Walking Meditation / "... the narrow window between day and night—this threshold when the night air streams through the bright streets."

*

See-through tree

*

Looking up at the rest of the see-through tree, in awe of its will to live

*

Fall is clearly in the air today.  After a short run of hot sunny days, the morning was cool.   Halfway through my hour-long walk, as I was crossing the wooden bridge down the creek from the stone bridge in Whatcom Falls Park, I looked over the railing at the creek below.  Briefly, blue sky and a cloud were reflected in the slowly moving water and then the sky above was all cloud.

*

Of Being

I know this happiness
is provisional:

     the looming presences --
     great suffering, great fear --

     withdraw only
     into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
          this mystery:

-- Denise Levertov

*

THE WAR DIARY OF YEVGENIA BELORUSETS DAY 181 (TUESDAY, AUGUST 23):

"In Kyiv, in the narrow borderland between night and day, the war seems to disappear completely, as long as no unexpected noise intrudes. That relief doesn’t come often. The war is for the most part present, with no escape from its daily persistence. In the first weeks of the Russian invasion, I was still convinced that it would quickly come to an end, within hours or even days. Like a greeting from that initial phase of the war, I feel the fear rise within me during every air raid alarm. I’m back in Kyiv after a long hiatus, and the wailing sirens wake me at half past three in the morning. For a few minutes I feel I must take the warning seriously. But in this violent phase of the war it’s a strange idea to go into a shelter in the middle of the night and try to find refuge from any possible danger. I smile at my restlessness, at the fact that during my stay in Berlin I had gotten out of the melancholy and fatalistic habit of maintaining my daily routines in the face of danger. Instead of going to the bunker, I shuffle with weary steps to the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea. The air raid alarm fades and a nocturnal silence settles over Kyiv, seeming to suppress the danger. Today’s messages on the Telegram channels of Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv warn that the coming days will be especially dangerous. We, the Ukrainian readers, should beware. “We ask you to please take shelter if you hear the warning signals in the next few days”—it sounds like the writer is in the middle of a debate, trying to convince recalcitrant citizens with ever-new arguments. To back up these claims, we were told that the sound of the alarm will change starting today. Church bells will chime for chemical attacks, and storm bells will ring if the threat is radioactive. The reason for these measures is the growing tension on the front, as well as the coming holidays, especially Independence Day tomorrow, August 24. Before the war this holiday would give rise to a festive mood that lasted for days. In Kyiv today there’s chatter about the coming holiday, but much less has been said about the war’s anniversary—the war turns exactly six months old on Independence Day. The farther you are from the war, the clearer the procession of time becomes, and you think half a year of conflict needs a special approach, a rational analysis or a case history like the ones for sick patients, in the hope of a speedy recovery. But here in Kyiv, the symbolism of this round number crumbles when the people involved in the war—almost every Ukrainian, in one way or another—cannot afford any distance from the conflict. Today I visited a Kyiv museum that has been converted into a shelter where volunteers make camouflage netting. Women come here every day to fasten small cloth rags to solid nylon, one knot at a time. Sometimes the volunteers’ children and their friends come and work with them. You can also spend the night here on the folding beds that rest in a single corner. One of the women shows me on her cell phone how her little granddaughter sleeps comfortably on the camouflage netting. There’s a twelve-year-old boy here whose reputation as a knotting virtuoso is growing. He ties the nets together with such speed and mastery that he’s won the admiration of the other volunteers. Soldiers of all ranks and positions on the front come here to place their orders. Sometimes they drink tea, enjoy the company, talk and listen. Then the women visit the front line to see which nets are in particular demand. In the next room, medicine is collected and sorted for the front. The relatives of these women—their husbands, brothers, and friends, their sisters and daughters—are at the front. I know someone who works here named Katerina, and in the mornings she also sees patients as a pediatrician in her practice near the museum. Every day, when she joins her colleagues in the museum offices, she searches the faces of others. If she sees no tears in their eyes nor any deep despair, she concludes that there is no awful news from the front and that fortunately everyone is still alive. “Sometimes I think,” another volunteer tells me, “it would be better not to know a single person at the front. I go to sleep every night scared to death. There is no peaceful morning, no peaceful hour in my life.” As we say goodbye, another seamstress, Natalia, begins to complain about the people in Kyiv: “Many are living as if there is no war. They do too little. They want to forget. They distract themselves and ignore the constant threat of death.” She believes that the residents of Kharkiv, in the east of the country, are thinking more clearly. She visited the city recently. “Everyone in Kharkiv knows about the death and danger, but they stay in the city. They want to save everything there is to save.” She witnessed a rocket attack during her visit to Kharkiv, and in a somewhat dreamy manner she recounts it: “After the attack, the paramedics and neighbors and rescue services all come running, without crying, without cursing, without looking for culprits. They cover the dead with sheets, they rush the injured to hospitals, they start searching the rubble.” If they weren’t being attacked every day, if new buildings weren’t being bombed and people murdered all the time—these people would have long since rebuilt Kharkiv. She suggests that’s how incredibly brave and helpful they are. I keep hearing that the farther away you get from the war, the easier it is to think it hardly affects anyone. A soldier who’s an acquaintance of mine came to Kyiv from the Donbas for a couple of weeks to take a breath before returning to the front. Before the war, he worked as a programmer and wrote poetry. When we met up, he said little. I, on the other hand, told him that my friends in the small town of Toretsk, in Donetsk Oblast, have had no electricity for a week and no water since March. They’ve been fetching water from wells ever since. They wanted to flee the city long ago, but they are the only ones who can get humanitarian aid and distribute food and medicine to the people of Toretsk. Every day they postpone their departure. The Russian attacks tend to begin at night in pitch black. The ground trembles underfoot; people begin to fear that their small houses with the narrow cellars they hide in will be destroyed any minute. During the shelling, they can’t switch on a single light, there’s no cell service, and they have to wait a long time, perhaps till the next day, before they can call someone to make sure their friends and relatives are still alive. As I explain this to him, the soldier nods in understanding. For months he’s been living surrounded by explosions with the feeling of an endless quaking around him. In little picturesque villages, ruins line the street. Yet again the nights are like invitations for crime. The villagers are reluctant to speak of the coming winter, partly because water and electricity lines in the Donbas have been destroyed. On Kyiv’s Telegram channels I read about Russia’s plans to attack civilian infrastructure in the coming days. The nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia is in danger. The American embassy warns U.S. citizens to evacuate Ukraine at once—the same warning it sent out half a year ago. I wonder how it can be that global knowledge of these anticipated crimes—against international law, human rights, and the environment—does not help to stop them but instead becomes a pretext for new warnings. My favorite time in the hot summer days of Kyiv is the narrow window between day and night—this threshold when the night air streams through the bright streets. I’m here and I’m enjoying every hour these days when city life marches on with all its everyday nuance."

"The diary of Yevgenia Belorusets began on the first day of the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine. It was released almost daily for its first forty days."

"Is America Possible?"/ "... Whatever you do, we are going to let our light shine ..." / Young tree finds a home / "... A passion so intense ..."

*

While doing my yoga practice this morning I listened to "Is America Possible?", an interview with Vincent Harding by Krista Tippett from 2011 and then read the transcript because there was so much I wanted to remember.  I've been going to the "On Being" archives nearly every day and listening to the interviews under the category of "Across Generations."

Vincent Harding:  "My own feeling that I try to share again and again, Krista, is that when it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, democratic society, we are still a developing nation. We’ve only been really thinking about this for about half a century. But my own deep, deep conviction is that the knowledge, like all knowledge, is available to us if we seek it ...

... That was so much part of the way in which the songs try to encourage us not simply to be reactors. So that instead of saying, “You honky governor, you’re no good, and we’re gonna do this or that to you,” the basic, deepest word was, “Whatever you do, we’re gonna let our light shine ..."

....Whenever somebody jokes about “Kum Bah Ya,” my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting co-workers to come from all over the country, especially student types, to come and help in the process of voter registration, and Freedom School teaching, and taking great risks on behalf of the transformation of that state and of this nation. There were two weeks of orientation. The first week was the week in which Schwerner and Goodman and their beloved brother Jimmy were there. And it was during the time that they had left the campus that they were first arrested, then released, and then murdered.

The word came back to us at the orientation that the three of them had not been heard from. Bob Moses, the magnificent leader of so much of the work in Mississippi, got up and told these hundreds of predominantly white young people that, if any of them felt that at this point they needed to return home or to their schools, we would not think less of them at all, but would be grateful to them for how far they had come.

But he said let’s take a couple of hours just for people to spend time talking on the phone with parents or whoever to try to make this decision and make it now. What I found as I moved around among the small groups that began to gather together to help each other was that, in group after group, people were singing “Kum Bah Ya.” “Come by here, my Lord, somebody’s missing, Lord, come by here. We all need you, Lord, come by here.”

I could never laugh at “Kum Bah Ya” moments after that because I saw then that almost no one went home from there. They were going to continue on the path that they had committed themselves to. And a great part of the reason why they were able to do that was because of the strength and the power and the commitment that had been gained through that experience of just singing together “Kum Bah Ya" ..."

Krista Tippett:  I was listening to the BBC in recent weeks, and they’re watching us from afar. They were interviewing a journalist about this moment in American history, which seems very tumultuous and the question was, “Is it really more violent and more despairing than it’s been before or does this happen repeatedly?” And the comparison was made with the 1960s.

They said, look, there was a lot of social turmoil then. There were assassinations, right? I mean, many assassinations. But this journalist said — and I just want to know what you think — he said that he thought the difference between the 1960s and now was that even though there was incredible tumult and violence, it was at the very same time a period of intense hope, and people could see that they were moving towards goals. And that that’s missing now. What do you think about that analysis?

Vincent Harding:  Hmm. Krista, I think that is such a complicated kind of issue that I can only pick at it and tease it out and play with it in the best sense of play. I think that what I see now is the fact that all over this country, wherever I go, and, of course, where I go tends to be sort of self-selective because I am most often going into situations where people are operating out of a sense of hope and possibility, where in their local situations, whether it be Detroit, or Atlanta, or a campus someplace, or a church community in Philadelphia, that there are women and men and young people who are operating out of hope.

My sense is that, in the ‘60s, there was probably a larger kind of canopy of hope that we could see, and we could identify, and that people could name and focus on. Now, we are in particular spots, locations, sometimes seemingly isolated. But I feel that there are points, focal situations, where that is still available and where people are operating from that.

So I think that it is not simply the matter of hope or no hope. I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before.

And I think that that’s the place that we are in, and that’s even more the reason why we’ve got to figure out what was King talking about when he was seeing the possibility of a beloved community and recognized that, maybe, for some of us, that cannot come until some of us realize that we must give up what we thought was only ours in the building of a beloved nation. Can there be a beloved nation? Why don’t we try and see?

*

In the last few days, I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought that I would buy a Coral Bark Japanese Maple and donate it to Big Rock Garden to take the place of another Japanese maple that had died.  I'd been watching the frail ailing Japanese maple for some time and kept hoping that it would spring back to life.  I talked with one of the many volunteers who give their time to various sections of Big Rock Garden and gave her my phone number.  I was contacted by a retired couple who volunteer their gardening skills and who had also hoped that the maple I was watching would rebound.  I brought a young tree for the couple to see and we walked around Big Rock Garden, looking for possible locations for it.  My hope was that it could be planted in the same area as the one that had died.  Yesterday I went up to Big Rock Garden to see where it had been planted and made a video with my cell phone camera,

Here are the photos the volunteers sent to me:

*

(Once again, the fonts resist uniformity.  Why not?)

Revivals

When to my melancholy

All is folly

                 then the whirr
of the hummingbird
at intervals throughout the day

is all that’s sure
to stir me, makes me
jump up, scattering

papers, books, pens—
                                    To the bay window,
and certainly,

there he is below it
true-aimed at the minute cups of
Coral Bells, swerving

perfectly,
the fierce, brilliant faith
that pierces the heart all summer

and sips bitter insects steeped in nectar,
prima materia
of gleam-and-speed-away

A passion so intense

It driveth sorrow hence ...

"... an energy field more intense than war ..."

Mr. Solitary Crow makes an appearance.

A short visit to West Beach which looks out on the Strait of San Juan de Fuca in northwestern Washington State, about an hour south of where I have lived since this time of year in 1974.

*

MAKING PEACE

A voice from the dark called out,

'The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.'

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can't be imagined before it is made,

can't be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses. . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

~ Denise Levertov

 

What woke me up today

 

Witness

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

by Denise Levertov

*

Awake Awhile

It does not have to be Forever,

Right Now.

One Step upon the Sky's soft skirt

Would be enough.

by Hafiz

*

Awake

Waking today

just before winter

when I try to name the color of grasses,

how I feel of their beauty,

there is no word.

I think of the time before there were 

words

when you would know morning mist 

by the feel

of your loved one's skin and hair,

and when someone came from the forest 

of dry leaves

you would know by their scent

even if they carried no wood.

Or the heat of their body skin in summer.

Or if they came the winding way

down from the mountains

they would be covered in cloud

returning to the fold

or if they had gone farther, to the ocean,

you'd know them by their far-seeing eyes,

and when some travelers return

and are shining with light

you know, without saying, that they

have been

in touch with other worlds.

I have no wealth to speak of

other than this,

all this, just to praise the dry grasses

and their color that can't be spoken

in words.

by Linda Hogan

*

The way out is in / "A Noble Truth is a sacred creed" / Sounds of Silence / A voice from Kyiv / When the trees marched

Please Call Me By My True Names

From Plum Village App, regarding the talk on "War and Peace" with Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino:

They also discuss inherited war traumas; the importance of maintaining compassion and balance during these times; the limits of compassion; going beyond our ‘roles’ and ‘labels’; channeling anger; practicing when we feel ‘on the edge’; racism and discrimination; coming back to our humanity; cultivating love, peace, and nonviolence, every day. And: can we bear arms without hatred?

A Noble Truth is a sacred creed (Bob Dylan)

Thich Nhat Hanh was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967.

Thich Nhat Hanh's memory was evoked at a recent memorial service for a friend of the Lummi Nation.  Listen at 18:54:

*

 

It's so far out, the way out is in (George Harrison, lyrics from "Any Road")

*

Sounds of Silence

*

A voice from Kyiv

*

In the Woods

"Everything is threatened, but meanwhile

everything presents itself:

the trees that day and night

steadily stand there ..."

Denise Levertov 

*

Just now I remembered when the trees began marching in the Ring trilogy, by J. R. R. Tolkien.  These trees at Big Rock Garden are within walking distance of my home.

*

Nonviolence is not a tool.  Nonviolence is a way.

...

You may have to put somebody in jail.  You may have to stop.  You may have to even fight but your way of doing it doesn't come to destroy and hate but it is to establish peace.  It is to establish a relief of suffering.

(Brother Phap Huu)

"... Listen to the elders ..." / Douglas James (Sit ki kadem) / "O, the great sky!"

It was well worth my time to listen to everything Douglas James, Lummi elder, has to say.

If you don't have time to listen to all Douglas James has to say, click above for the short film that comes after he speaks and listen to Bill Tsi'li'xw James, hereditary chief of the Lummi people.

*

O, the great sky! 

(from "Silent Spring," by Denise Levertov)

Concurrence

Concurrence

Each days's terror, almost

a form of boredom -- madmen

at the wheel and

stepping on the gas and

the brakes no good --

and each day one,

sometimes two, morning-glories,

faultless, blue, blue sometimes

flecked with magenta, each

lit from within with

the first sunlight.

(Denise Levertov, from a collection titled The Life Around Us)

*

Maybe it was Robin who posted this video some time ago.  YouTube churned it up for me today,  My tears of joy and rage are close to the surface these days.

*

The earth is leaning sideways

And a song is emerging from the floods

And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun.

You must be friends with silence to hear.

The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful-

They are the most rare.

~ Joy Harjo from "Singing Everything"

Ukraine and the persistence of war

A song, written during the Vietnam War, came to mind this morning.  Turns out that the narrator for this YouTube video of a CBS show from 1967 is Leonard Bernstein.

The sorrow of war continues to haunt our world, as it has from time out of mind, intensified by the existence of nuclear weapons, thanks to the efforts of the United States to win a war.  In war, there are no winners.

The insanity of those who consider using nuclear weapons, including the United States, has never been more apparent.  The Ukraine is one of the countries that no longer has nuclear weapons but does have 15 nuclear power plants. 

*

"To put it simply, nuclear power plants are not designed for war zones," he added. "It seems exceedingly unlikely that Moscow would authorize deliberate attacks on these facilities, but they could nonetheless become targets in a war that will, in any case, disrupt their operations."

*

It Should Be Visible

If from Space not only sapphire continents,

swirling oceans, were visible, but the wars --

like bonfires, wildfires, forest conflagrations,

flame and smoky smoulder -- the Earth would seem

a bitter pomander ball bristling with poison cloves.

And each war fuelled with weapons: it should be visible

that great sums of money have been exchanged, 

great profits made, workers gainfully employed

to construct destruction, national economies distorted

so that these fires, these wars, may burn

and consume the joy of this one planet

which, seen from outside its transparent tender shell,

is so serene, so fortunate, with its water, air

and myriad forms of 'life that wants to live.'

It should be visible that this bluegreen globe

suffers a canker which is devouring it.

-- Denise Levertov

*

May there be peace for the people of Ukraine and all sentient beings.  Against all odds.

*

Refuge

When I was a child growing up in the hills on the outskirts of Redwood City on the San Francisco Peninsula, I spent much of my time reading in my bed and taking long solitary walks with our small family dog, Star, who was a beagle-fox terrier mix, black with a white star on his chest, a compromise because my father had wanted a beagle and my mother had wanted a fox terrier.  When I saw the header for this blog post, I knew I had walked in that place as a child but I wasn't sure where it was.  The simple photo of sunlight and shadow on a dusty path California clay path evokes a flood of rich childhood memories, sounds, sensations and how the California landscape held me and kept me safe.  It wasn't so much what the blogger wrote that brought back memories but his photographs.  He didn't walk in these places as a young girl in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

My best childhood memories are of exploring the natural world with our family dog and visiting the world beyond my world through books.  The blog post reminded me how fortunate I was to have lived where I lived at the time I did.  I doubt that small children or even older children are allowed to walk alone in the places that I walked alone.  I am also reminded that I was fortunate to have a mother who loved books and although she wasn't able to give me refuge in other ways and my deepest emotion in connection with her was fear, she shared her own ways of finding refuge from her own fears through books and art.

I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

Denise Levertov