Summer Thoughts

I started this blog saying I was going to write for at least seven minutes daily.  It has morphed and taken on a personality all its own, however.  I like that it has.  It’s been awhile though since I’ve just sat down to write and see what I want to say.  Summer is speeding by, as always, but this summer seems to have roller blades.  School starts August 14th (I think, if that’s a Tuesday).

Some people would say, Oh, you have a month, but come the first of the month I’ll be my classroom getting ready, putting up paper for bulletin boards (I reused the same paper two years in a row, time for a change), sorting math supplies, peeking into our new reading curriculum . . .I’ll most likely teach first/second grades again which means learning Pearson for both grades if my school can’t find a way to separate kids for reading time.  We’re small, one or one and a half classrooms per grade and sometimes the numbers don’t work.  Nobody wants 35 kids for reading.  Last year I had only 10 first graders for math, though, and it was delightful.

There’s smoke in the air.  A fire is burning a long way off, but the sky is red and that burning feeling is up inside my nose.

Wondering what to start writing next, the project I’ll be committed to for the next year.  I thought my mermaid novel, but in working on promoting HERON’S PATH I’ve found a plethora of mermaid books.  Going to look over my novel THREE DEMONS and see if it’s salvageable.  I think the Las Vegas part works well.  But I need to re-envision Hell.

I am so grateful for summer.

Forgiveness

Last Sunday, a week ago,  Gail and I went out to the Bogg’s Bog, a wetland the Nature’s Conservatory protects.  Summer had come down in the beat of a day. Needles in the grass  bloomed and stuck to my socks. I thought of rattlesnakes.  The tules, within just a few warm days, were now brown, and the water in the marsh had already receded to where only birds can reach.

Redwing blackbird sentries surrounded the nesting area. These birds were a military force, the males  in uniform with the red chevrons on their wings.  They vigilantly protected their breeding grounds from predators and kept the females within its confines, forcing them to stay with their eggs.  Canada geese honked in the distance.  We could see them resting far off.  They breed here during their long migration, something that I hadn’t realized.

When we first arrived, Gail and I sat on a log in the shade and just listened.  We told our stories to each other.  I shared what I thought was a bit of darkness on my soul, but brought to light with a trusted friend, with the words spoken over the colors that were descending with summer so that they rose with the bird talk, I realized that there was no darkness, just confusion and missteps.

Yesterday I went to Mary’s.  To get there, you have to walk down six or seven switchbacks on her path.  It’s steep and makes me winded each time I climb back up.  But the descent is wonderful, and you wind up at her wooded house, built circa 1940, that rests right on the shore.

We sat on her porch and listened to the water lap and watched the birds fly and settle in the oaks, skirt the lilac, buzz around the feeders, and swim in the shallows.  What a feast . . . we traced one call, a single note that kept repeating, from her deck and up to her bedroom window where we found  a male mountain quail  hiding in the upper branches of  the scraggly oak tree.  Black head and top knot, gray body.  The females were foraging below him.

We looked down from her window and found a mallard and his mate paddling in the water right at the shoreline.  A Bullock’s Oriole flew by. We went back to the deck to follow him as he flew up to the taller trees.His bright orange belly caught the afternoon sunlight; he and the tree leaves shimmered gold.

The finch’s necks were bright yellow, and we caught the iridescent red of a few hummingbirds.  Then as we sank down in her lawn chairs, a pelican circled.  Even when he was several hundred feet out on the lake, we could see the profile of its mating bump protrude like a big pimple on his nose.  It will be there through the end of next month and then disappear when the mating season is over.  There were two small birds doing a mating dance of sorts, the circled around each other too fast to know if they were hummingbirds or finches, or some other species.  They rose twice while we were there in a small whirlwind of joy.

Mary and I shared a few hours of grace. I’ve thought a lot about grace for most of my life; I’ve only experienced it in small amounts on a conscious level, though I know if I became more centered I would be aware that I am actually drunk on it.  My reality is  steeped in it, as is yours.

Grace is found with the quiet mind.  My monkey mind is the absolute monkeyish.  If I “heard” this correctly, Course in Miracles says that we continue to crucify Christ with our thoughts, our lack of forgiveness for ourselves which then creates tension with the world.

Brother James commented to me: You are loved  . . . and now I can’t remember the adverb.  Passionately? Exquisitely?  If the world experienced that love, would the kingdom of heaven, which is here already, form solidly among the shadows?  We could touch it the way Thomas did Christ’s wounds, find that it is real, and that we have always belonged.

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Mother Eve and the Garden in My Body, Part 2

I was with a friend a couple of hours ago sitting on a dock stretching into Boggs Marsh.  We were in a garden of tules with redwing blackbirds, ducks, a goose, and frogs disquieted by our voices.  Muck of the marsh below.  The remnants of yesterday’s storm floated above our heads, blocking the sun, and a wind chilled us until we sat on the boards that soaked up the sunlight slipping through the clouds.

She said, “You were eating your maleness yesterday.”  I laughed because I didn’t know she had read my last entry, but also it hadn’t occurred to interpret my dream that way. 

We both admitted we have never felt feminine, that a sense of beauty, physical or spiritual, was somehow not embodied in us.  Not that I’ve felt  . . .  I’m giggling as I write this . . . manly.  Just to celebrate womb and breasts, natural grace, the clay that has made me, doesn’t come naturally.

I’ve always trusted my head more than my heart, sometimes with drastic consequences. But the head has felt safer, in general.  Perhaps movement brings emotion and so often with them chaos, the tension I wrote of yesterday.  That wonderful freedom I woke with, the woman who lives deep in my gut, the grace of simply being, is gone today. 

But the gift of the dream, experiencing the lifting of anxiety, of the silencing of the small voice of dread that has been my companion all of my life, has helped to reinforce what I know on the surface of my consciousness, on the surface of my skin, but don’t in the depth of  my body’s knowledge.  This shell that surrounding me is not my true self.  That spirit of yesterday morning, open and strong, really resides inside of me. 

 Eve, blamed for so much, lived in a garden.  And then she was banished, and the shell descended.  I would love to believe that the garden is beginning to grow again and that she’ll return home.