Leaving Richmond Hill this afternoon I spy our latest, most frequent cat visitor crossing the street, honoring the pavement with his royal paws. Confidence is a cat walking away.
There goes a crow with a forked twig in its mouth. I've heard that if you feed and make friends with crows they will leave gifts on your porch - bottle caps, tinfoil burger wrappers, shiny ribbon.
Huffle puff puffle huff up and down Libbie Hill steps. Don't mind me Mr Skink! A skink for every crevice, or a crevice for every skink? Here's a big one poking his head out into a sunny spot.
The other day when we toured the house with the inspector, I held open the door of the breaker box while he analyzed its contents. Through the back window I saw a well-grown groundhog poking his head through a broken down spot in the back fence. If we get the house I'm gonna call him Lloyd. If we don't get the house I guess I'll call him Lloyd anyway. I'm already calling him Lloyd.
What do you call the sound your shoes make walking along a gravel path?
Two men, who look to be father and son, silently fish off Chapel Island, sipping 24 ounce Natural Light. The fish are jumping after flies, just not their flies. Contentment is father-son fishing, luke-warm beer, lots of shade, little talking, few fish.
Farther down the path a tree is full of tiny birds (I don't know a stork from a sparrow), quietly playing musical twigs. They don't seem to be eating or talking. Why do they keep trading places?
Who is that goose honking at?
Passenger train on the elevated track. All that shaking but the ducks in the canal aren't worried, dipping their heads after something ducks eat. The trestle "bent" (the load bearing frame between the spans) reads "Built in Bethlehem 1961" (or is it 1967?). According to Billy Joel out in Bethlehem they're killing time, filling out forms, standing in line.
Time to go home and clean some bathrooms.
Check it out! An excited eight legged huntress in the bottom of a trashcan. Don't tell anyone, I'm turning it loose in the hall.
notes
- ...so well hidden has the act of birth become
- until the last moment I could not believe that a baby would be the result of what I was seeing
- only when these other children are safe in the world will your grandchildren be safe
- from the moment I saw that a plum grew out of a brown-colored, dry-looking branch, and a watermelon came from a green stem attached to a plant that was rooted in the dark earth, "heaven" as described by the pastor of our church became irrelevant...
- "relative, shift your teepee, Mother Earth needs sunlight"
- wisdom, however, requests a pause
- "No whirlwind, no reply; no burning/ Just a bare winter bush./ This is God, too.
- It is like/ sitting on/ a sunny pier/ wondering whether/ to swing/ your feet
- during the pause is the ideal time to listen to stories. but only after you have inhabited Silence for long enough to find it comfortable
- The distaste for hesitation. The absolute hatred of spending time in emptiness, what Buddhists refer to as groundlessness.
- it is hard to bear our own human thickness
- To be cared for. I said to my friend: it is possible for everyone on earth to have this.
- At this time in history, we are to take nothing/ personally/ least of all, ourselves
- If I could be happy in a land where torture of my kind was commonplace, then perhaps there was a general happiness to be found
- it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love
- I cherish the study and practice of Buddhism because it is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the world of healing our ancestors...they can only be healed inside us
- I see the Christ spirit in all those who cannot be bought away from their love of humanity
- To enumerate the crimes committed against the Mother of Humanity would drive the sanest person mad
- When I read these letters and poems and viewed the drawings, I was connected to those of our ancestors who first experienced the wrenching devastation of the destruction of their families. I felt in my own body the long centuries of slavery
- He was someone who, in a sense, was living, consciously, toward his death...Which is how we black southerners felt. MLK was not the only one who thought he wouldn't survive.
- Love your country/ by loving/ Americans
- Generosity toward those less fortunate is the way of the future, if a future exists
- tell them: I welcome you here
- I firmly believe that the only punishment that works is love
- "The only thing worthy of you is compassion"
- The beings we kill become, somehow, ours for life. Ironically, we become responsible for them in death as we were not in life.
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