The Hill We Climb

It is 10 degrees outside, bright and sunny, and the landscape is blanketed in white.  Our son, Chris likes to say that there is always a bird party in our backyard because of the feeders and suet baskets that Ashley fills regularly.  Right now, I am watching chickadees, juncos, cardinals, nuthatches, and house finches swoop in toward the closest feeder, enjoying lunch on a very cold day.  Last night, I bundled up and went outside to stand under the bright wolf moon, and to gaze at the stars above our house and the shadows cast by trees on the fields.  I felt grateful to be alive and well in January, 2021.  

While this day to day life happens and the seasons turn, the pandemic rages and the divisions in our country and threats to our democracy continue.  Even as we settle into new leadership that is working to bring steadiness, calm, real help, and dignity to all of us.  Ashley and I listen regularly to David Brooks, a moderate Republican, on the PBS News Hour and read his editorials in the New York Times.  On January 21, he wrote this:

Just by who he is, Biden sets the stage for a moral revival. His values cut across the left/right, urban/rural culture war we’ve been enduring for a generation.  This will begin to heal a broken and ungovernable nation. Next, Biden will work to depoliticize American life. Over the last years, politics was about everything except actual governance. Under Trump, partisanship was about personal identity, class resentment, religious affiliation, racial prejudice and cultural animosity.

I was shocked by how moved I was by the Biden inaugural. We’ve been through an emotional hailstorm over four years. Suddenly the sky has cleared. It’s possible America may emerge from this trauma more transformed than we can imagine.

This is what I keep my eye and heart focused on these days…a long view that the time has come to honor the pluralism and beauty that is our country and our planet and to work to protect and sustain all of us.  

A powerful piece of the Inauguration was seeing and listening to Amanda Gorman read her poem, “The Hill We Climb.”  A glowing, powerful, graceful young Black woman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, recited a moving and beautiful poem about our history, our struggles, our democracy, and the future that is before us to create.  

She ends her inaugural poem with these lines:

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it

Amanda Gorman reading at the Biden Harris Inauguration, January 20, 2021 Credit @bideninaugural Instagram

To hear a such a brilliant poem that in many ways is both instructional and visionary was uplifting and brought many of us to tears.  We have been missing this infusion of beauty and culture from our leaders for a long time. 

Vea Vecchi, long time atelierista and researcher in the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, often speaks  about the fundamental place of aesthetics and poetics in learning, in understanding, in growing to love the world.  In Reggio Emilia, educators believe that learning without this element is incomplete and impoverished.  

In her TEDx talk in 2011, Vea says:

Within its very structure, 

Poetic thinking does not separate but puts together

Imagination and the cognitive

Emotions and rationality

Empathy and deep investigation and research

It awakens all of our senses and perceptions

Feeding a strong and deep relationship with what we have around us

And, this creates two ways of being in the world…solidarity and participation, both are the basis of democracy.  This is far away from indifference and violence, which are among of the worst ills that we have. 

Vea Vecchi and Charles Schwall at the St. Micheal School, St. Louis, MO, June, 2004

In her essay “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” that I found reference to in Letters from Layla, Audre Lorde writes…[Our powers] lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. 

To bring these dreams and visions to life, we have work to do.  White people have so much to learn and so much unconscious bias to bring into the light.  Our history is full of trauma, discrimination, violence, and hate.  Making a commitment to read, to study, to learn, to stay in the conversation and to participate in dismantling systemic racism is a pledge that we have taken. 

I have found it thrilling to learn more about Amanda Gorman, as both a poet and an activist, reading more about her, now following her, listening to some of her past performances, discovering that she has a children’s book, Change Sings, coming out in September!  One resource that I found that is beautifully done, and a must see for educators of young children is this special, PBS Kids Talk about Race and Racism, aired last October, 2020, hosted by Amanda Gorman. Don’t miss it. 

In an interview in USA Today about the special, she says:

We often don’t give kids enough credit for their intelligence, particularly their emotional and moral intelligence.  We can’t end [racism] unless we have a dialogue about it, and that can't be a one-time conversation…It has to be continuous and interwoven in our lives and the ways in which we communicate with our children. And that conversation doesn’t always have to be daunting. It can have its own fun, its own light, its own joy and love that’s brought forth by families.

To put this so simply: Racism is real, but race is not, in the way we’ve constructed it, meaning that I hope that when families watch this they don’t leave with a sensation that Black people are drastically different from white people.

I want them to understand that, yes, skin differences, hair differences, language differences, those do exist. But when we boil it down, we are all part of only one race, which is the human race. We have to remember that when we talk about racism, because that underscores how incorrect it is, that it’s trying to draw lines between us when we’re really part of the same family.

I found Amanda Gorman’s presence on this special, as her presence is everywhere, uplifting and full of light and joy.  We can thank our lucky stars that visionary and poet Amanda Gorman has stepped on to our national stage at just the right moment for our children and for all of us.

The Shortest Day

I find myself welling up with tears around this time of year whenever I let Christmas in.  Always, when I play carols that I used to hear when my mother placed her carefully stored vinyl records from Kings College onto the small record player in her study.  As far back as I can remember, each year we would go to my uncle’s house every Sunday in Advent and sing carols with my cousin Ellie playing the piano and leading us all.  There was a tree with real candles, an antique, sparkling music box, large, round, and sturdy at the bottom of the tree beside a small creche.  Another world and time that I can conjure up just by hearing the sweet voices singing these carols now, on this gray, cold morning in our Vermont house, with only me sitting here remembering and writing.  

I was lucky to be my mother’s companion growing up.  My sisters and my brother were much older, in their teens and in college by the time I was six.  One of my mother’s friends used to tell me, “I always wondered what such a small child could appreciate in the museum when I watched you and your mother climb the big, wide steps, hand in hand, to visit the St. Louis Art Museum. 

But I was enchanted from the very beginning.  Over the years I visited many museums with my mother who loved and knew art history, often standing before Renaissance paintings of the Nativity by Fra Angelico, Botticelli, or Ghirlandaio.  She would say something like this, “Look at how the mother gazes at her baby, the tenderness. It is a beautiful story of a star guiding the way, a humble birth, animals and creatures gathered around.  It holds the beauty and mystery of every birth, the hope at the birth of every child.  The light in the darkness at this time of year.  It is a timeless story.”

As far as religion goes, my mother became as much a Buddhist as a Christian, and fortunately for me, I learned to love mindfulness and meditation and the example of the awakened Buddha from her as well as the Christmas Story and the example of goodness and light, justice and courage lived by the Christ Child.

Student made creche, circa 1980

When I taught art at Stowe Elementary School in Vermont, early on in my career, the sixth grade and I made a terra cotta creche.  Each child made a figure or an animal, a shepherd, a wiseman, a sheep, or a cow.  Rather than take it all apart, I decided with their agreement, to bring it home all in one piece.  It is a treasured part of Christmas for me to unwrap each figure and assemble it. I look forward to lighting candles all around the scene each evening and to sharing the child made creche with family and friends.

A recent sweet memory is of the pop up Christmas Pageant at our Middlebury Unitarian Church in 2016 when our grand daughter, Delilah, at age two, chose to be a sheep, all by herself. She just put her hand up when asked if there were children who wanted to participate, and there she was!

Another tradition our family included in the Christmas season when we had our own young children was to attend the Christmas Revels in Hanover, NH.  We dressed up, piled into the car and drove the hour and a half to Hanover.  The Revels brings such joy alive for all ages…full of fanciful costumes, local talent of actors and an orchestra of horns, drums, and strings, children singing, a play within a play, usually involving a dragon, and several beloved songs sung every year.  When our first grandchild was only two, we all attended the Christmas Revels in Cambridge, Massachusetts and now that has also become a renewed tradition for three generations.  This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Revels founded by John Langstaff. Because of the pandemic, Revels directors have produced a marvelous digital version which spans all those 50 years. It is available for streaming until December 31st, 2020.

This holiday season is such a difficult one for most of us all around the world.  Enormous numbers of people are still sick and dying from the pandemic.  So many have lost their livelihood and are living with uncertainty and hardship.  Most of us are not traveling or spending this beloved time with our families. And yet, just as I reflected at Thanksgiving, I find myself feeling deeply grateful for this life, for my family and friends, and for the traditions and the stories of light and hope that have sustained me all of these years.  I am grateful for the chance to live this human life and for all the gifts that I have been given. 

Always, at the end of the second act of the Christmas Revels everyone stands and joins a line dance with all the cast, singing and dancing out to intermission singing all the verses of Lord of the Dance and this chorus: 

Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

I like to think that we are headed into a time of renewal and hard work, of justice and well-being, of a change of heart for all of us.  I like to think that we might all join this Dance toward safety, health, happiness, and ease of heart for everyone and for our beautiful planet.  I am reminded that it is important to take a long view, and at the same time to choose every opportunity to put commitment to a just and cared for world into action.  

I conclude with a poem by Susan Cooper, recited every year at every Christmas Revels performance.  Today, December 21st, is The Shortest Day!  It is also the day of the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, a rare alignment of the two planets in their respective orbits from Earth’s view. This conjunction has also been called the Christmas Star. Be sure to go out and look for it above the horizon in the southwestern sky about an hour after sunset.

We wish you all many blessings for a heartwarming holiday season wherever you are, and for a joyful new year full of renewal for every one of us.

The Shortest Day

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died

And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.

They lighted candles in the winter trees;

They hung their homes with evergreen;

They burned beseeching fires all night long

To keep the year alive.

And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

They shouted, reveling.

Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

Echoing behind us—listen!

All the long echoes, sing the same delight,

This Shortest Day,

As promise wakens in the sleeping land:

They carol, feast, give thanks,

And dearly love their friends,

And hope for peace.

And now so do we, here, now,

This year and every year.

Welcome, Yule!

Grateful for the Unexpected

April, 2020, Cadwell Farm

Here we are on Thanksgiving weekend.  In the middle of a pandemic, as the days grow darker and shorter, and real winter is not far away.  And yet, this Thanksgiving, I think many of us feel a heightened awareness of our blessings and our good fortune.  Even if we can’t be with our families, we treasure them all the more now, with a new understanding of the preciousness of togetherness and close connections in this world.  I doubt any of us will ever take that for granted again.  

We were so lucky to be with our son, Chris, our daughter-in-law, Lei, and our grandson, Jack for the last couple of days.  They are the ones who moved up to Vermont from Brooklyn to escape the pandemic and decided to stay in the farmhouse where Ashley grew up, 20 miles south of us, for a year.  We are a close pod and don’t really see anyone else now.  Especially now that Governor Phil Scott has issued guidelines that do not allow multi-family gatherings, even outside.  

April, 2020, Cadwell Farm, Lei, Chris, and Jack

So, we are all restricted, everywhere around the globe, and have been for a long time.  Being with dear friends and family, even on Zoom, even on the phone for a catch-up chat seems so heartwarming.  I talk often with my siblings and that is a blessing.  We read regularly to our grandchildren in Boston and that has been so much fun for all of us.  And we are Jack’s caregivers two days a week. 

I am learning so much about being a toddler’s companion every week.  It is a timeless time of entering Jack’s world and seeing things from his perspective.  I have happily left all worries and to do lists behind and lived with him in the present.  We have moved through three seasons now.  Starting in the spring, we walked around the Cadwell farm as the world grew from brown and gray to spring green. We awaited with excitement for the arrival of chicks his father ordered and goats on loan from a farm in Shelburne. The goats lived on the farm for several months and became our friends.  

June, 2020, Cadwell Farm

The summer was full of wanderings, planting, harvesting tomatoes and green beans and eating them warm and on the spot. We swam at the local recreation area, and in our local lakes and reservoirs.  Sometimes, Jack would glide with me in the Hornbeck boat I purchased early in the summer, an open kayak that looks like a canoe.  

We have savored the fall, in the midst of the blaze of color of the maples and birches that cover the landscape, the falling acorns, and circling hawks.  We have made peanut butter pinecones for the birds, and cornbread muffins for us.  Throughout, we have read so many books, at our house and at the famrhouse.  

Picking crab apples for jelly

We began to draw every week in the beginning of September.  I cover his small table with paper and we get out the chalks, or the crayons, or the Mod Paint Sticks, and sometimes gouache with colors in a small round pallet.  Repetition and variation, theme and variation, careful preparation, and then, observation and play, “tossing the ball” as Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach, always called it, between the adult and the child…seeing what happens, and then, making the next move, supporting the child’s curiosity and lead.  

Jack started to put sentences together at the end of September.  Now, he can’t stop talking and picks up words and doesn’t forget them.  His favorite question is, “What is (fill in the blank) doing?” On Thanksgiving, he wanted to see the Tibetan Buddha statue that I inherited from my mother, so I brought it down from the shelf where it lives, and we investigated.  Jack asked, “What is Buddha doing?” I said, “Buddha is sitting.” Chris asked, “Jack, what is Buddha doing with his hands?” Jack said, “Singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider.’” (My older sister explained to me later that the figure is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being, rather than a Buddha figure. The jewelry is the clue. Thank you Sally!)

In October, I participated in three webinars on The Hundred Language of Children through offerings from Reggio Children… “Children and Nature,” “Children and Clay,” and “Children and Numbers.”  I was pleased to listen to Reggio educators, many of whom I know, live.  I was thrilled to see and hear about resent work shared both from Infant Toddler Centers and Pre Schools.  I became more excited and curious about what Jack and I might do with, among other things, stones and pebbles outside, movement, and climbing, and clay! Reggio Children continues to offer webinars for individuals and schools that are open for anyone who is interested. This month they are focusing on documentation and making learning visible.

This year, we are working closely with the toddler teachers at Principia Early Childhood Center in St. Louis, and with Louise Elmgren, a studio teacher who has taught elementary and middle school age students and is now in the middle of her second year working with the youngest children.  This partnership has helped ground me in the practice of organizing rich learning experiences for toddlers.  I have learned from Louise to jump in, with the knowledge and love of materials that I have, to explore, play, and enter into a kind of dance with all of it, the child, the materials, the present moment, and curiosity and wonder at what unfolds.  

We have worked with teachers of toddlers for some years now and they always ask…“How does this apply to me, to us, to the toddlers we teach…this Reggio inspired way of being with children?”  My experience, so close to Jack, being his one companion for full days, and being in love with materials myself has led us to beautiful explorations that have helped me to consider these questions with new understanding.   

Jack and the goats, Remy and Ramerthorn

In our last blog post, Learning Outside, I referenced The Goodness of Rain, by Ann Pelo, who tells the story of being a caregiver for a baby during her first year of life, when most of their time together was outside.   My son jokes with me that I should write a book about being with Jack for a year because I have learned so much from and alongside him…one child and one adult, building relationship through experience and trust, joy and exploration, repetition and novelty, growth and change.  I am an educator and I have spent a great deal of time with young children, my own, my other two grand children, and those I have taught.  However, not every week, one-on-one with a toddler since my first child was this age, and I have learned so much since then!  

Jack’s family is experiencing displacement and uncertainty, and at the same time, a safe place to live and to be for this period of time.  In spite of all the sadness and loss, believe it or not, I have the pandemic to thank for this lifeline for me during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Jack would not be so close otherwise.  I would not have had the opportunity to grow and learn alongside him.  Sometimes things that happen to us that are completely unexpected turn out to offer countless blessings.  This is one of those times.  

Learning Outdoors

Walking the land…Bristol, NH

I remember several years ago when my dear friend, Jeanne Goldhaber, asked me, “Do you know the book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World ? It has all my attention these days.  Please read it!”  

This book, by Peter Wohlleben, was the impetus for Jeanne and her colleagues at the Reggio Inspired Vermont Early Education Team (RIVET) to consider the perspective of trees as “active social life forms” in their observations of children’s interactions with trees, and also to invite other colleagues to share their work and insights about children and trees in the Spring 2000 issue of the quarterly periodical, Innovations.  In this book, Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, takes the perspective of the trees much as Jacques Cousteau took the perspective of the creatures of the oceans in his writing.  In The Hidden Life of Trees, we hear many stories and case studies that reveal the “wood wide web,” the biological structures that allows trees to exchange signals of danger, share nutrition, and work together in many ways. 

Jeanne asked me to share reflections and thoughts in response to the Innovations article and the work focused on children and trees that was collected from many schools, teachers, and children including Taos, New Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; Winnetka Illinois; Belingham, Washington; Casper, Wyoming; Washington D.C.; and Baisha, China. The reflections in this blog post will be shared in the Winter 202 issue of Innovations.

Happy Valley Orchards, Middlebury, VT

Let me start by acknowledging the big world picture of where we are right now.  What strikes me today, as we live into our 7th month of a global pandemic, that was not foreseen as the spring issue of Innovations went to press, is what a different world we are living in, all of us, perhaps most especially teachers and children.  As Cadwell Collaborative, we work with a school in St. Louis, Missouri where teachers have been mandated to spend 80-90% of their time in school out-of-doors.  Learning outside is recognized as one of the safest ways to be in school right now, not only in North America, but worldwide.  

What happens when we, teachers and children, move our learning outside? What happens when we are almost always surrounded by trees and plants, sky and clouds, weather and wind? In many schools, being in relationship with the natural world is no longer taking place only during recess or on special expeditions, but as the norm, as the everyday way of being in school.  

Many of us have been fascinated with the Forest School Movement where small children in Germany and Scandinavia spend all their time outdoors, even in the winter.  Now, there is a resurgence of interest because, out of necessity, many students and teachers are going outside to learn. 

In many ways, this is a big silver lining to the pandemic.  There is ample research on the benefits of being outside and spending time in the natural world for all of us and especially children.  Learning outside reduces stress and anxiety, increases attention, engagement, motivation, and increases memory and retention. 

Sharon Danks, author of From Asphalt to Ecosystems and CEO of Green Schoolyards America, and co-founder of the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, is helping schools and districts across the country use outdoor spaces as essential assets as they reopen with physical distancing measures in place.  

Children’s tree portraits, The University School, Milwaukee, WI

Returning to the Innovations article, how do projects that focus on children and trees fit into this new picture?  I was touched by all of the children’s words that were quoted in the Innovations article…words of noticing, in metaphors, and full of tenderness toward the trees that surround their schools.  

Consider these ideas and theories of the children quoted:

There are baby trees, and momma trees.

Roots go to the center of the world and drink together.

She is cold because she’s outside and the snow lands on her branches.  

I am struck that children most naturally identify with trees as themselves…a tree’s parts as body parts, the trees’ processes as cycles, the trees’ lives as close to their lives. 

Since I lived in Reggio Emilia and worked at the Diana School 30 years ago, I have learned that this is true of Italian children, North American children, Chinese children, all children.  It is a universal response of children to the trees, if we ask, and notice, and listen.  

One of my favorite books is The Goodness of Rain, by Ann Pelo.  Ann chronicles a year when she was asked to care for a toddler of a friend of hers.  She dedicates herself to nurturing her companion’s and her own ecological identity and kinship with the natural world. I recommend this book far and wide for it is the record of an intimate journey of an adult’s and a child’s growing love of and strong sense of place in the natural world. 

Another favorite is The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, where authors and naturalists, Gary Nabhan and Stephen Trimble investigate how children come to care deeply about and identify with the natural world and how human growth remains rooted, as it always has, both in childhood and in wild landscapes.  

View from Bliss Ridge Farm, Vermont

Both of the books, beautifully written, tell story after story of children in the natural world, of children and stones, gardens, rain, mountains, ponds, creatures, and trees. The authors tell us stories that are compelling and convincing…that we are all a part of this magnificent natural world. That we are nature. That we belong to the trees and they belong to us. That we are intimately, really and truly, connected and in a symbiotic relationship. True also of the air, water, earth, plants, insects, sky, wind, and sun.

As I write today, I am looking out on a sparkling, crisp October day, where the leaves of the birches and the crowns of the white pines are waving and shimmering in the morning light.  These trees that circle our property are our constant companions in all weather and through all the seasons. This natural world that we inhabit, it is calling us.  We have an opportunity to make it our classroom now and to learn close at hand what it has to teach us.  May we all find time to listen to the trees, the sky, the stars, and to the children. May we listen and learn together.  

When I Am Among the Trees 

 Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees, 
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Our circle of trees

Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a force, an inspiration, and an extraordinary agent of change.  I know that many of us were taken by surprise and filled with sadness and even despair at her passing.  

Maria Shriver wrote, I depended on her voice, her judgment, and her guidance in the public square. Her death left me feeling down, really down. Who will ever replace her? Who has her character, her fierceness, her ability to work across the aisle? Who will be the beacon of hope that she was? 

There is so much sadness and grief in our world! Wildfires burning millions of acres and displacing and harming so many people on the west coast.  I read that last week that the air quality in Portland, Oregon was the worst in the world! Covid-19 still rampant. Death, illness, fear, uncertainty.   Police brutality and our national reckoning with racial injustice.  The country divided.  Our democracy seriously threatened.  It seems to us like a fight over values and that is deeply disturbing.  Values of decency, honesty, integrity, fairness, and equality.  It feels to many that the values that our country was founded on are being pushed out.  How is this possible? What will become of us? Our planet? Our country? 

And then, one of the people who has done the most to uphold those values and transform the way women can move forward to live full, powerful lives passes from this world and leaves a vacant seat on the highest court.  

 Yesterday I read Jill Lepore’s piece in the New Yorker.  She ends it this way: 

Preserving the Court’s independence will require courage and conviction of Ginsburgian force. And there are changes, too, that most of us would never want undone. A century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering career as a scholar, advocate, and judge stands as a monument to the power of dissent. “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” (quote from Supreme Court Justice in 1873) It took centuries, and tens of millions of women, to dismantle that nonsense. And no single one of them was more important than Ginsburg, warm-hearted, razor-sharp, and dauntless.

So, right now, as never before, we are called to be dauntless and warm-hearted, even though we are not all lawyers, in positions of power, or as razor-sharp as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  After her death. I read and reposted a quote that I found inspiring.

You have been our hero and our North Star.  We will not let you down.  Rest in peace. 

These sentences gave me some reason to get up and keep at it, keep writing post cards to get out the early vote, keep being kind, keep sitting on the meditation cushion and steadying my mind and opening my heart.  To keep believing in, imagining, and working for the future of our strong democracy, our beautiful planet, and our vibrant, hopeful children and grandchildren.

Another thing that has helped me in the midst of all this chaos… I have been following what is called a Meditation Practice Intensive with the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community.  I meditate with them through Zoom twice a day and attend talks every week.  I am also reading Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life that Matters, written in the thirteenth century by Dogen, a Zen priest and founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan.  This is the guiding text for this month’s practice.  Among other things, Bread Loaf Mountain is a community that is friendly, welcoming, steady, and dedicated to relieving suffering in the world.  Listening, reading, and being quiet has helped me take a long view, and to get out of the ruminations of my mind.   

And then, there are the grandchildren who live in the present and live in joy.  When they were here with us in August, I remember the two oldest kneeling side by side on one of the twin beds in the room where they sleep, glued to the window looking at the full moon rising. Asher said excitedly, “I can’t believe we get to see a yellow moon!” 

And then, the evening when Delilah looked out the kitchen window, gasped, and pointed at the flush pink sky. “Look! We have to go outside,” as she grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. “Look at the sunset, Lulu! I am so good at spotting things in Vermont. Better than in Boston….the stars, the moon, the sunset.”

Just before they left, Delilah pressed a stone into my hand.  “It is the shape of a heart and it has a heart on it (which it did, in a fossil like form). You can have it.” 

I put Delilah’s stone by my bedside alongside two white stones that my brother-in-law, Steve Cadwell picked up somewhere on the beach and saved in a collection.  Steve died of brain cancer last year, in August, 2019.  Steve’s two stones, and now Delilah’s, remind me of the last words said every evening after the Zen meditation.  

Let me respectfully remind you.  Life and death are of supreme importance.  Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost. Awaken! Take heed! Do not squander your life. 

The stones remind me that life is short and we must live it now, fully, awake, doing our best to give it our all in each moment, for the sake of the world, for the sake of others, to create a hopeful future.  

May we remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg and may her memory be a blessing, and as I read tonight, a revolution. May we live fiercely and with a warm heart.  May we give it our all.