La Push Poem

I remember nothing before this. I arrived here on some current I could not control. I tumbled and bounced. My roughness was smoothed away on the long journey till I no longer cared what I looked like.

I had begun to accept the drowning heavy weight that held me in blackness. And then, under a dark moon I was left here, drying to a dull gray.

I have begun to call her Mother, the one who pulls me in and washes me and then leaves me here again and goes away. (I have seen the mother seals do this with their pups on the far rocks.)

There is such a clamor with many of us rolling in and out of our Mother, though usually I am left alone when she is gone.

I have begun to call him Father who comes around with a slow warmth sometimes and sometimes a bright heat so I cannot look him in the eye. He does not come when the stars are near. I know these are other fathers travelling home, just as mine is.

There is talk from the legged ones that this one or that one is beautiful. They do not know I can hear them. Mother says I am part of a beautiful pattern that is spun out on the sand each time she goes away.

This beauty, she says, cannot be seen from where I am, but that Father and all the fathers can see it. Even the Mother Seals can see it, and any who fly or wander by. She says that Beauty is in what we are together and not in who we are alone.

photos and poem by Catherine Alice Michaelis

Eternity

This is my ultimate favorite flower picture from our travels in June. It is a cactus flower and I just stuck my camera's nose into the middle and took this photo. It is totally unaltered.

Eternity - as in forever and ever and ever - has been on my mind a lot lately. I think flowers and plants inspire thoughts of the eternal, at least for me. I had a teacher who said that flowers symbolize fulfillment and seeds symbolize potential. While this is true, I also see the reverse: flowers are all about the potential fertilization of seeds in the ovary and their future dispersal, and seeds are all about the fulfillment of the flower in perpetuating its species. It's a chicken and egg kind of thing.

But besides that, flowers and plants cycle around seasonally, breaking up forever and ever into manageable circling chunks of time that we can take in without panicking. The seasonal changes assure that while time keeps going on, things stay the same, and plant cycles are part of that pattern.

Our recent travels took us to Arches National Park. It was an experience of stepping both backward and forward in time. As we drove near the park, via the lesser used highway, we drove along the Colorado River. Slowly we started a descent along red walls that got higher and higher. I thought it interesting that while what is at the bottom of the canyon walls would be the most recently revealed through erosion, it would also be the oldest layers thus far uncovered. In some odd way the present moment and the far past were connected and experiencing each other. And while the future kept unfolding forward, the past kept unraveling backward. For me this created a feeling of eternity. Like the ouroborous snake that circles around and swallows its tail. We were always at the beginning and ending of time.

In the actual boundary of Arches National Park it was different. Here it was just the past over and over and over. Grains of sand whipping around in 80 mph gusts scouring everything, including us. Water worn arches and formations now in dry desert wearing down so slow that I felt time would end when the world is flat.

Being at the coast also evokes timelessness. While the waves go in and out over and over a thousand times a day, the ocean beyond the white foam frills is steady and unchanging. It breathes like a sleeping giant so huge we can only see the heave of its chest going up and down. The changing tide is not marking time at all, just the result of the giant turning this way and that, pulling the covers away and then flinging them back. What would it mean if the giant wakes?

At the coast there are sand patterns whose geometries repeat over and over. To see how the wave patterns go up and down the beach carrying little pebbles that resist return can create such intricate patterning amazes me!

Patterns are all about eternity to me. Patterns have arbitrary boundaries created by humans or nature, but if they were not bounded, they would have no limit. They would just repeat on and on. Fractals are an example of eternity patterning as well.

I make efforts to step back as far as I can in hopes of seeing the larger pattern of which I am just a grain of sand.

The sand, sea, the plants and us are all made of the same stuff in different combinations. Today I am "me" but I may turn into all kinds of things after I die. Not in a reincarnated sort of way, but in the way that all matter decays and transforms as energy into something else. If you believe science, everything that exists has always existed.

I can believe science for now, but after I die and become something else or many something else's or just compost for a long long time, I may not believe in science anymore. I probably won't believe in anything. I think eternity has a way of eroding all beliefs, because if you observe long enough, I think all beliefs are proved false.

Small Decisions That Changed Everything

Each New Year's Day I can't help but think of Florence. Her and her family brought so much into my life, and into the lives of many. These flowers were scattered new year's day into the Gulf of Mexico in the same place Florence and her husband's ashes were tossed. It's a ritual her daughters and son-in-laws, and once myself, perform each year about this time. I feel so honored to have been included.

For 25 years, along with whatever else I was doing, I did end-of-life care for over 30 people in Seattle and on Vashon Island. Florence was my last hospice client. I almost didn't take the job. It seemed very short term and not many hours. At least at first. I ended up caring for Florence for 7 1/2 years. And she took care of me, too. She showered me with love. You never know when you take on a job what it will bring, and this job was one of those that at the beginning I could have had no idea what gifts would be opened up. And they keep opening.

Every day of ours lives is like that. Last night at a friend's for New Year's Eve, Kevin asked each one of us to share a decision we had made in the last year and what that decision meant for us. It was amazing to hear what people shared. And today as the new year begins I have been reflecting on some of the smallest decisions I have made and what results they have brought. They are like Russian dolls, but beginning with the smallest, the result of the decision gets bigger and bigger as the ramifications unfold.

Of course one of them was the decision to go to a Peruvian mysticism community outreach meeting on a day when I was sick and and at a time when I didn't travel off Vashon Island very much. That was where I met Bill. Two months later I realized I was in love, and three months after that we were married. As cliche as it sounds, the day we married was the happiest day of my life to date, though truly, I have had so many days with Bill that have been nearly as equal. This was three and a half years ago, and I think of it as the beginning of my life.

This reminds of a day in January in 1984, I was 23 years old. A friend asked me to take a tai chi class with her so she wouldn't have to go alone. I didn't know anything about tai chi, but decided I would go and try it. The teacher talked about her recent trip to China as part of a group tour. At the end of the first class I turned to my friend and told her I was going to China. To put this in perspective, I had never travelled outside the country, I didn't have a passport, and I didn't know China was "closed," though it opened to individual traveller's that year. I just felt compelled, like a force beyond myself was guiding me, and I had no choice at that point. A year and half later, I was there. I loved it! I spent 3 months travelling around with a woman friend, Connie, who asked to join me just before I was to leave.

We went to lots of wonderful places in China.

Saw amazing things.

We met wonderful people everywhere.

We were invited in for tea, a meal, a party, an english lesson. Rarely did anyone speak english, and we knew no Chinese.

We ate great food, all the time.

And we stayed in some charming places.

Because of Connie, we went to Tibet, and again, because of Connie (more adventurous than I) we went to Nepal. But there in Tibet I met Narayan, a Nepali mountain climber who would also change my life. Once in Kathmandu, he took charge of my sightseeing and even took me trekking.

Narayan died just a few years later in an avalanche on Mt. Everest. His death brought me closer to these good friends of his who would become family, bringing so much love and joy into my life.

My Nepali "sister" Lalita holding her son Bijay, me with their daughter Rashmi in front, and Lalita's husband Hom in 1985. They would go on to have two more children, twin boys.

Rashmi is grown and married with a little girl of her own, Aleya.

Her brother Bijay is married as well, and they have a son, Arush.

I would return to Asia soon to live in Japan, but that is another story for another time.

Only as I write these two "small decision events" right now am I realizing they both have a spiritual beginning.

And that leads me to one last realization about a small decision. It was the decision to take an astrology class that inspired me to finally sit down and read Julia Brayshaw's beautiful book: "Medicine of Place." I realized then that Julia, who was joining my astrology class, was an avid sacred geometer, as am I. We got together for soup and sharing and our Sacred Geometry Study Group was soon born, and grew fast! This has been such a gift for me. As well as pushing me to deepen my spiritual studies through geometry, it has brought me into circle with some of the most wonderful people in Olympia. They have become important friends that feed my heart.

The marriage of five and six. Inspired by John Michell's book: "How the World is Made: The Story of Creation According to Geometry.

I wonder what I am doing now, or have done recently, that will be one of these great unfoldings of wonder. I can tell you I called an old friend, Kim, from high school the other day. We don't talk or see each other often, sometimes years go by. Late in the conversation I told Kim I was reading the "Bagavad Gita" and really getting so much out of it. She told me she tried to take a class in that when we were freshmen in college, but it was too hard. She told be she was reading "Autobiography of a Yogi." Bill had traded for that book last summer and I have been wanting to read it. But there is always so much to read. Kim said she was a little bogged down in the book and I suggested I read it too so we could talk about it and help each other along. Well, in three days I am over half way through book. And I am already wondering, is this "small" decision to read this book going to change my life?

(One of Bill's drawings from a group geometry night.)