I woke this morning thinking of the school where I pick up Zach. It is fenced and then fenced within that for various areas, schools, ages. The children are well-protected as they must be.
I feel we, too, are protected, are in a big play-pen, learning how to get along and play together and share. I suppose the difference is that there is supervision in a school. One child is not allowed to hit another or dominate them. It seems we have not learned equality here, as adults, on our planet earth.
I read the news and find it depressing. I don't even seem to feel an uplift at Obama's inauguration though I am certainly glad and grateful it is here. Perhaps it is the marketing that disturbs me. Because we gave money to his campaign, we received a fancy paper inviting us to the inauguration, which merely meant we could attend a local, public event here. It felt false, and came with a list of and pictures of things we could buy. Somehow it seems odd to me to be encouraged to buy mugs, hats, and shirts that say Obama. How is that about saving the planet? Also, he is the president. Do we need to advertise for him? It borders on hero worship and I don't like it. Hero worship gets us into trouble. I do appreciate that he is encouraging everyone to get out and volunteer on Martin Luther King day or rather his sponsors are. A great deal is being done in his name.
Perhaps it is the many meditations for peace I have been doing that allows me to feel how many places need those prayers. I am feeling guilt that I live in the country that furnishes weapons to other countries so they can use them to kill. I am haunted by images of children in Africa holding guns, and yet, I love this country. I am always happy to return home.
And the sun comes again today, brings light softly to the hill.
I am reading A Natural Sense of Wonder, Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons, by Rick Van Noy. Reading it, one certainly sees the changes in climate. Where I am we are breaking records for heat and drought. It is sobering, something out of our hands.
Van Noy writes this:
We read of the scientific evidence, but there is also evidence of climate change in our history and literature. When Thoreau mapped the pond in winter, he measured sixteen inches of thick ice. A meticulous note taker, he also recorded the dates when the pond would thaw in spring. The average date for the ice to thaw, the ice-out date, between 1845 and 1854 was March 31. Some students from a group called Journey North have continued the tradition. Between 1995 and 2005 the average date on the same pond was March 13, eighteen days earlier. In 2006, the ice never came in.
Conservation botanists such as Richard Primack are comparing what is left today to what naturalists such as Thoreau wrote about. "Of the more than 20 species of orchids seen in Concord by Thoreau in the 1850's, for example, only 4 remain today." Plants now flower about three weeks earlier than they did in Thoreau's time. Trees leaf out earlier in the spring and shed leaves later in the fall. Season creep, they called it, and it's creepy all right. Baltimore orioles may have to move to Buffalo."
I don't believe I am depressed, just reflective, feeling deeply. Meditation allows that, I believe, gives a spaciousness that says, "Yes, I am the one with her head most necessarily in the sand, and I am the one feeling the pain that rocks this planet each day, allowing the healing power of tears to flow."
I have dedicated these forty days to meditating as much as I can. There is a soberness in it for me, a gravity, even as I work to fill myself, my room, the planet, with light. Perhaps it is feeling the dark places within, bringing them light, like water, saying it is safe to come forth. Look at the world, the wholeness of it, the balancing. See all with Love!
All that happens outside is in me. No wonder, at times, I bow with pain, and, at other times, lift my chest to the sky with the open winged heart of a bird.