For Shelter, the World

Chow time

At one point in the middle of the blizzard last winter, I kept hearing a tapping noise at the window. It was a black, white and gray chickadee looking in at me, disoriented and hungry because of the sub-freezing temperatures and two feet of snow on the ground. I threw some breadcrumbs out onto the snow, but since I didn't have birdfeeders installed I couldn't do much else. As the winter progressed, I kept remembering that little bird.

Now I've got a flat birdfeeder hanging from a branch of the apple tree nearest the house (prime viewing location for both me and the cats), a small hopper feeder affixed to a cornerpost of the front deck, and a platform feeder on the ground. I provide food of various kinds; black-oil sunflower seeds, millet, nuts, cracked corn and dried berries. It didn't take long for word to get around about the avian smorgasbord in my front yard. I bought a bird book (Stan Tekiela's Birds of Washington Field Guide) and have been learning to identify the various species by sight and sound.

Since the bird species that inhabit the areas west of the Rocky Mountain are much different from those east of the Rockies, I'm meeting someone new (bird-wise) every day. Yesterday I came home to see a bluish-gray bird sitting in the hanging feeder, so big that it almost filled the 14 inch-long feeder. Its body shape was vaguely familiar to me; it had a large flank, a small head and slender neck, but with distinctive markings I hadn't seen before: a narrow white band across the back of its neck, and black wings. Checking the bird book, I discovered this to be a band-tailed pigeon, a bird that doesn't stay in one place for the season but roams according to where it finds food at the moment.

Unlike the roaming band-tailed pigeon, I have many repeat customers who seem to have taken up residence nearby. Here's the undisputed king of the yard ...a large redwing blackbird who sits in the top of the apple tree, calling the other birds after I've re-filled the feeders.

And who's this?

Yep, that's one very well-fed squirrel.

The challenge

New Moon in Taurus this past Friday: a challenge to all of us, individually and collectively, to take a stand for ourselves and our planet. What do we value? What do we want? What supports us and feels right for us ... with the emphasis on "feels"? There is a way through, and it doesn't have much to do with intellectualizing about what's going on or trying to "figure things out" mentally.

It's time now for us to perceive and consider things at a different level of our human abilities -- sensing deeply and awarely with our physical bodies, and being open to receiving the invaluable input of our emotions and intuition. In our interactions with each other and the world around us, we've been functioning pretty much as though we're just disembodied heads. In the process, we've lost touch with something vital, including our power to discern what is real and what isn't; and that's led to our present loss of control over our lives, our inability to make reality-based, effective and thoughtful decisions and choices, or even to interact meaningfully with each other. (If you want a clear demonstration of that, you need look no further than the Internet and the mass media.)

As the biblical saying goes, May those who have eyes, see; and those who have ears, hear.

We need to get our eyes and our ears back in proper working order, and that's only done by actually doing it, using all of our abilities, not simply by thinking about it or watching a movie about someone doing it, or by chatting about it on an online forum. (Those activities can have a role to play, but they're not all there is, or even the most important part.)

A random chapter of the Tao Te Ching for this tumultuous and adventurous time  ...

53

The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn-
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

 

Transitions

My mother died this past Tuesday morning, in the assisted care facility in Houston, Texas, where she'd been living for the past five years. She was 81 years old.

From what I can tell from my genealogical research, many of my forebears have had a predilection for living to advanced ages, at a time in history when most folks did not.  While my mother's family has a tendency to various mental issues that act to decrease the quality of life, in my father's family they seem to keep their mental faculties in good shape pretty much up until the end, and living as active a life as they can. There seems to be a core strength they have, even the ones whose physical health is not optimal. They're like the Energizer Bunny; they just keep going and going.

My mother's older sister died in 2007 at the age of 87. My father's two oldest sisters died during the past couple of years, each at the age of 95. His maternal grandmother lived into her nineties, which for the early 20th century was a darn good age. My Dad tells me that during the final three years of her life, his "Granny" felt trapped sleeping inside of her house, so she moved her bed out onto the front porch and slept there. This was a rural area in Texas, where it gets doggone hot during the summers and cold in the winter. From all accounts, she was a tough old character.

My Dad himself is now 87, which makes him one of the last remaining survivors of his generation. He seems to have a healthy understanding of the cycles of life and death. Maybe it's the farmer in him, having grown up in a sharecropping family during the Great Depression -- his mother was a founder of the farmer's market in their area of southwest Arkansas -- or maybe it's just the wisdom acquired from a long life in which he's had much to bear and much to accept.

I've definitely inherited the "farming" DNA. This week I've been turning over the soil in my garden, and this weekend is seed-planting time. (Even though we had a cold front come through yesterday, and a late, light freeze last night.) As to whether I've also inherited the family longevity genes, time will tell. I do feel that core strength present inside of me.

All I know right now is, we (I'm speaking for all of humanity now) live the lives we need to, for as long as we need to. We're doing the best we can, whether we think so or not.

Eternity in an hour

To see a World in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

[...]

A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand'ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misuse'd breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

[...]

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return'd to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.

[...]

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro' the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

-- William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"

Chickadee in apple tree, waiting its turn at the birdfeeder

Passage

This is a time for a deep let-go. Allow any pain, sorrow, or difficulty just to be there, accepting its "facticity." It is very much like the experience of Gautam Buddha when, after years of seeking, he finally gave up, knowing there was nothing more that he could do. That very night, he became enlightened.

Transformation comes, like death, in its own time. And, like death, it takes you from one dimension into another.

-- "Transformation", from the Osho Zen Tarot

I will not die an unlived life

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling
or of catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
making me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
so that it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that that which comes to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which comes to me as blossom
goes on as fruit.

-- Dawna Markova

Easter memories

When I was a little girl, my mother made special Easter outfits every year for my sister and me. At that time, she sewed most of our clothes, using her old black metal Singer sewing machine. (I think she was still using that machine when I was in college.) Our Easter dresses would be made out of organza and taffeta, often embroidered or otherwise embellished, and there'd always be a purse, shoes and hat to match -- and it being in the Deep South, I can remember little white gloves, too.

On Easter Sunday, we'd get all dressed up in our new finery, take photographs to commemorate the occasion, and go to church; then come home, check out our Easter baskets filled with candy and that green cellophane grass that ended up everywhere, and do the Easter egg hunt thing in the backyard. We usually got some sort of stuffed animal as a present. I've still got one of them, a small bunny rabbit, one of the few items of my memorabilia that made it through Hurricane Katrina. That bunny is tan and white now, but I think the tan part may originally have been pink, forty-five some-odd years ago. (And yes, some of those years have been mighty odd.)

Come to think of it, we also had special Christmas outfits as well. The one I remember in particular was made from burgundy-colored velveteen trimmed in white cotton lace. Since my sister and I are only two years apart, our outfits usually matched, either in design and/or color.

Although my mother had great difficulty being a parent, she did the best that she could, given where she was coming from and the hand she was dealt. On the conscious level, she and my father both doted on their little girls, although the reality often didn't match the conscious intent. As was typical for the Depression-WWII generation who were creating the American middle class from scratch, they were determined that their children's lives would be easier and more affluent than theirs. My sister and I were born in 1955 and 1953; I've seen those of us born during those years referred to as the "golden children" of the Baby Boom.

I can't remember when the last time was we got the special Easter outfits. I'm thinking I was in grade school when it stopped ... things began to change for my mother then, which resulted in a lot of ramifications down the line, so that timing would fit.

Lake, sky, mountain

Photo taken at the end of one of the rare clear days in the western Columbia Gorge during mid-March.

This 50-acre lake comprises the delta of a good-sized creek that flows out of the Cascade foothills into the Columbia River. During summer, the dam at the confluence of creek and river is closed, allowing the lake to fill. At the beginning of the rainy season in October, the dam is opened and the lake allowed to drain, leaving a big mudflat with the creek running through it.

As anyone who lives near a stream knows, the water level is extremely responsive to precipitation and snow melt. Over the course of the winter, the terrain within the lake bed changes constantly, depending on the weather. When spring arrives, chum salmon and other endangered fish species run up the flume at the creek mouth to their spawning grounds in the foothills.

Hovel

Painful it is indeed,
Passing through the world;
But in a hovel like this,
I live on in peace and quiet,
Winter rain falling.

-- Nijoin no Sanuki, 12th century Buddhist monk and poet,
as quoted in the Little Zen Calendar, March 31, 2009

While my home isn't exactly what I'd call a "hovel", this little poem speaks to me of simplicity and sanctuary, of dedication and determination. The hovel is not a place; to me it signifies an attitude of mind and heart. What is truly important? What are the essentials in my life? Can I let go of that which is not essential and does not serve me?

As the insanity and brutality and all-around noisiness of the world rages at fever pitch -- rather like that ten-day blizzard that came through during the Winter Solstice -- I remain safe and warm by focusing on the present moment and by not getting caught up in the collective grasping and raging. The more I stay grounded in the process of my own life, in touch with nature, with an attitude of acceptance and maintaining my boundaries, the more peacefully and effectively I will make my way through.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Little Zen Calendar quotes:

I go on walking
Higan lilies go on blooming

-- Taneda Santöka (1888-1940)

I've been through a lot in the ten years or so since I first read those words, enough to know now for sure: no matter what, I go on walking.

Boomers, part 1

A few years ago, I helped my elderly father locate an appropriate assisted care facility for my mother. While the places we considered varied in their degree of pleasantness, there was one thing they had in common: all of them were relatively quiet. You might hear a television in the communal lounge or someone playing the piano in the lobby, and people would be talking, but that was it.

Let's face it ... these Depression-era kids were into their adulthood before TVs became widely available. As to music, they were limited to either vinyl phonograph records played on a large "hi-fi" that was essentially a piece of furniture, or else playing actual musical instruments. Rather than relying on "canned" entertainment, they made their own, and they didn't expect instant gratification in everything. Growing up during a time when the provenance of their next meal was often in doubt, their main priority in life was not entertaining themselves. This was not what you'd call a generation of partiers.

Fast forward to the year 2020, when the residents will all be in the post-WWII generation. Walk down the hall in any assisted living community (or whatever they're calling them at that time), and chances are good you'll make your way through a cacophony of rock music blasting from every room. Probably the same songs we listened to in the '60s and '70s.

"I've been through the desert on a horse with no name ..."

It'll be like living in a college dorm all over again. Oh, the joy.