We were hit hard by a hurricane at the end of August and are still reeling from its effects. We lost the roof over the kitchen veranda which covers the major part of the house and we lost the roof over the veranda of the second floor and also the roof of our yellow Hummer - all a great big dent in Wally's World! The worst for me was the loss of my veranda - a kitchen garden of 18 years, my eco-playground of tropical plants, a collection of succulents, herbs, and tree-top creatures - iguanas and fly-through birds, dragonflies and butterflies. Without a roof it is not fit for plants or creatures. The sun is too, too hot. The whole house is vulnerable to the heat, the kitchen being the worst. As it is now, the heart of the home is an oven.

What are we to learn? That destruction clears the way for new, that beauty depends on order to rest on, that when the order is gone, another order evolves, that chaos is uncomfortable, temporary and necessary, that we too are in the way of being reordered. My spiritual exercise:  accept this wreck, inhabit it, create again. At the core of my home-maker-heart, make everything belong again. That longing fuels me even though I'm tired. 

Wally's list gets longer, not shorter and the bulk of the work falls on his shoulders. He's worked like a young bull his whole life and was looking forward to more ease. My heart aches to see him have to rebuild just as he was savoring what we had made. 

Resisting the tyranny of the urgent, we ask ourselves a simple question: what is the right action needed today? Do that thing well.

Life unfolds, into what we don't know, but we trust that the movement is always in the direction of more life. As we look up and out, from within and beyond, this is the pattern of love.

Beginning again...

 It's been 4 years since I've posted.  Life has been full of changes but we're still moving in "a long obedience in the same direction". Slow living has a lot to teach.  Commitment to a personal evolution that expands and carries me deeper is unknown territory. I don't know where I am going but I have said "yes". The ground of knowing is here. 

Wally and I are growing old together. It's been 18 years since we came here with our secret hopes and dreams. They have evolved too and now we marvel at this place we've made together. 

I want to get back to sharing our stories again. Part of my impulse is to hear what my heart has to say in response to these days, to adjust my bearings for what may lay ahead as the world changes irrevocably and rapidly, to pick up the thread of where we have come from and what we see on the horizon.

Wondering the Grand Canyon

This week I have literally stood on the edge of the world, my self just a miniscule particle-part of the vastness of time, force, beauty, death and life. Such a wonder, the Grand Canyon! It took 5 million years for what we see on the surface and 2 billion years of earth history at the bedrock. When you ponder time and the forces of change, eternity is evolution infinitum. 

When I last visited the Grand Canyon with Wally 10 years ago, his response was shocking! He stripped naked and stood on the edge with his arms open and his face lit from within.  The contrast of his uninhibited aliveness stirred a longing in me. It felt pure. I clearly did not share the same impulse, in fact, it was forgotten until I visited the Grand Canyon again with my sisters this week.  

Walking along the edge I felt waves of electric charges in my groin - fear, protective and contracted mixed with intensified awareness. It heightens the preciousness of being, of flesh, and also the fears of suffering pain that annihilates. It's a thrill - one that draws and repels like both sides of a magnet. 

My inner landscape of late has been more like a tropical jungle. It's easy to get wandered-off-lost and lose track of time and meaning in busy-ness. It's necessary to cut away at the overwhelming jungle-growth, to clear a way to see. I resist taking on more and instead shed the weight of stuff that slows me. I feel the need to get on with it before I'm too tired. What is it to pound the jungle to discover that the threshold I'm on is actually a gaping chasm! My toes grip the earth, vastness blasts my face! Ay, Dios!  - hold onto life by nail and toe and maybe fall? Or let go of fear and hope and fall into the Wonder and Mystery? What is it to die before dying and live this way? Isn't that the pattern in the Grand Canyon scheme of things? 

I'm feel the transforming forces all around me. Below my feet are miles of time and matter, invisible, intelligent, the ground of my being realized in new materiality, and above me a spaciousness as great and grand and unknowable. I make a turn and walk the rim in a new practice of living- an act of active surrender. 
 

Deep calls to deep - a psalm

Carve me deeply.
Make of me a canyon
where your life moves.
Let it be known
God was here,
is here still
in this scoured place,
purified for genesis,
seeding creation,
cycling through seasons,
making all things
new by ancient forces:
one a cataclysmic undoing 
the other
a steady, slow polishing.

Shape me by the tenacity of your constancy.
I cannot know yet
what glory a canyon can hold
but I rise to kiss the sky,
bow boughs to the waters edge,
sink roots to the drink from the source,
move in time
to an irresistible force
of alchemy
making of me 
an ark of God. 

Ava

Our little dog died during the night. Her name was Ava. We do not know the cause of her sudden death, possibly a poisonous bite. We tried everything to save her but she went quickly.

Yesterday she woke up with the exuberant energy of a girl on Christmas morning.  She played with the other larger dogs without fear. Although she was small, she thought she was big. For this reason we loved her, her confidence in the friendliness of the world gave her a  large and joyful presence.

Dogs can easily reveal things about us. How do we face the day? How easily do we go with the flow of what life brings us? They effortly teach us  to accept what it is to be fundamentally happy or just to simply be. A dog does not try to be beautiful, or intelligent or rich. A dog is simply happy to be in the present moment. Her only focus is what is in front of her nose, not in the past or in the future. She assumes that the world is generous and that everyone loves her. And why not!

When we choose to love, we do not know the whole story. We hope for more joy than sadness but there is always both. One must love bravely and when there is suffering pay it with gratitude. We do not have our little friend by our side but her love-lesson is always with us.

I want to be like Ava - small on the outside, big on the inside, eagerly ready to love again and again.

The ark...the inside story

I've been wondering about Noah's ark. It occurs to me that our home is an ark

of sorts during the tropical storms of the rainy seasons - Wally's ark! We head for the house when it rains. The dogs make a bee line, anxious to have an excuse to be inside. Even the varmints: mice, termites, ants and scorpions escape the wet wheedling their way inside. When there is a storm everything looks for shelter. Inside, we huddle together watching the light strobe, bracing for the thunder, feeling its rumble, listening to the wind and rain pound the windows and roof. Inside it is still and we wait. We sense the wild, destructive force of nature. Who knows how the storm will play?

God told Noah to bring all the animals into the ark - the opposites, male, female, wild, tame, clean, unclean, crawling, flying - and once inside they are locked in together. The differences between one human to another, between people and animals, between kinds of animals are mind boggling. So the ark becomes the place where humans and animals must do the messy work of living together.

It's not a children's story, and it's more than a story about a flood. It's a metaphor about living in relationships. That's the pattern I'm seeing in everything lately, that's why ecology feels so important. Learning to live locked in with differences, learning acceptance, being willing to change for the sake of survival...it's a veritable laboratory of relationships! 

Forgiveness will be necessary to make the connections. Fr. Richard Rohr says, "Forgiveness is the only way to free ourselves from the entrapment of the past. Nothing new happens without it."  He thinks that the first forgiveness we experience is to forgive reality itself for not meeting our needs. There are some things that can't be reconciled. We will have to find a way to live with them. It will mean holding together that gathering of contraries. Again, connection, the Divine Mystery that holds all things together - call it ark ecology. 

What happens in the ark doesn't stay in the ark. It seeds the earth.

Kind of interesting when you think about it: the ark was built to save the world. Maybe the work of living together with what is inside the ark, the relationships, is the real story of salvation.

after the ark, a rainbow...

Counter-culture

The first thing I managed to do after summer school was fall down the stairs. I bonked my head, back and elbow hard enough to be a gimp for a week. Not the form of rest I had in mind...

So much for my plans. Life happens and Who's to say that's not part of The Plan. I'm hinting of God of course. It seems that's the usual meeting place, when there's no control and no help in sight...."uh, hello, God (Higher Power, Universe, Life Force)  uh, it's me, uh, ...down here."

It doesn't have to be an accident. I hear it from all my friends, the insistent changes that come with aging.  The old bod doesn't get up and go like it used to. The cumulative effect of not enough exercise, or flossing, too many cocktails of diet coke and ibuprofen finally undercut the temple of God.  Or like yesterday, when the power was out for 10 hours and the temperature and humidity were 100 and big ants were cutting a highway from the ground to the 3rd story veranda where me and the dogs were panting and praying for a respite. We would have settled for a breeze but the wonder of those ants distracted us!

Seems like everyone I know is going through some version of unwelcome change.

Our society hasn't prepared us well for change or for the third part of age. We're being sold youth as the highest aim of desire. What an upside-down world! Please, let's be counter-culture!

As our bodies soften, why can't we accept that as a good thing? Years ago, a man that worked for me said that his sensation of being loved was getting smothered in big flabby arms and breasts because that's the way his mom, aunts and grandmothers were built. Our bodies are not ourselves. Our bodies are sacred to those who love us, to children, dogs and lovers, in ways we never think about because we see ourselves only with our own eyes -  and not just ourselves, but everything else too. We see the world as we see it, not as it truly is in it's magnificent, glorious LARGENESS.

Mimi is 16 - 112 dog years

This week I couldn't be productive, instead I was given the gift of being at home with my dogs on a scale that they crave. I used to think that ticks were a plague but now I see ticks as one-on-one time with each dog - connect as I dis-connect... ticks that is. Weird, heh? This small, humorous joy comes as joy often comes: in unexpected ways and places.

We need to slow down to experience the gratitude and wonder of being alive in this extraordinary world, to notice the minute and exquisite details in the ordinary. This is stuff that a retirement nest-egg can't give you.

I want to grow old together with my friends and savor these capstone years for what they are - a gift of age.


"Grow old with me, the best is yet to be..."