Month: August 2012

Community, Daily Round, Nature, Noticing, Photography, Slow Life

Stillness at the Center: The Rhythm of Wild Things

by Kitty12 Comments on Stillness at the Center: The Rhythm of Wild Things

I’ll soon be closing The Daily Round’s first journey around the year’s circle. The thing about closing a circle is that you arrive at the place you began, and though life seems more a spiraling helix than a circle, there are the rhythms of the wild things, my signposts and psalms calling me to stillness and reflection as I spin once again around the sun and notice the angles of light that tell me autumn is nearing.

Last October, I wrote about my friend, Jane, the writing spider. I’ve been keeping my eyes open for her progeny as I wander through the gardens that are nearest the place I set her egg sac to rest last year. We were surprised to find one of her daughters had chosen an exterior window of Phillip’s workshop for her home. She graciously allowed me to photograph her, and the elegantly inscribed web she’d woven.

In return, I shared stories about her mother and our friendship, which seemed to create a bond between us. Last evening, she was gone, but her own  extravagantly secured egg sac remains as a sign that another cycle is beginning.

Sometimes it seems ironic to seek stillness on a planet spinning about its axis while orbiting a whirling star in a pin-wheeling galaxy, but I seek it nonetheless, and am still learning how to better meet its geography at my center, whether I’m wheeling through local space on my bicycle, walking the trail, or taking the morning’s turn through the gardens. Ancora imparo, wrote Michelangelo in the margins of a late-life sketch: “I am still learning.”

I am learning stillness. I am still.

The Canada geese, blue and green herons and sandhill cranes, faithful signposts, have been teaching me about stillness in the circle journey, as they stand serene, gently planted in flowing rivers and tall grass. Soon they’ll be joining thousands of their species in staging areas located in our marshes and wetlands, before flying south for the winter.

The hickory nuts have matured and fallen, and the squirrels are storing them in my gardens and pausing, it seems, to make merry while the sun shines.

The insects are mating, planting new life on leaves and sticks, under logs and grasses, so that revolutions of metamorphosis will enable their emergence as adults in the next circle’s turn. Last weekend, the soldier beetles and common grass yellow butterflies were mating, while the diligent bumblebee and skipper went about their feeding undisturbed, drinking nectar and distributing the pollen that ensures another circle for the gardens as well.

My camera often seems to be the eye and my walks the anchor of my stillness, in every season. They allow me to focus on one thing at a time and decelerate my energy to the calming waves of “now” and “just this.” Solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking; although, in this lovely circling labyrinth we call life, I don’t know that solving questions is nearly as important as asking them and living within their possibilities, turning them through the year, and noticing where they lead.

This morning I discovered a second daughter of Jane’s, in medias res, resting at her story’s center, or beginning its telling there, in stillness. I thanked her for her presence and grace, and shared again that I knew her mother…

Our lives revolve, connect and circle round, but spiral outward as well, through the relationships we form and the stories they create. The rhythm of wild things sings the truth of this, round and round.

Hush. Be still. The signposts are everywhere.

Notice.

 

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.

Balance, Creativity, Daily Round, Droughts and Floods, Gratitude, Love, Music, Nature, Photography, Transformation, Web of Creation

Music and the Food of Life

by Kitty12 Comments on Music and the Food of Life

Life at Full Moon seems to be recovering well following our long weeks of drought. We mourn our losses, but tend the living, grateful for the blooms and vegetables that survived. For now.

I was weeding in the garden yesterday and enjoyed the thrumming hum a variety of bees made as they buzzed from plant to plant. A bumblebee climbed a licorice spire of hyssop with concentrated intensity.

Butterflies fluttered through, barely lighting on blossoms before sailing off; the birds seemed to be having choral practice at the feeder and consuming sunflower seeds in spectacular quantities.

It seems the music of life becomes more intense as we edge nearer to autumn’s first frost, and the Great Silence of winter hushes all for a time. (I’ve often wondered, though, if snowflakes fall to a music that flows in wavelengths beyond our auditory capacity.)

The evening symphony of crickets, cicadas, and katydids has pulsed throughout the night this week, like Poe’s tintinnabulation of bells. I love their silvery percussive music and am grateful our cooler weather allows windows to be open.

This morning I went out to water plants on the deck and discovered the milky latex from the rubber tree’s stem dripping onto some leaves below the point of injury. Looking more closely, I discovered a female katydid nestled in a leaf’s crevice, and suspected katydid it. 

I later learned there are more than 100 varieties of katydids in our country and over 4,000 throughout the world. My visitor was of the genus and species Scudderia furcata: a Fork-tailed Bush katydid, and a cousin to crickets. She’d likely deposited eggs in a stem or leaf of the rubber plant, slitting it with her ovipositor and thus releasing the latex.

If so, nymphs will emerge next spring and, after successive molts, mate and deposit their own eggs a year from now.

All of life in a year.

My katydid isn’t a musician. In her species, only the male sings by rubbing a scraper on one forewing against a toothed edge on the other (stridulation). She heard her mate’s call through tympana, hearing organs located on her forelegs. It gave me pause to imagine our world if humans spoke and heard like katydids! But maybe we’re not all that different; after all, Phillip’s music and voice served as quite an attractant when I first heard him sing.

I missed the music of the birds and insects during the drought. It seemed to wither and withdraw. Its absence didn’t offer the peaceful, centered silence of meditation; it was more like a vacuum existed where once there had been sound, an element of life that connected us and made our spirits whole had abandoned us. If there were calls and songs, they sounded brittle, thirsty and desperate.

But the great music of life that calls us to merge, to love, to eat, drink, and make merry has returned and I’m almost as thankful for this as I am for the restorative rains.

I like the music for its honesty and lack of false sentiment: it says, “Come to me and we’ll marry our energy to create more life together.” It acknowledges that sometimes this is done though mating and at other times through surrender.

Katydids prey upon plants and slower-moving insects like aphids. They have an extra pair of miniature legs dangling from their chins, like built-in silverware, to help them efficiently consume their energy, in whatever form it takes. Birds, bats, small mammals and, in some cultures, people, eat the katydid.

The clematis died in the drought and has been feeding microbes for weeks. The vegetables that didn’t die will soon be on our table and in the freezer.

All this beauty, all this lovely music, all these relationships…all seeking to mate and create, to eat, or to accept capture and so transform one’s energy into others’ food, an ending none of us escapes.

Sweet, devouring life: all of us fed and feeding. Death just means someone or something’s been granted a feast. Nature imposes her balanced justice: in the end, we all become another’s banquet.

But first, we make and merge the music of our lives, which is to say the music of loving our way through droughts and into seasons of peace and joy. Once more round the circle. All the music of creation is perhaps a way of saying, “Thank you” to Love, just for the chance to sing and hear the songs of our spinning planet.

One day something will sing for its supper and it will be me. (“I” would be the correct grammar; I don’t think that will matter then.) May they be as grateful for the meager meal I offer as I have been for the bounty offered to me. And may what remains of my energy offer sustenance in love…

If music be the food of Love, play on.

 

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.

Authenticity, Becoming, Blessing, Community, Listening, Noticing, Photography, Transformation

The Human Carnival: Shining Like the Sun

by Kitty6 Comments on The Human Carnival: Shining Like the Sun

When the weather seers predicted a weekend of the glorious summer days we’ve lacked since May, we cast about for adventures that would take us outdoors.

Phillip has a friend who restored an old car and enters it in auto shows, where cars are grouped by their “class,” and receive awards according to these and other categories, including the coveted “Best in Show” award.

I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy a car show; I’d be happy in a world where transportation was limited to walking, bicycling, and mass transit. But I own a car and drive it when I want or need to go somewhere further than I can realistically walk or bike in a given time frame. And people have different interests and assign value to their collections for a multitude of reasons. Maybe I’d learn more about car collectors by attending with an open mind and listening for the stories behind the choices.

I learned, like those of us who value antique furniture, there is a nostalgic aspect to collecting and restoring old automobiles; they remind us of our childhoods, an idealized past, or are historically significant. And an old car can symbolize someone’s youth, his time of individuation and the endless dreams about the life he imagined for himself as an adolescent. Here is the very vehicle that took him beyond parental authority and into his own…

And then there’s the puzzle-solving aspect of restoring old machines: the location of parts and endless tinkering, perhaps not unlike my endless hours in my gardens. It seemed to be the kind of activity, like any passion, that takes one deep within and mends the spirit while engaging the mind.

So we went to a car show this weekend, and the next day attended an even larger event that featured autos, crafts, music, and carnival rides as well. I listened to stories and learned a bit about old cars and met the people who love them.

I observed other human animals and relaxed in the midst of those others who, like me, are constantly sifting through choices, assigning value and judgment, succeeding and failing, earning awards, connecting, withdrawing, winning and losing.

All these limits and labels we place on ourselves and others—they vanished as I sat and breathed and merged with the human energy around me. There can be a great letting go, in the unlikeliest of places, that comes with a blessed grace washing over the spirit.

I recalled Thomas Merton’s moment of enlightenment, his epiphany on the corner of Louisville’s Fourth and Walnut:

…in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.  It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race … there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.  If only they could all see themselves as they really are.  If only we could see each other that way all of the time.  There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed… (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, New York: Doubleday, 1996)

Those who forecast the two days of pleasant weather were right: It was a lovely weekend, both sunny and enlightening. I could use a few more of these…maybe I’ll start a collection.

 

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.

Spirit Level

Powering Down in Nature

by Kitty14 Comments on Powering Down in Nature

On Thursdays, the daily round brings “fresh bed day” for the Full Moon Cottage 2-leggeds. (4-leggeds’ beds are cleaned on Fridays. I’m not sure they appreciate this, but my allergies do.)

This morning, I caught myself folding sheets and pillowcases as an Olympic contender, going for the gold, timing myself and offering color commentary regarding the elegance, choreography and precision of the folds. It amused me, but also told me it was time to turn off the Olympics and go for my walk.

A few nights ago we watched the movie Greenfingers, a wonderful testament to the ways gardening can be transformative and healing. The story is based on the true experiences of prisoners in HMP (Her Majesty’s Prison) Leyhill, a minimum-security prison in the Cotswold’s, England. At first indifferent to the suggestion they participate in gardening, a group of prisoners eventually creates a garden, and then competes in a prestigious garden design competition.

As their connection with the earth evolves, each man gains a wider view regarding his gifts and opportunities for naming his presence in the world. They learn that they can choose new ways to show up for their lives. Capacities for surprise, for delight, for love and relationship have been nurtured by engagement with the earth.

Earlier in the week, we’d watched part of Ken Burns’ excellent program for PBS, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The title is taken from a quote by Wallace Stegner, and the program reinforces the wisdom of those who fought long and hard to establish the national park system, arguing for the deep healing that gently entering and embracing wilderness offers humanity. Not unexpectedly, lobbyists, corporate interests, and politicians wanted to commercialize, mine, and deforest every square inch of the acreage that became our national parks, and it often seemed they would. Thankfully, in the end, the National Parks were established, but the threats from those who would exploit them continue to merit vigilance.

These programs reinforced something I’ve always known, and I expect it’s true for most people: solitude in natural settings is deeply healing and over time, transformative. Our own wild hearts find solace in the garden, the forest, along the seashore, and river. A few hours spent tending plants and weeding a garden can offer deep peace to the spirit. We reconnect with those dreams and truths we bury so quickly when faced with the outer entanglements and accelerated speed of life; in nature, we slow down enough to finally hear our song and bring it back into tune.

I don’t “power walk.” I stroll with my camera, treating the walk as a long, silent meditation. I stop at trail benches to sit and breathe in the smells and sounds. While I believe physical exertion and aerobic exercise are rewarding and certainly contribute to my health, I don’t think every activity that invites my physical engagement has to be dominated by an aggressive need to exaggerate effort, compete, speed, and hurl myself through the experience. In fact, I suspect the need to “power-up” is sometimes related to an inability to slow down, to be still, to breathe mindfully and to listen deeply. And our old friend, fear, can sabotage our need to be still: What if we don’t like what we, finally, hear? What if, when we arrive at our center, there’s no there there? Or even more disturbing, what if the voice at our center tells us we must change to save our life and fulfill its purpose?

Of course, when we let go and journey to the center, the likely result is the gift of gentle messages from Love, but we may certainly encounter truths along the way that are painful.  I’ve found that “staying with” the journey transmutes the pain. Exposing it to the light and restorative power of nature dissolves the accrual of spiritual disturbance that builds up between walks. The more personal power I surrender, the more deeply nature’s power washes my spirit clean.

Today, I let go of all those ever-present inner voices and listened to the songs of the wind, rain, trees, birds, and turtles, and my own song and energy were guided back into clarity. I doubt gardening or walking into the woods and meeting stillness, silence, and listening will ever be Olympic events, but in the end, they offer the spirit treasures more precious than gold.

 

 

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.

4-legged companions, Becoming, Daily Round, Nature, Photography, Slow Life, Transformation

Dog Days

by Kitty19 Comments on Dog Days

On our morning walks, Clancy, Riley, and I have smelled a change in the air over the past week. The angle of light has shifted, falling lower across the trail. Mornings are bathed in a honeyed-glow and the geese are flocking up along the river. 

The dog days of summer have arrived.

Along the trail we travel every day, the spring’s trilliums, wild geraniums, and columbines have long faded, the wild rose petals have fallen and the rose hips are shrinking from the heat. Bellflowers, thistle, Queen Anne’s Lace, goldenrod and yellow coneflowers now decorate the edges of the path.

In the constellation Canis Major (which means Big Dog, as it represents the larger hunting dog of Orion), Sirius (“scorching”) is the brightest star, so the ancient Romans called it the Dog Star. In their day, Sirius rose and set with the sun at this time of year, and they believed its fierce light added to the season’s heat, and that the dog days brought lethargy and disease to man and madness to dogs.

But the East Indians had another “dog story” related to Sirius, which is also known in India as Svana, the dog of Prince Yudhistira. The young prince, his brothers and dog set off in search of heaven’s gates. The brothers complained, resisted, and gradually abandoned the journey, but the dog, Svana, faithfully traveled through adventures and perils with his companion, all the way to the gates of heaven. The gatekeeper said the prince could enter, but not Svana, to which the prince replied there could be no heaven for him without his dog. This pleased Lord Indra, who then welcomed them both within.

Clancy and Riley like this story very much.

One morning we stopped on the bridge for our usual break and “treat party.” A resonant clicking and thrumming sounded near us and we jumped up to discover the source. There beside us was a beautiful male Tibicen cicada. This genus is the annual variety of cicada, unlike those which appear at 13 or 17-year intervals.

But to call our friend an annual visitor belies the fact he’s already spent three years or more underground as a nymph, eating tree roots and progressing through 5 instars (developmental stages) before emerging and undergoing his final molting above ground, when he shed his last larval shell and gained wings, becoming the fine fellow we met, singing for a mate by rapidly compressing and releasing his tymbal muscles.

He’s called a “Dog-Days Cicada” because this is the time of year he joins us at the topsoil level.

Cicadas have a prominent place in human mythology. Often in these stories, because their final molting leaves behind a shell of their former shape, cicadas are associated with reincarnation, resurrection, transformation, and the shedding of self-illusions one must surrender to attain enlightenment.

In some places on our endlessly amusing globe, cicadas have been, and remain, an epicurean delight. We assured our friend he would not be eaten by us, but warned him about the birds and squirrels who would find him very tasty indeed.

He replied that one who symbolizes rebirth long ago welcomed death as a necessary and harmonious traveling companion. Riley and Clancy nodded, agreeing that life is best lived now, because now is all there is.

Our friend flew away, but we remained in silence together on the bridge for a time, Riley and Clancy content to enjoy all the delights the morning brought to their senses, while I, the weaker spirit, sought–like my ancestors–to make myth and meaning of the world around me and to understand my origins, my purpose, and what may come. Clancy laid his paw on my right hand and Riley licked the left, calling me back to the present.

I settled back to watch the geese and smell the breeze, enjoying the dog day before me. Eventually, I thought that now must be heaven, for like the Indian prince, I believe there is no heaven without my 4-legged companions.

*****

(“Every day is Cat Day,” says Murphy!)

 

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.

Community, Environment, Green Living, Nature, Noticing, Web of Creation

The Tattered Web

by Kitty5 Comments on The Tattered Web

I checked in with a local television station early this morning to hear the weather report on this first day of August, also known as Lughnasadh, a Celtic celebration of the “first fruits” from the summer’s harvest. The temperature would be in the mid-90’s again, said the meteorologist, who then summed up our recent weather saying, “We’ve experienced 31 days of temperatures 90◦ or above this summer, and our July was hotter than the temperatures in Tampa and Los Angeles.”

Our first fruits are weak and withered this year, dying from thirst.

I thought about the overwhelming majority of climatologists whose scientific training leads them to conclude we are in a time of dramatic climate change, and that its effects have been greatly magnified and accelerated by our dependency upon machinery that spews CO² into the atmosphere. Those who make money from this machinery and/or the products created by it, deny these facts and use their wealth to lobby (i.e., threaten, pressure, bully, and buy) politicians who might otherwise enact laws to curtail our environmental destruction.

We are often so flooded with data that it’s difficult to derive meaning and chart a path of wisdom and action. Data can be spun from so many sources, including thin air, and used so attractively to support different points of view.

Here are some other statistics I encountered today, reading through the August 3rd issue of The Week, a magazine that collects “the best of the U.S. and international media.” (www.theweek.com):

[An editorial in the Daily Mirror (U.K.), stated that] Britain …banned all handguns in the wake of the 1996 school massacre in Dunblane , Scotland…Assault rifles and automatic weapons, it should go without saying, have been banned since the 1930’s. Last year, 52 Brits were killed with guns…less than the carnage in the U.S. where 31,347 were killed in 2009.

And more data, gleaned from another article in this issue of The Week:

Over a period of two months, [James Holmes, the alleged shooter in Aurora Colorado’s recent tragedy] bought a semiautomatic variation of the military’s M-16 assault rifle, a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, and at least one Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol from local dealers. He also bought and stockpiled 6,000 rounds of ammunition from online sources. Every purchase he made was legal.

The gun lobby in our country, fueled by the NRA’s seemingly endless wealth, fights for our “right” to maintain such weaponry access as the status quo, despite international statistics supporting data (and perhaps logic) indicating that less access results in less murder.

My state recently prevented, by a very narrow margin, a mining company from rewriting our long-cherished environmental laws to suit its desire to seize greedily from the earth and her people, “buying” natural resources we cannot renew. They said their mine would create jobs, even as it poisoned the workers’ water and destroyed their land. The state legislature’s Republican majority has vowed to renew the “fight” for their friends in this mining corporation.

I fear we are a people who have lost our way. Greed and individual rights have transcended the need for us to co-create wisely with the rest of nature. We seem to be saying to each other and the rest of the world, “If I want it, I deserve it; if I desire it, it will be mine.” And we bow to those with the wealth to fulfill our wishes. Even if they kill us.

This path will lead us to our end, taking the innocent with us, for we are part of the web that connects every precious particle of our planet. And of all species on the web, we are among the most recent guests. But rather than humbly and gratefully taking our place as responsible and respectful members, we’re like noisome thugs who crash the party, steal all the gifts, and burn down the house as we storm away.

We’ve already destroyed much of the web in the name of sport, progress, wealth, and individual rights. We are an arrogant species, dominating the weaker and following the path of aggression when all along, we might have chosen collaboration.

Our birth has invited us to be one in community with all creation. No right exists, or ever will, that allows us to discount any of these relationships. The web is sacred, and dependent upon each of us to honor our place and respect the power and presence of every other created particle. Setting down the crazed burdens of greed and wealth, we would be better able to embrace one another and restore the earth’s health before we cannot.

Tonight’s full moon is the first of two this month. I’m sitting beneath it and pondering a planet that offers only joy to people who scorn the gift and destroy the giver.

I dread the day a last voice sighs, “Here was our heaven, now gone, forever,” but I see it coming. I have only to look at the stunted cornfield outside my window. And hear the rifles at the “game farm” beside it.

 

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.