My thoughts for today actually arose from our wind storm this past Thursday. It had been a noisy night of windblown objects hitting the outside wall, and in the morning, I drove my grandchildren to school past streets strewed with palm fronds and tree branches, while the wind gathered strength minute by minute. I caught a parking spot just across the street from the school gates but the wind was fierce. Debris bounced across the street and through the yards, trees bending, signs swaying. As I helped the little ones out on the passenger side, intense gusts pushed us, almost knocking us over! There was a tree at the sidewalk edge and I instinctively grabbed their hands and wrapped them around the trunk, shouting over the wind, "Hold on tight!" They bravely clung to the tree trunk as I grabbed backpacks and shut car doors. Hand in hand, we all ran across the street and up the hill to the last opened gate, fighting the wind all the way until I delivered them to their teachers.
When I arrived home and sat in meditation, a memory surface of an afternoon in Palm Springs twenty years ago. I was sitting in stillness with my friend and teacher U.G. The wind outside was gusting then, and U.G. began to talk about a-causal events--that cause and effect are one movement and “the stimulus and the response are one movement.” As he spoke, his hands were in motion and at one point he raised an arm, while watching a swaying palm tree outside. He quietly spoke: “That tree out there, that branch moving is responsible for the lifting of my arm.” The room fell silent. In a flash of clarity and acceptance, I "saw" the interweaving of life, human beings and nature as one movement, there, in that room.
After my morning meditation I remembered that just last week we had been caught in an unexpected thunder storm as school let out. I drove the kids home, waiting near the front door. while the car was battered with a torrent of rain, lightening, and roaring thunder. Instinct told me to back up away from the trees on the curb and wait it out a bit, even though it was a short run to the house. Then the hail started! I was texting my son-in-law with an update, when the storm slightly receded and he came running up the walk to scoop up the kids, one by one, into the house with me following behind. Over the next 2 hours, the storm passed as quickly as it had arrived.
I saw again how instinctive our actions had been in the wind, as we-grabbed the tree that was just where it needed to be that morning; how we ran into the wind, dodging the dangers, focused on that space of grace. I thought of all the mornings we had driven past that tree, never really noticing it in the early morning rush. Yet, something in each of us--maybe even more so for a child--knows we too are a part of all that is green, we too belong with the multi-colored flowers that the kids love to pick, and the rocks they 'ooh and awe' over and the mystery of sudden storms, even in our age of atmospheric science. Yes, nature can be treacherous, but perhaps our solutions rest in the realization that we spring from the same Source. We depend on each other: people, animals, trees, bugs, wind, sun and moon...Life. We live with each other; move with each other.
By afternoon pickup time, the wind had settled. We walked up the hill, scouring for 4 leaf clovers and plotting Leprechaun traps for today, St. Patrick Day, as a door that opens to Spring. I invite you to take the time today to discover moments that move with the flow of Life. That movement is in you, moves as you. Life as one movement. (Susan Nettleton)
for poetry:
http://warpandwolf.blogspot.com/.../wind-will-blow-it-all...
https://breadsite.org/lyrics/530.htm
https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/.../PeaceofWild/index.html
https://hillsidesource.com/daily-thoughts/2018/6/28/letting-go-is-trust?rq=Letting%20Go%20is%20Trust