Category Archives: Gratitude

Bird and Bugs (28)

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There is this little bird who comes to the corner of my mother’s back yard where I sit in the mornings when I can. Today she is poking around the pots of succulents looking for bugs, her white and gray and black and flashes of yellow vivid in the early sunlight. I watch her dart about, sip my yerba maté, warm cup cradled in both hands. I’ve only ever seen her by herself, and I wonder again today if she is all alone. I say metta for her. May you be safe and free from harm. May you have everything you need to thrive. May you be happy. May you have companionship if you want it. On the last wish, I can’t help thinking, oh, to me our companionship is dear. Later, I finally find her in my bird book, a yellow-rumped warbler. And, too, once I know what kind of bird she is, I see another of her species approach her. Scolding? Wanting sex? I haven’t seen her since, but I’m still hoping she’ll be back.

Morning (27)

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They are both still alive in the morning
one sprawled across the carpet in my room
in a patch of sun.
I know how lucky I am
because I was not loving
when I said good night
and if one of them had died
I’d have to carry that deep regret
all my days.

Third Blessing (26)

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I walk back down the hallway
to my room
and there is Venus rising
big and bright above the ridge
the sky just now growing light.
Again, this unlooked for gift
sweet recompense
for interrupted sleep
echoes of the last day of our year
a triad now of blessings.

In Between, or New Year’s Eve Day (25)

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I am up for my mother
in the dark.
In between trips down the hall to her
I sit on the edge of my bed
wait to see if she settles again
and see the fat crescent moon rising
above the ridge
the whole rim of the moon lit up, too
my big silver lining
I would have been asleep
missed this magic.
It is light when I go back to bed
the moon a long, lovely sliver in the sky
penultimate day of her cycle
daylight thinnest sickle of her
a second blessing
this last morning of our year.

Dear Readers (24)

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Dear Readers,

Those of you who have been with me here for a long time will know I often fall behind and catch up at the end of my year in order to meet my goal of writing one blog post for each year I’ve been alive.

This year has held extraordinary circumstances for us all, and I am indeed extraordinarily behind. I am trying to be kind to myself, to reach for ways to let life be a tiny bit easier. I don’t know if I can let myself “fail” in this. But I think I need to be open to the possibility since I would have to post 4 times each week in order to catch up.

So. I think I am writing to apologize to you for whichever way this falls out. I apologize in advance if I am not able to meet my goal and for going “missing” for much of ths year. (I had no idea I’d posted so few times!) And I apologize in advance in case I do make efforts to catch up, for the crazed flurry of posts I might inundate you with in the coming weeks.

I want to thank you, too, as always, for being my dear readers. However the rest of my sixty-third year unfolds, thank you. May life be as gentle with you as possible. And here’s to being together when I’m sixty-four. (Yes, there is a song in that!)

Love,
Riba

Visitors (23)

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This morning there is sun. It’s cold for southern California, and glorious after three days of steady rain. I feed the birds in my mother’s back yard, put up the lime green umbrella in my far corner, dry my edge of the white slatted table and the two chairs I use. I look up at the ridge and west across the valley, one of those rare days in L.A. where the air is clean and fresh. My tea is still steeping, so after I am set up in my corner of the back yard I head out the front gate to get the newspapers. I hear a hawk and look up in time to see her launch herself from Aida’s redwood, arc right above me, fly up the road to another tree. I talk to her from where I stand. Then a second call, a second launching right above me, and her mate flies southwest, disappears. He surprises me even more. Both of them! Had they been there all along, and I was just oblivious? The mama hawk flies back to Aida’s tree. It is the closest I’ve been to her when she wasn’t in flight. I talk to her. She listens, preens a bit. It feels comfortable, almost ordinary. We have a history together, she and I, one that mostly feels like a dream to me now. But I know in the core of me what happened was real. I don’t say it out loud right now, but she knows how much I love her. I just stand there looking up, wishing I could see her eyes. If she is broadcasting to me I am too dumb today to pick it up. But I know she loves me, too. It is an enduring source of awe for me, that this can be true. I stand still after she leaves, calling out once more. I am mute now, humbled, grateful. And I am all filled up with her, my unexpected red-tailed hawk friend.

Becoming (22)

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I’ve never been good at this, but I’ve always wanted to be. So when I get the sense for the first time that she has a message for me, I try to be able to receive it. I am surprised to get words. “Dissolve and blossom,” she tells me. I know right away she means my habit of fear, the armature that’s lived inside me all my life. Days later, in an almost dream when I am curled up in bed crying, wanting to forgive myself for being unkind to my mother in the unlooked for hours of the early morning, I see chicken wire in my heart and throat. After my fall, for a moment I understand she meant more than my fear, that her message was more akin to the sense I’ve had that I am being asked to surrender completely, to let go of all resistance, maybe, or allow all my holding on to dissolve, to slip back into the earth to become good things. I know this is impossible. But more and more in small moments, quiet tears sometimes sliding down my face, I believe in it, the incremental, invisible little bits of it, one unexpected moment here or there, and then the next.