marry dirt, to orange up in underground caverns now dredged in breathing room.

I notice how the Universe is always culling, as well as spinning new fronds.  How creating and disappearing always make room for each other.  How death courts life and how life dissolves in it.  How a field of infinite connected energy exists, but how it must continually open its palm and let go, and then continually create something new.

Out to the garden I go, when these typing words cease, in torn shorts and baggy orange “Isle Royale” t-shirt.  Will snuggle in on a faded purple high school football cushion, knees and calves grubby in dirt, fingers moving relentlessly in the carrot kingdom whispering, “It’s all love, it’s all love, it’s all love.”  Or maybe I won’t whisper at all.  The overhead buzz of red-flashing frantic hummingbirds, the drone of cicadias, the sensuous tease of basil, the bulbuous tomatoes heavy of vine, the dancing pattern of sunlight on oak leaves–these reveal the love without words.  I’ll simply bow my head and watch the fingers choose which carrot uproots and which stretches a little more languidly toward sky and earth in this deep August morning.

And into the furnace of the belly will simmer the tiny carrot thinnings tonight, and new life shall be nurtured from death, won’t it?