Karinaland River

  Expecting the Unexpected   Engaging with life in this open mindset beckons us to be fully awake, present, observant. Centered and grounded. It keeps us nimble, responsive, flexible. Fluid and flowing. Seduces us into curiosity, aliveness – open to new experiences. Whatever they are. When I arrive at the beach, before reaching the top of the dune, I don’t know what the rainstorms,  waves, ebb and flow will have washed away, built, or eroded since my last visit. What will it look like? Will the sand dollars be abundant? The pelicans perhaps absent? The whale skull gone? The “iron beast” submerged or exposed? Today, the Pacific is unusually calm and smooth, as if to show the way, offer a different possibility. The waves are rolling in slow and low, only once in a while they are crashing. The seagulls and long-billed sand pipers are hanging out with each other, peacefully. Bundles of tangled seaweed, plenty of sand dollars, pebbles. And further down, a lonely big elephant s...

  War and Peace   The endless experiment of humans trying to become real human beings here on Earth. It is difficult, a mystery. So much peeling-away is needed, first of all. Pain, fear, anger, sorrow, hate. And so much inconvenient truth would need to be faced. Ignorance, greed, envy, cruelty, hubris. When “ all we are saying is give peace a chance ” ends with a murder eleven years later, we must embrace that too. December 8 – forty-four years ago. When innocence gets punctured, we must learn what is offered. “I just shot John Lennon.” In that moment we could have learned that the world of stardom, celebrity, fame is inherently violent. Do we understand? We all are “ walking on thin ice ” when we think just ONE thing will save us, or the world. But simplicity is full of complexity, waiting to be understood. The paradoxes always belong together – ­this I love about the ancient wisdom and the Art of T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Yin and Yang are forming one reality, not two. Dividing into g...

  Big Mother Oak     For the past fifteen years I have slept in her grand arms. Rested better than ever in my life. Beneath her majestic canopy, I felt safe and held as never before, cradled by the majesty of this old Coast Live Oak. She has not come back with green foliage this spring. She is bare and shrinking. Ambrosia beetles are feasting on her sap in the lower trunk. She has decided, I have to let her go. A deeply meaningful process for me – difficult – outer and inner. She is pulling her energies back into the root system, giving it over to her little sister, brother, children, and her dear friend, the Cork Oak a few feet away, huge in size like her. My immediate question to Mother Oak is:   “What are you trying to teach me? What are you gifting me?”   Like my elders and mentors throughout my life, Big Mama Oak disperses her wisdom in slowly unraveling stories that will accompany me for weeks, months, and years, waiting to be fully digested and deciphered...

  Mustering courage to keep speaking out loud     On Sunday February 5, 2023, the world is changed with four shots. Three shots into Marya’s back, coming from her second husband Chuck, then one shot for himself. Both dead, a murder suicide. Losing Marya this way – my 54-year-old step daughter who I was close with especially in recent years – is utterly shocking and incomprehensible. That evening, she tries to leave the home, perhaps a fight. We will never know. He was a veteran. May both rest in peace.    Altar for Marya   I knew Marya for 32 years, first as a beautiful, feisty, angry, insecure and often arrogant young woman, who goes off to study at Humboldt State University in Arcata. Then getting married to Andy Jensen, and being a dedicated mother of two girls, Jennifer and Sarah, extensively volunteering at their schools. Later she becomes a grateful daughter who greatly appreciates the devotion with which I was caring for her dad Bob Blauner, my late ...

  Loving to Death     Blue Heart Stone by Marya     When Emma – who is in her early thirties – tells me  she noticed how most American police TV series have the same formula of the cop being the hero and good guy, I am relieved and thrilled to hear her actively inquiring where the obsession with guns, violence, and mass shootings might partially originate from. How it is secretly embedded everywhere in our culture. The entertainment most of us are happily and innocently digesting. How we are unknowingly brainwashed. Thrilling violence titillates our senses and wakes us up from numbness. Perhaps this kind of entertainment is teaching us all along violent behavior as a normal way to be alive, she wonders.    To solve our problems with guns. For me, cop shows are a continuation of the old “Western” mentality.  Every Man for Himself with a Gun . (Notice the always gendered association.) Of course, the whiter the hero the better, the villains are ...