About Vitality, Emotions and Um, Trees in Everyday Ramblings

This is one of the two small community gardens in the neighborhood a few days ago. Sorry about the glare but that is the way of it in Portland most of the year. The Parks Department runs this particular garden and there is a plot in here for the most extraordinary iris that many of you have seen pictures of over the last few years.

I took this picture though because I wanted to capture what the back of the row of houses on the street above looks like now. The yellow one on the left, (one in), is the one that was auctioned off to a bank recently, the one with a board in the window. It has beautiful pine floors. I have seen pictures of the inside. It is very small.

The neighborhood is changing exponentially this year. Over across the busy street where Under Armor finally started remodeling what will be their local offices (in my old gym) next to the public track they took down five medium-sized street trees on Friday. The previous owners had done some nice landscaping in that area before they ran out of money and the current workers just ripped up the carefully placed irrigation system, seeing the pipes all bent akimbo touched my heart in many ways.

Carlo is sitting on the floor next to me paying close attention to my feet. He is prepared to move towards the kitchen as soon as they are firmly placed and I stand up for his morning snack. The cats are rooted and determined to maintain a regular routine around here. Particularly when food is involved. It is pretty funny, he jumps up and his long beautiful tail goes straight up as he leads me into the kitchen to the food cupboard.

They are very happy cats even though they complain a lot. :)

I have been thinking about how emotions work quite a bit in the last week after my unexpected experience with watching River and feeling intense grief for the loss of the person I don’t get to be anymore because Mr. Finch is gone.

Of course it is all about me, at least when it comes to the body, and the body is where emotions come from, the subconscious. Mr. Finch knew this. Kes and I have been talking lately about feeling vaguely mildly depressed and lacking motivation and how each year we forget what a huge impact allergens have in the environment and how they affect us both.

Just in the last week, there are unmistakable signs of incredible energy being expended in the environment towards spring. Under the cold and the glare and the rain spring is exuberantly coming on. Trees are budding, flowers are blooming, and vegetables are doing their vegetable thing…

The ancient yogis knew how emotions worked too. They used different terminology but they totally got it.

So one of the main reasons the cats like routine so much is that they don’t have to expend precious cat energy being super vigilant because they can count on getting their needs met on time in a predicable manner which leaves much more time available for oh say having an after snack bath like Diego is doing on the bed right now.

It is the same with people. Particularly those of us getting a little older that for various reasons have less vitality.

Change has got to be one of the biggest challenges we face and yet it is inescapable.

As Gary, my yoga teacher, (and Olga too) say, change is inevitable. All we can do is influence the direction of that change.

One can only hope that with all the trees coming down, new ones will be planted and when Miss E. comes through this area fifty years from now and wistfully thinks back to a time when she visited her unusual great aunt she will see beautiful healthy trees in a vibrant vital urban landscape.

Last updated February 22, 2016