Tag Archives: awe

Peace of a Pacific Sunset

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It’s sort of a ridiculous assignment, to try and describe a sunset in ten lines. But ten lines are the rule. I made the rule. It’s an interesting task to try and tell a story in ten lines. Sometimes it works better than others. When I finished this poem, I thought wait! I didn’t mention that sometimes the air will seam to turn roseate before it fades to black and white. And there was certainly no time to mention that sometimes the dolphins dance in the waves or that the pelicans sail majestically by in freight train formation…

So what does a poem mean to a dream? I guess that both are always unfinished… or maybe just incomplete. Maybe it’s the good reminder that we are called to say what we see and that what we see isn’t in conflict. When we add one vision to another, we get a more complete, but never perfect vision. I see things differently than you so the overlap will never be precise.

As we begin to develop our dreams, there will be times when we realize there were pieces we didn’t include. Then we’ll have to decide, do we simply need to be aware of that? Do we need to find someone who is working on an allied dream? Or do we have enough to deal with in the dream we’ve created, imperfectly perfect as it is?

So, I guess I’ll just keep asking myself… What kind of peacemaker am I? How will that change this year? And how will I embrace the places where I miss the mark or simply don’t have the capabilities? And equally important, will I keep being open to the startling beauty of a sunset that is not like “mine” and allow it to stretch and modify my notion of beauty… and Peace.

The Slow Start of Peace

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When the sun peeks in my window, I wake up, and move fairly quickly from 0-60 mph. Those who receive my daily musings can attest to receiving them in the early morning for most of the year. But not right now. An early night doesn’t necessarily correspond to an early morning. The quick move from asleep to awake means that my dreams are left behind as I engage with the day. During this time, Nature has laid hold of my schedule and claimed it. As I sleep later and awaken more slowly, dream fragments stay with me and the day starts more softly. The warming cup of tea adds reflection to its normal heating and jolting work.

My friend Lenore read something and passed it along about an Arctic animal — maybe a squirrel? — that hibernates. (He apparently hibernates for 7-8 months a year. What a life!) Every two to three weeks, he uses a huge percentage of the energy stored up for the winter to rouse into a dream state. Then, dreaming completed, he drops back down into his stasis and waits for the cycle to continue until the thaw happens.

Since squirrels are probably not dreaming about Peace, what is so important about dreaming? What do they, what do we gain from lingering and snuggling? I don’t have a psycho-spiritual- physiological answer for that! I can only suggest that we try lingering and see if it makes a difference in our lives. And then, during the rest of the year, if we can find a way to allow that difference to grow and guide our lives. Fulfilling our dreams moves the world forward… but we can’t fulfill them if we don’t stop and dream them first. “Slow down, you move too fast.” Have a groovy day!

The Peace of Winter Trees

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I was delighted when I studied Chinese Five Element Theory and discovered that it includes a Fifth Element, Wood, one of whose functions is flexibility. In our busy urban lives it is an element to which we pay too little attention. Tree hugging — actual rather than philosophicall! — is really quite balancing for our health. It improves our spiritual and mental flexibility. Most of us can use that! (as for whether tree-hugging, philosophical, is virtuous, I invite you to discuss amongst yourselves… but I would, no great surprise to any of you, come down on the side of the trees.)

One of the joys of learning the five element theory was the need to suspend disbelief and learn something completely new. I compare it to learning the alphabet. If you spend your life trying to figure out why the would designate this symbol A as the letter A, you’ll miss the astonishing things that can happen when you break the code of reading. Here’s to learning new things and believing six impossible things before breakfast!

And of course here’s to trees and all the wonderful things they teach us, of which flexibility is only one!

Sunset Peace

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My mother Betty was a landscape artist. Thanks to her, we spent a lot of time captivated by what was going on outside. I now know that she taught me first to look and then to see. One of the things we saw was sunsets. In her quest to teach us about beauty, she had two helpers with sunsets.

First, on the days that Mom had the car (remember those days when families had one car!) we went down to pick Daddy up from the carpet mill where he was a dye chemist at 4:30. We drove directly West. For some parts of the year the sun and clouds would be inescapable.

Second, our dining room faced west. Mom taught me a lot about stopping whatever you were doing to look at the sunset. This served me well when I lived in the Oakland hills and would watch the sun travel its path between South San Francisco to Mt. Tam and back, offering a different sunset delight every day. The Gods of the Bay Area must love sunset, because it was often the clearest part of the day.

Deb wound up with both Mom’s sunset paintings. We all visit them when we visit her. The painting above is Mom’s view out our diningroom window. So it won’t surprise you that I find a joyful Peace in sunset… or that I stop and gulp to gawk at the beauty.

Awe

Creation is so much larger than we are usually willing to contemplate. It can take standing at the edge of Grand Canyon, or some equally immense site to help you understand how vast and how ancient this world is.

A favorite Sandra Boyton card showed a bear standing at the edge of a precipice saying something like: As I stand at the edge of the world, looking into the night sky, I am amazed at how small am I. (I’m sure it’s small and petty of me that what I loved about the card is that you opened it up and it said, “it’s amazing how small you can be.” I would never send the card. But I bought it and it sends me into gales of laughter every time I come across it!)

Sorry, back on track. It’s difficult to live in the vastness. And so we retreat. We can only observe the grandiosity and then have to back off to what we can comprehend. If you read Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” or watch her TED talk, she talks about the wonder of her left brain’s shutting down and the right side, which connects with the universal expanding and expanding and expanding. She loved it, but understood that it was not real world.

Awe is in that universal place. And awe is in awful because we are not able to stay in that universal place. It is at once and the same time wonderful and terrible. Or maybe terrifying.  How can there be that much?

And so we retreat back to the mundane. But if we do not continually visit that place of inspiration, we miss at least half of all that makes life wonderful. And I don’t believe that in the face of that wonder, we can feel anything other than connected (by our insignificance). I can’t imagine that you can stand at the South Rim of the Canyon and think “I should own this. and you should not.” Instead you think “this is holy ground.”

So perhaps when we need to make peace, we should go to these sacred places, on our own or with those people with whom we have disagreements and allow the vastness to bring our petty squabbles into perspective. And then we should deal kindly with one another.