Nearly full moon – late afternoon – Photo: L. Weikel
Super Pink Moon
Wow. We’ve already had two ‘super’ full moons in 2020, with tomorrow’s Super Pink Moon promising to be the ‘biggest’ of them all. That’s because our celestial little sister will be closer to the Earth for tomorrow night’s display than it’s been for the first two.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the full moons since this past December particularly intense. Between eclipses and super moons, in a lot of ways it’s felt as though we’ve been whipsawed from one challenging (and I use that word charitably) experience to another.
And now, of course…here we find ourselves. In uncharted territory, to put it mildly.
Pluto and Jupiter’s Added Influence
As if most of us don’t already notice an uptick in sensitivity or perhaps emotional volatility near the full moon, tomorrow’s cosmic event is almost guaranteed to hit us with a good thwack. That’s because in addition to the Super Pink Moon being the one that will appear biggest and most beautiful (and thus almost certainly tug on our heads and hearts most powerfully), it is occurring while Jupiter and Pluto are sitting practically on top of each other (known as being ‘conjunct’ with each other).
Just to give you a thumbnail sketch, Pluto is the ruler of life/death/rebirth, dramatic upheaval, destruction, and transformation. Jupiter basically makes everything ‘bigger.’ And in 2020, these two planets will be ‘conjunct’ with each other three times: April 4th (yes, here we are, just starting to realize the utter enormity of Covid-19’s impact on our entire world), June 30th, and then November 12th (oh goody – nine days after our scheduled presidential election). What could go wrong!?
Given everything we’re going through at the moment, here’s an especially intriguing article.
A Monumental Time
I’m pointing all of this out because I find it fascinating how so much of what we’re experiencing is reflected in the cosmos. And I, at least, find it helpful to try to bear in mind that knowledge is power.
No, we may not be able to shift the alignment of the planets or avoid (or prevent) the impact of these celestial conjunctions and the emotional wallop a super full moon might have on our experience and perception of everything that’s going on around us. But realizing that all of this is unfolding and impacting how we feel about it all can temper its impact – even if just a little bit.
And right now? We need all the awareness, compassion, and kindness toward ourselves, each other, and our collective emotions as we can muster.
So, please. As the next couple days unfold, remember the gigantic forces at play right now and be gentle – with yourselves and with everyone you encounter (which hopefully will not be all that many people since we’re supposed to be staying home!).
Give yourself a chance to check out that Super Moon as it rises tomorrow. And as you do, perhaps you can close your eyes and tap into the energies you may have seen or felt when you did that global meditation the other evening. Open your heart to love and healing. And let us all hold onto our hope.
A couple things came to my attention today that drive home the adage that ‘everything can change in the blink of an eye.’
Not that I’m unfamiliar with the floor of my world dropping out from under me. But the feeling that accompanies drastic change in our lives (usually on the ‘awful’ end of the spectrum), is rarely something we want to repeat or actively seek.
One occurrence that shook me was seeing a friend of the family post on FB that their home was lost in a fire this morning. A home in which two girls spent their entire lives growing up – charred beyond measure. Treasured and irreplaceable family heirlooms – up in smoke. Worse yet? Family pets. All but one (a cat receiving medical treatment tonight) presumed or confirmed dead.
Loss
This family has been on my mind all day. I sit in my home of 35 years, surrounded by my beloved pups and kits, and my heart can only flirt with the sorrow and horror I’d feel to lose so much in such a ravaging manner.
And while I absolutely value the preciousness of all life and am grateful human lives were spared, I imagine the loss of photos and journals, and a myriad of other utterly unique, tangible items that were artifacts of lives lived by their ancestors leave a terribly raw and open wound in their hearts. It’s precisely the irreplaceable nature of these items that make their loss tragic.
The loss is stark. Only memories remain. And these realizations of impermanence are harsh.
The Little Things
I imagine that shock has probably overcome the family by now. A certain numbness to the magnitude of loss takes over so we don’t implode on ourselves.
The big stuff, in many ways, is probably most easily replaceable. It may not be Grandma’s four poster bed, but a beautiful bedroom set can be acquired. Same with many other ‘things’ we surround ourselves with in our homes.
No, the excruciating pain will probably come in the form of a daily drip of realizing all the little things that have been lost. Stuff we all take for granted. Little things that are so ingrained as a part of our daily lives that it’s not until we reflexively look for them or think, “That must be in the attic…” that we realize yet again what’s gone.
And the worst part may be that intangible loss: that feeling of being swept out of that home and off that land – no matter how large or small the plot of earth that stood beneath their house. That sense of possibly never sleeping there again, the impact of realizing they may never look out windows onto the familiar trees or grass or skyline they’ve lived with and gazed upon for decades, will only gradually dawn on them.
When others experience horrific tragedies, it’s only human to empathize and reflect upon how we would feel if thrust into the same circumstances.
In the blink of an eye, everything can change for any of us. It is cliché, perhaps, to suggest that we look around and appreciate our lives and circumstances. But nevertheless, it behooves us to do it. Take a moment. Look around you. Appreciate your many blessings.
And send compassion and courage to those who, in the blink of an eye, have lost so much.
After my session with a client today, I made a quick stop for a couple groceries. As I left the store, I decided to take the slightly more circuitous route home, which is actually my favorite way because it takes me alongside my beloved Tohickon. Almost always, when I take that route, I also give in to the temptation to stop and write for several minutes. Since it was drizzling out, I figured Karl wouldn’t want to walk, so the prospect of writing a page or two in my journal beckoned enticingly.
As I rounded the corner and approached a turnoff close to the creek, I encountered this sight: a man with his van door askew, seeming to herd a small deer into the front seat. I stopped a fair distance away, trying to get a better idea of what, exactly, I was seeing, and not wanting to add to the confusion by pulling up too close.
Photo: L. Weikel
I hadn’t been observing for more than minute when I realized the little one was definitely confused, and didn’t seem to be readily scampering off into the brush as the man was clearly trying to persuade it to do. It was hard to tell whether her sight was impaired, but it was clear she didn’t know which way to turn.
Dazed and Definitely Confused
At first, I rolled down my window and asked if I could help. His vehicle was a little over the center line and it was dangerously close to a corner where I know people often approach at a good, if oblivious, clip. The man welcomed my help, thinking maybe the two of us could herd her with more success. He said he’d just come upon her before I arrived and she’d almost walked right into the side of his van. He believed she’d recently been hit by a car – grazed, perhaps – but was probably going into shock.
Together, and with the rather aggressive and unexpected aid of another man who’d stopped behind my car, jumped out of his vehicle, and insisted upon yelling and waving his hands at her, trying to scare or bully her into getting off the road, we at least managed to steer her to the side of the road that had a deer trail leading off into the brush. She refused to get off the road, though.
Photo: L. Weikel
Rush Hour
When cars started piling up in both directions (remember, this is a country road; the trickier part was that it was right around 5:30 p.m.), the first man impulsively picked the deer up and placed her on the bank of weeds and brush just off the paved portion of the road.
Stunned, she just stood there, not more than two feet from the edge of the road. The drizzle had turned to a more steady rain by this time, and the four or five cars that had stopped in both directions had taken turns and moved along. Three or four stopped to ask if they could help. Most, sadly, barely put their foot near the brakes at all as they rounded the turn and came upon us.
Calling For Backup
As soon as he picked her up and placed her on the side of the road, the first man left. Another had parked his pickup on a triangular patch of land about a hundred feet away and came over to the deer and me. He suggested we call the police. Instead, I tried calling AARK, our local wildlife rehabilitation foundation, but of course they were closed for the day. No matter what we did, we could not get her to budge from where the first man had ‘deposited’ her. And neither one of us trusted that she wouldn’t immediately dart back into the road if we left her where she was.
Photo: L. Weikel
I called 911 and let them know our situation. About 15 minutes later, an officer arrived. In the meantime, the man, who introduced himself as John, and I stuck with her. As you can see from my photos, she let me get very close to her; in fact, I petted her head and neck, cooed and spoke softly to her the entire time, telling her that she needed to get further off the road and bed down. John said he’d heard a young deer had been wandering around the neighborhood the past few days; word was that the mother had been hit and killed and the youngster was lost without her.
When the policeman arrived, he was very sympathetic, but his options were limited. In fact, because she was not in the roadway at the moment, he could not technically do anything. (If she had been in the road…the option was not a pretty one.)
Banged and Confused
Neither John nor I were comfortable leaving her so close to the road, nor did we want her to be ‘put down.’ Being up so close to her, it did look like she’d been hit – grazed or banged her head – because she had some blood coming out of her nostril. Not a lot. And there was a little on her foreleg, but she clearly had no broken bones.
I was reminded of my screech owl, Hootie, who’d flown into my driver side door one snowy January night and nearly knocked himself out. (A story for another day.) That experience had taught me that animals can be extremely resilient if given an opportunity to heal.
Photo: L. Weikel
Into the Thicket
Once I realized we humans were just hemming and hawing, I decided to do something. I climbed up the rain-slicked, slight embankment so I was right beside her (hoping she wouldn’t get scared and dart out toward John and the policeman), picked her up, and started guiding her deeper into the thicket. I was delighted to see the vast amounts of poison ivy all around my sandaled feet. At one point, she balked and suddenly backed up, squeezing between my legs. The weeds and pricker bushes were positioned such that I had to carefully pick my way around them and circle back to get behind her once again and start all over.
All this time, John, the policeman, and another person who’d pulled up (I believe John’s daughter-in-law, from their conversation) were chatting and, I assume, watching me act as an erstwhile deerpoke-cum-whisperer. After a few more mutually clumsy thrusts and lunges deeper into the brush, she calmly looked up at me, bent her forelegs and knelt in front of me. She then gently settled herself into a bedding position and assured me she’d stay for the night.
It was raining softly. I was a bit chilled. But she was at least somewhat protected from the harshest of the elements. We all agreed that we’d done what we could, and it was up to her and Mother Nature to see if she would survive.
Yet another deer encounter…hopefully this one has a good ending as well.
We all know it’s the little things. It’s the little things that push us over the edge. It’s the little things that can trigger road rage and make us go from pleasant to demented in two seconds flat.
It’s the little things that make life worth living.
It’s the little things, sometimes, that serve to bring a smile to our face just in time to shift whatever barometer we have within us to perceiving life as reflecting a rainbow rather than embodying a fogbank or a massive cloudburst.
There’s a big difference between those three ‘weather events’ and how they impact us (especially if we’re taking a walk when experiencing them). And sometimes it’s hard to perceive whether we’re impacting the weather or it’s impacting us. Are we the chicken? Or are we the egg?
Yikes. I’m all over the place tonight.
It’s stemming at least partly from the photo I want to ‘feature’ tonight (which I’d hoped to post last night, but we all know how well that went).
A Smidge of a Rainbow
I took tonight’s photo (above) last night as Karl and I traversed the ‘walkabout’ with Spartacus and Sheila (The ‘walkabout’ is the ~4 mile route we routinely take, as opposed to the ‘walk-around,’ which is 2.1 miles.)
I was tired when we walked last night. And feeling some uneasiness over the state of the world. (Oh wow, how ridiculous is that? ‘Some uneasiness?’ The banality of that statement is laughable.) But it’s true. Karl and I were both just sort of skating along on the surface. We even commented on how sort of ‘stuck in neutral’ we’re both feeling – paying attention to what’s going on in the world but trying our best not to get ‘hooked’ into any of it.
That’s hard.
We made a point of not digging too deeply into the specifics. We kept changing the subject, because we knew how easily we could become mired in misery.
I’m not going to recite what was (and is) going on ‘out there.’ Most of you, I suspect (with a few notable exceptions – and you know who you are!) are committed to remaining informed and many of you are activists, or you at least try to make a difference where you can. So whether our awareness of the current atrocities and outrages being visited upon our fellow Earth brothers and sisters (and Mother Earth herself) is conscious or not, we’re still picking up on the overall energy ‘out there.’ And it’s devolving.
As a result, as our mothers taught us, if we can’t say anything nice, we don’t say anything at all. Unsurprisingly, then, a good portion of our walks lately have been in silence.
Prickly Beauty of Thistle – Photo: L. Weikel
A Smidge of Love
So imagine my delight when I looked up at the sky – with no (truly, zero) expectation of seeing anything out of the ordinary – and caught sight of that smidgen of a rainbow.
It felt like an unexpected hug. No, it wasn’t some two page spread of a Technicolor spectacle. But neither was it a mere ‘rainbow dog.’ (And let me be clear: I’m not disparaging rainbow dogs. But you have to admit, they’re usually quite tiny.) It was real; it was unexpected; and it was a ray of hope. It made me smile, inside and out. It shifted my energy and kicked my perspective up a notch or two.
So of course, what was the first thing out of my mouth when I saw it? “I need to try to capture that!” I declared. “I want to share it tonight.”
We need each other. We need to give – and be – smidgens of rainbows for each other: Sharing unexpected smiles. Knowing, compassionate glances. Generous laughter.
Quick hugs, too – even if it’s just with our eyes or our words. Because it’s important, especially now, to know in our bones that we’re not alone, and that love will prevail.
I look at that post title and, just like when I had my birthday back in March, I think, “Wow. How did we get here?”
Birthdays and anniversaries. Markers of the passage of time.
Karl and I were married at 10:00 a.m. on June 28, 1980. And lucky for us, at 10:00 a.m. on June 28, 2019, we were sitting together on a rock that juts into the flowing waters of the Tohickon Creek.
Transported from one sacred place to another in, what only in retrospect, feels like the blink of an eye. The living of it sometimes felt like time was moving ever so slowly; so slowly that it felt like yearned-for change would never actually happen. And other times, the living of it felt like the rug, the very fabric of our lives, was being pulled out from under us. Irrevocable, instantaneous, radical change.
At Karl’s Gathering – Photo: Ellen Naughton
Through these past 39 years (and more, actually, since we met three years earlier), the one constant in my life has been Karl. Through education achievements, career changes, sudden death of a parent, depression, births of children, longer, more prolonged sicknesses and deaths of parents, spiritual discoveries, soccer tournaments, track meets, musicals, graduations, disappointments, college admissions, Siberia, initiations, sudden death of a(n adult) child, weddings, joys, walks…
It’s been us.
The loneliest times in my life have been when there’s been discord between us. Those were the times when I most deeply questioned everything.
Gratitude for the Luck – and the Choices We’ve Made
Given the particular professions I engage in, I’m acutely aware of how much work it’s been for us to remain a true, working partnership and best friendship through thick and thin. But I’m even more aware of how lucky we are. So much of what we’ve endured could have easily torn us asunder. But each of us, at critical junctures, chose to stay. We chose to talk. We chose to take a walk instead of storming out and staying away, perhaps pouring our souls out to someone other than each other. We chose to listen.
We chose to forgive. We chose to have compassion.
We also, as one friend reminds us every once in a while because she simply could not believe it when she ran into us laughing and joking in the parking lot of our local grocery store – chose to enjoy crazy things like renting a carpet cleaner to steam clean our rugs together.
“It’s the little things,” we said, laughing at how odd we must’ve seemed.
I do so very much love those little things we share. And the big ones. But most of all, I’m grateful to have Karl sharing them – all – with me.
At Tohickon Creek – 28 June 2019 – Photo: L. Weikel
Funny. I never call Thanksgiving “Turkey Day,” but here I am titling my blog post for today “Turkey Day.”
I didn’t eat turkey today, nor did I even see one (either in the wild or on a platter).
But I thought of turkeys today – and the meaning of Turkey as conveyed by my beloved Medicine Cards – and in spite of myself, kind of felt a little sad.
One of the paragraphs in Turkey goes as follows:
“Spectators unfamiliar with the cultural phenomenon of the pot-latch or give-away ceremony are often mystified by it. A tribal member may gladly give away all he or she owns, and do without in order to help the People. In present-day urban life, we are taught to acquire and get ahead. The person with the most toys wins the game. In some cultures, no one can win the game unless the whole of the People’s needs are met. A person who claims more than his or her share is looked upon as selfish or crazy or both. The poor, the aged, and the feeble have honor. The person who gives away the most and carries the burdens of the people is one of the most respected.”
What’s Mine? Yours? Ours? Theirs?
There’s a lot of focus these days on what’s ‘mine,’ what’s ‘yours,’ what’s theirs,’ and what’s ‘ours.’ And there are a lot of people claiming an astoundingly greater portion of a lot of our resources than could even remotely be considered their ‘share.’
And I will be the first to admit that I do not consistently embody the spirit conveyed within this paragraph. I don’t even come close. But I aspire to do so.
And I wonder how much better so many people in the world would feel if everyone just thought a little bit more about someone else. Not only the people who were ‘thought of,’ but also the people who do the thinking of others. It could be such a colossally ‘win-win’ of a situation.
The joy of making another person smile and know they’re loved – it’s huge. The joy of letting another person know they make a difference in your life and you appreciate them for it – can change their life forever. The joy of taking a moment to be kind, to be generous, to be patient, or to be compassionate – can make your life worth living.
Sometimes the smallest gestures, such as looking directly into a person’s eyes when you listen to them, can make everything seem a little bit brighter.
Aspire to make a difference. Smile. Be grateful. You matter.
