Pink Coyote

Speechless

Miles and the marble roller coaster

It seems like we've been full of going and doing this season.  Miles is interested in so many different things that I can't seem to keep up.  The toys are getting more complex and involved, leaving me (she who is without her engineering degree) with my hands tangled and mind boggled.  This above number has been mastered by my dear husband, who is quite the architect.  While totally inappropriate for a two-year old to figure out on his own, once set up it is one of those highly prized "hours of fun" toys.  B even rigged it where the marble spits off of the end of the track, bounces on a drum, then on another drum, rolls down a xylophone and hits a tibetan bowl making a pleasing ping.  Best of all, this toy is manufactured in Italy.  Worst of all is that it's made of flimsy plastic! 

The weather is beginning to heat up in the valley and I feel like being indoors more.  I'm doing more reading and less writing, more sewing and less talking on the phone....little shifts.  Though chasing a two and a halfer around has been keeping me on my toes, I still feel quiet when it comes to this blog.  It is as if I have little to say except to report on the doings of our lives here.  As if I am responding to the world around me with no comment.

I'm not sure what it is exactly that's causing me to hold back the thought processes I've been so eager to share here in the past.  Has the cat got my tongue?!  I think it has something to do with the fact that I'm placing less importance on process and pondering.  I'm not sure my ego needs to be seen that way anymore.  I once loved to overanalyze and psychoanalyze-if a concept can be broken down into smaller bits, I've always jumped at the chance to figure it out.  I feel more in a surrendered place now, where not only am I improving at letting things go more quickly, I don't seem to be attached to the bits.  Whatever is happening, it feels like a chemical change that is altering me forever.  So weird!

I'm deeply enjoying the fruits of summer, all of the little moments that words can't even describe.  Maybe that's it!  Maybe at the moment life is just leaving me speechless.

  

I love the energy of this hug.  Miles woke two Thursdays ago to find that his Great Grammalo (Gramma Lois) had been sleeping in our guest room all night.  "Gramma-Wo happy to see Miles?", was his first question.  He's really into people being happy to see him.  Seems like there is no shortage of them lately! Our precious Grammalo spent a week here and we ate until all of us thought we would burst, and played so hard we missed bedtime by almost two hours every night.  It downpoured rain her final day here at Huntington Botanical Gardens, where a Great Blue Heron fished and flew across the water in the new Chinese Garden.  All of the water and the heron seemed like perfect symbols for an emotional day of parting.  We will miss you, lady.  Please move to Sacramento and be nearer to us! 

Since mother's day, it has been wild around here with visitors and clean up and long to-do lists that seem to be getting longer.  Checking in with myself today as I drove to work, I noticed I was lost in unconscious, tedious thoughts about absolutely nothing that mattered.  I burst through them by asking myself what it is that I hold sacred.  That word, sacred, means everything to me.  It brings me back to the quiet part of myself that seems whole, alive and grateful.    Here is what came to mind:

*Bedtime conversations in the dark with Miles and hearing him say his "night-nights" to everyone he loves

*Friends who are willing to stand in a fire with me

*The last ten minutes of sleep I get before rising to respond to the gong of demand

*The quietest time of night when my boys are sleeping and my thoughts belong to me

*Sitting on scratchy, orange wool blankets inside a sweat lodge

*Figuring out what my dreams mean while I'm having them

*Connecting with humans on the  table each day in a totally present way that is healing and meaningful to them

What do you hold sacred?

Favorite Things

 

oh,yes, i met these women ten years ago on the planet sark message board before it became trendy camp sark when everyone i knew was postcardfairying and eatingmangoesnaked and learning how to be comfortable in her own skin as the appeal to do was replaced by a seed of BE which scattered all over the world and we began to talk-oh, the talks! long and deep and intimate with a charge underneath it that shouted, "we can do anything we choose!" with flames and invitations and returns to love and lost loves and marriages, too, twisted hurricanes and earthquakes and fires come and gone we still meet, this time on the milkiest tit on the west coast....my beloved big sur.

my beloved elements!

we rhoooule the whhhuuuurlldd!

Bored If You're Boring

I once had this grade-school teacher who must've heard zillions of pre-pube kids complaining about being bored.  I can remember how whiny it sounded to hear someone say it, "I'iiimmm BORED."  Maybe that's why she responded the same way each time by saying "If you're bored, it's because you're boring."  Obviously it stuck with me and I think it may have been one of the many reasons that decided I could absolutely NOT be happy living a dull, lackluster life.  It was my first lesson in being responsible for my own inner state.  Many adventures and counting later, I continue to make an effort to entertain myself.

Spontaneous aside: Digging around in my wallet today, I found this fortune from some long-forgotten cookie that made me laugh- "Wealth is not only money. Wealth can be happiness in your sweetheart or your honey." 

Cheers to all that makes us happy...

Happy Earth Day!

While thinking long and lazily over Bombay Chai about what Miles and I could do to celebrate Earth Day this morning, we patchworked a quick mailbox together out of paper scraps, a shoebox and a brad.  The surfboard flag is in a shadow in the photo, but rather snazzy.  He loves LOVES getting mail and so I've been out sneaking little notes and cards in there so that when he checks it (every  ten minutes) there is a little surprise waiting for him. 

Back to Earth Day!  Earth Day is sort of every day for us, but one thing that we don't do that I'd like to is cruise our neighborhood and pick up paper and trash that gets blown around in the weekly blusters we seem to have here.  There is a blue Christmas bulb outside our gate stuck in a tumbleweed, for example that must have rolled over here a season ago that will be the first in my bag!

Most Alive Monday

My big boy went to his first airshow this weekend which thrilled him.  B's "Pap-Pap" used to take him to see World War II fighter planes when he was a little boy, so when he heard there would be a show near us, he had to go and see what Miles response would be.  M already loves trains, cars and anything that moves with wheels, -really, a total boy in that aspect.  Needless to say, he was all lit up and they sat in a copter and even a very old plane that had been flown to California rather precariously (it made many emergency landings on the way). 

Brandon and I have no positive feelings for war at all, so it is a bit of a paradox that we would take any joy in sharing war machines with our small son.  Perhaps it is the energy of the second World War and the immediate and urgent cause to stop Nazi Germany that makes it historically tolerable.  The stlyish and daring fighter pilots and the pride they took in their small, sometimes independently contracted planes have a nostalgic, artistic appeal to my husband.  I love the artwork associated with that era, too.

Raising a boy means walking the fine line of indulging his boyishness and imbuing him with the sense of respect for human and planetary life in the hopes that his generation will not be faced with atrocities that shut down the natural response to be gentle and kind.  One can wish.

We rather unconsciously juxtaposed the experience with the creation of a tiny house for brownies that Miles placed under the plum tree yesterday.  It was a full, easy weekend of wonder and family.

   

This post was inspired by my dear Wendy's Most Alive Monday project.