Slipping Glimpser

Post-Christmas Musings

2011-12-27T23:12:00.000-08:00

This Christmas I found myself thinking about all the ways we celebrate Christmas, and the extraordinary complexity - emotional, familial, logistical, spiritual, financial - of relationship with this holiday (the "holy-daze," says one friend).

Therapists have told me that the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is their busiest time of the year: people who have never darkened the doorway of a shrink suddenly find themselves at their wits' end. And yet we're all supposed to be happy, "merry" even, which of course just makes it worse for those poor souls who, for one reason or another, find themselves a few shades short of the requisite emotions. I've observed that even those who profess to thoroughly enjoy Christmas tend to get just a wee bit stressed.

Not to mention the whole confusing issue of gifts: Just for the kids? How about all those coworkers? Does anyone even want this stuff? Will anyone like my presents? Do I go into debt to match the family's expectations? Who will I offend if I don't give a gift?

And, if you're like me, the political and economic questions start piling up too: How can I justify this consumerism? What about all the people who have nothing? But should I be supporting my local craftspeople and small businesses? What about donations instead?

My father is a sociologist, and one of his more playful sociological studies was an exploration of the ten unwritten "rules" of Christmas gift giving in the Midwestern town of Muncie, Indiana (called "Middletown" in the study). There are Tree Rules and Wrapping Rules, and Who Gives What to Whom Rules, and none of them are written down or even seen as rules. Everyone thinks they're freely choosing what they do at Christmas. Every time I read this study I recognize my own behaviors in it, and am both amused and horrified. Are we really so predictable, so driven by our unspoken cultural habits and pressures?

All that aside, I had a wonderful, albeit highly untraditional Christmas this year. And I heard a lot of stories from others about their Christmas celebrations and conundrums.

I spent my Christmas house-sitting for a friend in Northern California, so that she and her daughter could travel to Florida to be with family. My co-celebrants were a black-and-white miniature Australian shepherd and two black-and-white cats. The dog and the cats, unfortunately, are not on speaking terms, which is perhaps not so different from many family Christmas situations. Nonetheless, I was extraordinarily happy.

On Christmas Eve I drank hot apple cider, had a couple of phone chats with family, admired the beautifully decorated Christmas tree in the house, and listened to early music with the dog on my lap, considering how strange and wonderful it was that I was entirely alone and utterly happy, feeling the mystery of the renewal that Christmas signifies.

On Christmas Day I made a colorful organic salad for Christmas dinner for twenty residents of the local homeless shelter, dropped it off, and went for a long sunny romp at the local beach with the dog.

Later I had a phone conversation with an elderly friend who had broken her leg a few weeks ago and found herself spending Christmas in a rehabilitation center. Rather than being full of pity for herself (as I probably would be in her situation) she was overcome with gratitude - for the miracle of being alive, moment by moment, and for the miracle of her body's slow but steady healing. I was moved to tears as I listened to her.

Then I went to another older friend's house and shared a traditional Christmas dinner with her interesting grown family. We stayed up and talked until the wee hours of the morning, ushering in the end of Christmas with our wide-ranging conversation.

So what can I deduce from this about Florence and her perfect Christmas? Well, apparently she needs a healthy dose of solitude and quiet, music, time to feel the sacredness in the moment, a sense of purpose and service, a few warm animals, a little bit of time with beloved people (but not too much), good food, and a teaspoon of the beauty of the natural world.

Then there is my friend D., who was my inspiration this year. She was the one who organized the meal for twenty at the homeless shelter. She traveled to India earlier this fall, and when she came back she was, as she said, completely unable to stomach the idea of doing Christmas as her family had always done it. She said, "The world is changing, and we have to do things in a way that takes care of others."

She convinced her husband and children to try something very different, and astonishingly, they agreed. They bought toys for a local toy drive instead of gifts for each other, raised money for three Vietnamese children who need heart operations, and made Christmas dinner for the shelter, which the whole family delivered. Clearly for her, the perfect Christmas is one that honors her commitment to helping others.

Another friend, T., who is Jewish, buys presents for all the post office workers and takes them to the post office the week before Christmas, just when the stress and grumpiness of the customers is at its height.

I know others who spent Christmas deep in the sweetness of their family, doing nothing much other than being with one another, cooking together, eating together, appreciating each other and what they have as a family.

But lots of people I know spent Christmas in ways that did not nourish their hearts or align with their true expression. I know someone who is struggling financially (as so many are) who was expected by her children to play "grandma" with all the expected presents for the grandkids, far beyond her means. I know another grandmother who was struggling with a family request to give fewer presents than she wanted to. Others spent Christmas in ways that were conventionally "merry" but left them, mysteriously, empty and sad.

There are tremendous social and familial pressures at this time of year. My friend D. was very lucky that her family agreed with her radical requests. We all have such strong opinions about how Christmas "should" be, and woe to the person who requests or needs to do it differently.

Usually my writing here is not polemical: I'm not trying to convince you of anything, but rather to share my thoughts about something that has caught my heart or my mind. But in this case I want to admit that I have an agenda. I have a big Christmas wish for next year, and this is it: that we each support ourselves and each other to celebrate Christmas in the way that is truest to each one of us, no matter how strange or radical or untraditional it may seem.

Christmas tree at Muir Beach

The world IS changing, as my friend D. said, and it would be a beautiful thing if we could allow those we love to change too, and find ways of celebrating the season with fewer trips to the shrink (and, I might add, the mall!) and greater happiness and meaning. What better gift could we give one another?

If your loved one wants to spend Christmas alone with a dog at the beach, or helping out at the local homeless shelter, let her! If your loved one wants to go far away to a place where no one celebrates Christmas, let him! If someone asks not to give or receive presents, honor that difficult and brave request. If presents are important to you or others, find a way that they really matter, are truly appreciated, and are not merely an obligation, an empty gesture. If a family member is suffering financially, release him or her from the burden of reciprocity. Invite someone who is unwillingly alone to share your Christmas feast. Think of those for whom Christmas is a dark time, and see if you can bring a little light.

Perhaps, somewhere in there, each one of us, regardless of our religion, will rediscover the spirit of Christmas, for ourselves: the spirit of love, of kindness, of generosity, and of renewal. This is my hope.

The Shadow of an Anchovy

2011-11-19T18:38:00.000-08:00

My mother-in-law's family were poor peasants, and they would tell the story of being so poor that instead of having meats at the center of the round of polenta, they had a single small anchovy hanging over the center, casting its shadow. They said that the shadow of the anchovy was all they had to bring a little richness to the polenta.

- Peggy Haines-Capelli

I was in Italy at the end of October and beginning of November, in the provinces of Tuscany, Umbria, and Le Marche. I was more than a traveler there: I was named for Florence - Firenze to my mother and those who knew me as a child - and my childhood was woven with the narrow streets and convent cloisters, churches and olive groves of Firenze and Tuscany, as I traveled back and forth with my art-historian single mother between the surreally different worlds of the American Midwest and Italy.

Fields, vineyards and villa, Setignano

From the time I was five until I was fifteen, we lived in Florence for part of every year. I went to kindergarten and fifth grade in Italian schools. I spoke Italian. Some of who I am came from that life, so far-away and mysterious to my American school-mates. I hadn't been back in many years, and this trip was a poignant, sweet chance to be there again with my mother, while it is still possible for both of us.

Although Italy is wealthy now, when I was a child - thirty, forty years ago - Italy was poor, third-world poor, and we were poor too, despite (or maybe because of) our bicontinental life.

The convent on Via Giuseppe Giusti

When I was small, we lived in a convent pensione across the street from the archives where my mother did her research. She couldn't afford child care, so in the early morning, when I was still asleep, she would go out, buy a roll and jam, sneak back in and leave it by the bed for me. When I woke up I would find my roll waiting for me, and for the rest of the morning, until lunchtime, I would lie in bed, get crumbs all over the sheets, and read, endlessly.

If I really needed something, the Italian nuns were down below, cooking in the big dark kitchen, cleaning the already-shining floors in the mostly empty main rooms, or cultivating the garden behind the building. I remember eating zucchini flowers for the first time, deeply comforting pastina in brodo with grated parmigiano on top, hard Tuscan bread. A great treat was a single Baci, the chocolate and hazelnut "kiss" made by Perugino, or an aranciata, an orange soda.

When we lived in Italy for longer times, we rented an apartment from an English doctor who owned a farmhouse in the hills to the west of the city. The contadini, the traditional Italian peasants who worked the land, lived down below us, next to their animals. Every morning I would wake to the sound of the cart and white oxen going by below our windows, slowly, slowly, with much shouting.

Two white oxen in the Tuscan hills

Our back windows looked out over a quintessential, "romantic" Tuscan landscape: hills, olives, dark spires of cipressi (cypresses), stone walls, the old stone village of Pian dei Giulari perched along one side of the valley, just down the road from us. What was concealed was the poverty, the backbreaking work, the deep knowledge that knew how to rebuild the stone walls, how to prune the olives, how to breed the oxen, how to survive. Now most of the contadini, as a culture, are gone, gone to work the well-paying jobs in the cities, and the absentee landlords struggle to keep the vineyards and groves alive without that deep and unacknowledged wisdom.

Sheep and stone trough

I remember, vividly, walking as a child on a country road and looking down into a farmyard where a contadini family was gathered around a round of polenta. Polenta was peasant food - no city restaurant would have dreamed of featuring it on a menu - and it was formed into enormous flat cakes, as wide as a circular table. It was cut with a string into wedges (this fascinated me), and each person at the table would eat their wedge toward the middle. In the middle would be whatever protein the family might have, and whoever could eat their wedge most quickly would get more of what was there.

A meat shop in Norcia - yes, those are boars' heads

While we were in Italy this time, we spent time with Peggy Haines-Capelli, an American art historian whom I knew and loved as a child and who, unlike us, chose Italy as her home and country. She eventually married an Italian journalist, and is now a widow. She told us the story of her husband's family and the anchovy as we sat around her round table, eating food we had brought back from our trip into the mountains of Umbria: famous tiny lentils from the town of Castellucio, pecorino cheese, salame called "mules' balls" from Norcia, with a white center of lard - a feast somewhere between a picnic and a high tea, rich with the stories of our trip to the wild and mysterious Monti Sibillini, the mountains of the sibyls. When I heard Peggy's story, probably in mid-bite of something delicious, it felt like a koan: what is the taste of the anchovy's shadow?

Quinces in farmer's market, Florence

While I was in Italy I was puzzling over the particular flavor of Italian life - the tremendous soul and depth that can be felt in the simplest village piazza or in the most elegant Florentine coffee bar. There is an appreciation of the sensuous things of the world, which, far from seeming superficial and materialistic, actually feels life-affirming, ancient, hugely sane. How do they do it? And how is it, that with all the force of modernism and wealth and speed, it is still alive, a heart at the center of things, something that can be tasted in the olive oil sitting on a trattoria table or in the syrupy intensity of a morning one euro espresso at the train station? And this story, of the anchovies...I think it's a key. I think it's a teaching story, perhaps for all of us.

Chestnuts, hazelnuts, fennel, honey in a farmer's market, Florence

We live like gods, these days. Not necessarily happy gods, but gods nonetheless. Few of us can imagine the poverty that would have a whole family only able to eat what is essentially ground field corn and water. No doubt life was hard, even sometimes hellish, for that family gathered around the polenta and that single, hanging anchovy. It drove the man who would become Peggy's husband to spend his life dedicated to defending the poor and oppressed.

House for a cat, Narni

But there is also something quintessentially elegant and clever in the story of the anchovy's shadow, although I can't quite put my finger on what it is. If there is only one anchovy to bring a little something to your polenta, what do you do? Can you appreciate the shadow of an anchovy, its salty, fishy scent perfuming the air as you eat? Can you raise your empty glass to your neighbor? Can you laugh a little, at yourself and at life, which is only providing this one little fish? Can you take what you have, a little or a lot, and make a feast? That's what it is - it's something about creating a feast out of famine, out of so little, a kind of grace, in both senses of the word.

View from hermitage, San Euitizio in Valle

That's what I feel in Italy, when I'm there: a soulful, embodied willingness to live, whatever comes. Maybe it's my projection on the place and its people, but I don't think so...I feel and see it with the part of me that was formed there. And as the country teeters on the edge of economic collapse, after so few decades of relative wealth, I think, "Well, maybe they'll be fine. Maybe they haven't forgotten how to live, under those designer clothes and behind those smart phones. Maybe they could teach the rest of us a few things about living."

"Life is too short", graffiti on a rural wall

And as I imagine a loaf of Tuscan bread, just water and flour and yeast, that intentionally hard crust to protect the soft interior, no salt because who could afford salt - and then I remember how profoundly GOOD it is, in its simplicity, in its poverty - it gives me courage.

If we are all (or most of us) going to get poorer in the future, which seems like a distinct possibility, let's do it with class. Let's celebrate the shadow of the anchovy.

This essay is dedicated to Signor Mauro Meniconi, the proprietor of a roadside porchetta van in rural Umbria, and one of the secret saints of the world.

For more photos, go to https://picasaweb.google.com/Firenze33/Italy

Kitten Teachings

2011-08-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my neighbor here on the shores of Willapa Bay knocked on my front door. She was planning to leave the next day for a week-long trip. When I answered the door, she looked a little wild-eyed. "Florence," she said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but there are two kittens trapped under an abandoned house down the street. What should we do?" We walked down the street together, and soon we could hear desperate, high-pitched, piercing mews emanating from a dilapidated house.

Two impossibly tiny, nearly identical tabby kittens were in the crawl-space beneath the house, clinging to a small screened-in entryway and crying piteously. If kittens can scream, they were screaming. There are sounds that young mammals make in distress that are nearly impossible to ignore: the crying of a baby, the whimpering of a pup, the sound of hungry, frightened kittens. Wherever their feral mother had gone, she had been gone too long for them, or wasn't coming back at all. The sounds were unmistakably the sounds of little animals in extremis. I thought of my priest vows to be of benefit to all beings. It was too late to walk away. We looked at each other. "OK," we said, "let's do something."

We got a cat carrier, then went back to the kittens and tried to figure out how to extricate them from their crawl-space prison. With the help of another neighbor, we pried the screen off the small opening, and he crawled in. The kittens retreated, but were too small to go far. All we could see of the rescuer were his lower legs, but then his arm reached back to us, holding a trembling tiny bit of fur, blue eyes wide, striped legs spread wide. A minute later, another one appeared.

We popped them into the carrier and carried them back to my neighbor's house. They were very young, much younger than we had thought when we first saw them. Their blue eyes didn't focus, their ears were just unfurling and they wobbled more than they walked. We tried giving them milk (not a good idea, we later learned) but it was clear that they were too young to drink. They were trembling violently, clearly chilled, and mewing incessantly. Neither of us had any idea what to do. A call to the local rural animal shelter yielded only a recorded message.

We did what we all do these days, when faced with a dilemma: we went online. We learned that the kittens were perhaps just a bit over three weeks old, were almost certainly not weaned, and would need to be bottle-fed every few hours. They would not be able to maintain their own body temperatures and would need to be kept warm. They didn't even know how to urinate or defecate on their own. They were too young to go to a shelter, and might be euthanized if we tried. We should not have attempted to feed them - a chilled kitten should never be fed, and shouldn't be given cow's milk - our first big mistakes, blessedly irrelevant because they couldn't figure out what to do with the milk anyway.

My neighbor looked at me. We both knew she was leaving early the next morning. I had already promised to take care of her five-month-old Akita puppy while she was gone. "Of course," I said, wondering what my week was going to be like, wondering what I'd just promised to do.

So for the next week, with the help of my neighbor's kids and their father, I became a kitten mom. I coaxed them to eat, first unsuccessfully trying to feed them from a miniature kitten bottle filled with warm formula, then from a mixture of warm formula and canned kitten food that they waded into and emerged from covered from paws to tail in what they were supposed to be eating. They would come straight to me afterward, to get warm, and then I'd be covered with formula and kitten food too. I washed them, I massaged their bellies to encourage them to defecate, I found them a surrogate mother to cuddle up to at night (a stuffed camel toy, just about the right size), I checked their heating pad every two hours. Mostly, I worried about them.

The first few days were the hardest. Although they'd had enough life force to get themselves into our hands and out from under the crawl space, I wasn't sure their life force would be enough to keep them going, especially in the hands of someone who had no idea what she was doing. The first night they spent at my house in their little cat carrier I barely slept. I kept wondering if I would wake to a dead kitten, or two dead kittens, and the thought seared me into wakefulness over and over again, listening for their small sounds. They were so fragile, so incapable of taking care of themselves. They had moved from the category of "other" and anonymous to the category of "beloved" in just a few hours.

That was the most extraordinary thing to me, to watch my own attachment develop so quickly, to care for them as if they had been in my life for years rather than hours. This seems to be one of the most basic of human capacities: the imperative to protect and care - for one another, for children, for wounded strangers, for the vulnerable and frightened. I could no more have chosen not to care for those kittens than I could have chosen not to breathe.

I was also shocked by how much I suffered over them, how completely neurotic I became, overnight. I worried about them nearly all the time. I felt responsible for their lives, moment after moment. A simple mistake on my part, a little carelessness, and they would be dead. I wondered how the parents of a newborn, or the parents of a sick child, stand that suffering. And here I must express my thanks to Cherie Kearney, who connected me to her friend Barb Hoover, a long-time foster kitten mom who gave me much-needed advice over the phone. Otherwise I might have gone right over the edge, not sure whether I was doing anything right at all. It turns out that it's hard to learn to take care of kittens via the internet (I'm sure the same could be said for babies) - I needed an old hand, and thanks to Cherie and Barb, I got one.

Then there were the moments when these tiny scraps of life curled together peacefully on my lap, small enough that I could hold both of them in my cupped hands, or when they clumsily climbed up on to the gigantic mountain of me, or when they looked into my face with their barely focused blue eyes. Then it was worth all the kitten food smeared on my clothing, and all the neurotic agitation. I could almost see the heart-strings that ran from my heart to their small faces.

And the miracles! They didn't know how to purr on Day 1. By Day 2 they were emitting tiny crackling noises. By Day 3 they were purring on my chest. They didn't know how to wash themselves on Day 1. By Day 4 they were swiping themselves with their paws, not very effectively. By the end of the week they'd learned how to wash everywhere but under their chins (that took quite a bit longer - weeks, actually!). I got them a miniature litter box and scratched in it with my fingers. One of them came stumbling over and started scratching too. Within a day they knew what to do in the litter box, and squatted there like real cats, looking a little puzzled but also pleased. I saw them wrestle together the first time, on about Day 3. Their development was so rapid, it was like stop-motion photography, like a flower blooming, like the sun rising.

What had started out as bewildering and frightening became joyful and astonishing.

They - and I - survived the week. My neighbor came back and took them into her care with her kids' help. It was hard to let them go. They are now about six weeks old, and running around like little hellions. One's eyes are almost green, the other's still blue. We think they are both males, or maybe one is male and the other female (it's surprisingly hard to tell, graphic internet photos notwithstanding). My neighbor is still considering whether it's right to keep them - there are a lot of coyotes and raccoons around here, and kitties tend to be short-lived. If just the right home came along, someone who would take the two together, they might let them go. Otherwise, long-lived or short-lived, they do appear to have wormed themselves quite well into my neighbor's heart.

And I just donated to my local animal rescue group - HAVA - the Harbor Association of Volunteers for Animals- because the plight of kittens and puppies and dogs and cats and all the other creatures we take into our care, neglect, abuse, forget, abandon, has become vivid to me. I don't want kittens, any kittens, to starve under an abandoned house. All animals are these two kittens I cared for, deserving a good life, a chance to grow up and grow old.

I learned a lot from those kittens. I saw my ferocious protectiveness, my fear, my care, my capacity to love. I saw how life - any life - has a way of insisting, against the odds, on staying alive, on growing, on becoming. And beyond any words, our lives touched, intimately.

I will always be part of them, and they of me, however long they pounce and purr and climb in this precarious world.

May their lives be long, and bright, and lovely.

Running the Edge of the World

2011-08-02T00:57:00.000-07:00

Tokeland, Willapa Bay Southern Washington Coast ---

For the last sunny week or so I've been running barefoot on the big beaches to the north of here. Running's new - it's been a long time since I've been well enough to run - and running barefoot along the wet shiny salt-spray-and-wind edge of the continent is wholly new. The sand is packed hard from the breakers, almost as hard as pavement, and the shorebirds dash wildly into and out of the waves, just as I veer inland when a big wave comes in. Otherwise I like to run where the waves spread out into a fine mirror for the sky, my feet splashing in the shallow sheet of water.

Everything is reduced down to just a few "things", almost not things at all - sand ocean line of dunes shorebirds terns sun sky. There's a sense of edge, but not a hard edge - a constantly shifting, literally fluid edge. Running the edge of the world.

James Swan, in his record from 1851 of the earliest white settlement of this part of the coast, writes about traveling along this very beach from Grays Harbor to "Shoalwater Bay" (now Willapa Bay). Inland were huge dark cedar and spruce forests, deep bogs, steep hills - but a person could drive a coach and four horses down the hard-packed open sand. Washington beaches are still classified as "public highways" - a legacy of the time, not so long ago, when they were the only way up and down the wet and wild Pacific coast.

I say "this very beach" but the beach I've been running on is called Washaway Beach. It's the fastest eroding shoreline in North America. What is beach now was once land, just a few years ago. Hundreds of feet of coastline a year disappear into the ocean, houses that were once well inland now stand tipped nearly over the edge of the sandy bank, the entire town of North Cove (church, coast guard station, cemetery) occupied a sandy peninsula now entirely underwater, where Pacific waves break at low tide, the graves moved inland, bones and headstones and all. Where I run this year will be ocean next year, the edge moving inexorably inland.

So what beach do I run on? Do I run on James Swan's beach? Where is the edge?

This time of year the shorebirds are just beginning to return from their far northern nesting grounds, some to stay here for the winter, others to go south south south, unimaginably far south. They're tired. Today I saw a whole group resting beside the waves, little white balls of feathers, heads tucked in, a gull presiding over them. I run a long way around the shorebirds. The last thing they need is to have to fly unnecessarily, after what they've been through. I cringe when I see a dog on the beach, joyously chasing them.

Right now it's all semipalmated plovers and sanderlings, the plovers gazing meditatively off into the middle distance, the sandlerings running like wind-up toys back and forth from one good feeding area to another, flying up together like a school of silvery fish flickering in the air. It took me about a half an hour to move slowly slowly up to a group of sanderlings today, to get close enough to see what they were with my small binoculars, but slow enough not to spook them.

This is why I don't want to spook them - the plovers have just arrived from their nesting grounds in the Arctic and subarctic, and they're headed south for the winter. Some of them are headed to....hang on to your hat here....Patagonia. More of the sanderlings stay around for the winter, but they nest even farther north, only in the High Arctic above the Arctic Circle, and some of them migrate 5,000 miles or more to South America. This is serious flying for birds smaller than a robin. I don't even travel that far, wanderer that I am.

So the shorebirds and I share the beach, all of us travelers, here for a little while before we head south, and the beautiful Caspian terns fly overhead staring into the water and croaking "like a crow being strangled" (as a friend of mine described them). When it's windy the dry sand moves in a fine sheet across the hard-packed wet sand, and the effect is mesmerizing, like running in a shallow desert river.

There is a joy that can seize a person in a place like that, running in the wind in all that space and light. I'm not sure where it comes from, or why it arrives. The spirit grows wide, spreading itself out. There's nothing outside that brightness, for a while.

All At Once

2011-03-12T23:45:00.000-08:00

Isn't it strange, the way so many things are happening at the same moment? At this moment,as I write this or you read this, an inconceivable number of events are occurring: someone is experiencing the greatest happiness, another the greatest grief; there is an avalanche cascading down a mountain slope and somewhere else a light rain has begun to fall; a small creature is being born and another creature is dying; a new star is forming, and somewhere another star is winking out, its light and heat fading away into darkness. All at once.

Yesterday and the day before I experienced this mystery with particular vividness. Thursday night I was reading from Wildbranch at a local bookstore with two of the book's contributors. It was a lovely night, and local friends came out to hear us. I shared a story from a reader of the book, who had told me that she had given up reading environmental literature because it was too depressing, but she had realized that Wildbranch was about love, love and intimacy with our world, and love is a more potent force for action than despair. I felt so happy about the book and what it offers, so happy to be sharing it and reading from many contributors.

I came home from the reading to the news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which had happened as we read.

I was up much of the night, knowing that there could be a tsunami on the west coast of North America, and concerned for my little retreat cabin a few feet above high water on the Washington coast, my neighbor and her children, and my sweet friends who were staying in the cabin that night. I knew enough about tsunamis to know that they can cross whole oceans in a matter of hours without much diminution of their force. I knew that the county had called for an evacuation of all houses at sea level, including mine and those of my neighbors.

Several of us at the reading had arranged to go hiking the next day. The next morning I left for the hike before the time that the first major waves would come ashore. I had reached my friends who were staying at the cabin, and they had left and driven back to their own home, safely above sea level, but I didn't know what would happen to the cabin and the small community around it, all of which sits just a few feet above sea level on a narrow peninsula on Willapa Bay, a stone's throw from the open ocean and the roaring surf. I've always known that it is vulnerable to an event just like this one. Would this be the time?

Then, for the next few hours, I was hiking and looking at spring wildflowers, and I don't know what happened, except that the four of us on the hike fell into a kind of grace, one of those times of magical ease and beauty, unlooked-for, unrepeatable, perfect.

It was a clear, sunny spring day after rain, the air soft and subtly misty, the ground exhaling its moisture. Our trail started high up on Mount Tamalpais, then descended the open west-facing slopes of the mountain, views far out over the ocean, north to Bolinas and south to the very tops of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. The grass - not just the grass, but everything, every tree, shrub, herb and moss - was deeply, brilliantly green, the hallucinatory green of March in the coastal hills. After a while the the trail entered the redwoods and turned upward again, following waterfall after waterfall back up the mountain, up mossy stone stairways.

Some of us in our little group of four knew each other well, over many years; others were just acquaintances. Two Zen practitioners, three writing teachers, one botanist. What we shared was our love of literature and the natural world, and this moment together. We talked and walked and admired flowers and mushrooms and the light through the redwoods. We took photographs and shared gingerbread and homemade coffee cake by the side of the creek. We told stories. We wandered on and off the trail. I left my walking stick by a flower and then it reappeared, leaning against a railing on an entirely different trail. The day unfolded with a kind of ease that only happens now and again, in dreams or, if we're lucky, for a few hours in waking life.

The whole time I didn't know what had become of the only place I can call home, whether the sturdy little white cottage underneath the Sitka spruce was filled with muddy water as I walked the hills, or still sitting quietly in the rain, unharmed and whole. Or what might be happening in Japan or elsewhere all along the edge of the Pacific. There was nothing I could do, but I didn't forget, and it gave a subtly different feeling to the day for me, a kind of strangeness that made the light more brilliant and the grace more poignant.

When I got back to town, many hours later, I heard from my neighbor that everything was fine. She talked about how the day had been for her, also not knowing, waiting, and the gratitude she felt for the simple gift of being fine, of having a house and safe children, of making a pot of soup and starting a fire in the woodstove. How often do any of us remember to be grateful for our lives as they are, in all their ordinary details?

Meanwhile, across the ocean, thousands of people are still missing. Tonight, as I write this, people are huddled in makeshift shelters, mourning their homes, their friends and relatives, their pets, the lives they once had - lives that can be rebuilt but which will never be the same. And I sit here, still bathed in a sense of well-being from my day in the hills, feeling happiness for what was not destroyed in my life. These things exist side by side, utterly connected and yet also independent of one another.

I read tonight that the Dalai Lama has asked people in Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile for more than fifty years, to chant the Heart Sutra 100,000 times for the people of Japan and all who are suffering disaster.

The Heart Sutra says "form does not differ from emptiness, and emptiness does not differ from form." Another way of saying it is that I am, at the same time, both an individual with a history and an experience that is uniquely my own, and completely connected. I am affected by an earthquake across an ocean from me, and yet walked the hills as others suffered and died. We breathe air that has been in the lungs of a lion, the stomata of 300-year-old coast live oak, the nose of Buddha, but when we breathe, only we can breathe our breath, this one irreplaceable, unrepeatable breath

And on the day I die, there will almost certainly be someone walking those hills I walked yesterday, bending to look at a wildflower, smiling at a friend, breathing in the clean ocean air. We will share that moment, not knowing each other, linked inextricably.

Ode to a Favorite Place

2011-01-21T16:52:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've written here: I've been preoccupied with promoting the Wildbranch anthology (several great book readings, in San Francisco and Portland), working on a new book of Buddhist koans and stories about women, and organizing and helping to lead a women't retreat up in Washington. It's been a project-full time!

But today is a fabulously beautiful spring day in Marin County. I walked downtown from my aerie amongst the oaks and the hawks, down through the dark, cool redwoods and the creek in Blithedale Canyon, then into the quiet village of Mill Valley. I saw a friend for green tea and apple pie, then walked back through the canyon and up the hill again. Although it's not yet the end of January, we're having true spring weather. The grassy hills are ludicrously green, daffodils are in bloom, and everywhere the spring annuals are sending up leafy shoots.

I'm often astonished that I am able to live here, even if I can only afford to be here for a few months out of every year. The beauty of this area has never grown commonplace to me. Every time I see the Golden Gate Bridge from the hills behind my place, miles away, fog drifting between the towers, I'm amazed all over again. Every time I look out my window to the peak of Mount Tamalpais, or get out of my car in the evening to quiet moonlight, I'm grateful.

And the people! Marin is still a place for eccentrics and artists and meditation junkies, surviving like relic trees amidst the Lexus SUV's, and I seem to have the luck to meet them every time I turn around.

What inspired me to write today is a quote in a book by Gary Thorpe, a sort of neighbor in Marin, fellow Zen practitioner, writer, and naturalist. I don't know Gary, but I feel like I should - we've probably passed each other on the trail and sat in the dark together at Green Gulch, never knowing it. The book is a collection of short essays about Gary's quest to see a mountain lion, Caught in Fading Light. Here's the quote that caught my eye:

"Marin County, where we live, is a wonderful place to look for something. It's a land of wilderness, parks, marine sanctuaries, farmlands, small villages, and manageably sized cities. Here one can find an abundance of wildflowers and mushrooms, along with meditation centers and ethnic restaurants. There are elephant seals, car dealerships, redwood trees, high-tech industries, rare falcons, and imprisoned felons, all sharing one of the loveliest landscapes and coastlines anywhere."

This quote reminded me of another paean to Marin Countyin Alan Watt's delightful autobiography (remember Alan Watts, the first popularizer of Eastern religions?), In My Own Way. Alan spend the last decades of his life in Marin County, some of that time on a houseboat in Sausalito, and here's what he wrote about it in 1972. Now, admittedly, Marin was a little bit wilder then (in every possible way) but I detect the same spirit even now, and many of the people who were here in 1972 are still here, tucked away up the canyons. Some of them are my neighbors!

"Here in San Francisco and Southern Marin we have succeeded, more than anywhere else in the United State, in curbing the White Anglo Saxon Protestant subculture of the nation, though our slight margin of victory requires incessant vigilance...By virtue of its hilly landscape, its redwood forests and eucalyptus groves, its wayward coastline, its liberally bohemianized population, the peninsula of southern Marin has attracted imaginative people from all over the world...it has also become a powerful spiritual center of the nation, as befits the fact that its geographical center is a mountain holy to the Indians...Though not much more than twenty-five hundred feet high, Mount Tamalpais rises almost directly from sea level...Seen in the first light of dawn...the whole mass of hills, valleys, and canyons with their forests. groves, meadows and giant rocks confers an atmosphere of strange benificence.

Extraordinary people live upon it... There are mountain lions, bobcats,and deer galore, and wild goats and eagles and vultures and racoons and rattlesnakes and gophers... All these and many more wizards, yogis, artists, poets, musicians, gardeners and madmen cluster about this mountain."

So there you have it. My friends might wonder why I keep being drawn back to this place, so far from my home ground of the rainy Northwest coast. It's the light of the January sun, my 95-year-old neighbor who traveled the world as an adventuresome entomologist, the joy of walking beneath old coast live oaks draped in lichen, the library beneath the redwoods, the shorebirds by the tens of thousands, the Buddhist meditation groups in every nook and cranny (including my own household!), the beautiful white city shimmering to the south. And I do have a soft spot for mountain lions and vultures and wizards and poets and gardeners and madmen... (might even be more than a little bit one of the latter myself).

I've been thinking about gratitude, and its power to transform our habitually whiney minds into happy minds. Gratitude for place seems like a important kind of gratitude, at least for me. To bow down and kiss the ground, whatever that ground might be - granite or concrete, dirt or sand or duff or garden bed. Beauty everywhere.

And although it's true that I don't exactly live anywhere, I feel grateful for the many beautiful places that are part of my life, from the soft shoals and light of Willapa Bay, to the tawny slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, to the tremendous spaciousness and wilderness of the Mojave Desert. Even my hometown in the Midwest, with its gracious old houses and tropical summer heat, deep green - where in the world is there NOT something to celebrate of the place where you stand?

If you feel like writing a response in the comments, something about the place or places you love, please share.

Poetic Interlude: Winter on Mount Tamalpais

2010-12-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

Mist covers the mountain today

houses nestled in the folds of the hills,

half hidden by trees,

a Chinese landscape scroll outside the window.

All day they're cutting a huge fir across the valley

first, branches, till the tree stands bare

then, piece by piece from the top.

I miss the moment

when it no longer stands at all

clouds hide the sight.

Abundance and Diminishment, Diminishment and Abundance

2010-10-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I shopped at Whole Foods, the aisles just brimming over with the beauties of the world: rare and tasty cheeses, the finest carefully-chosen organic vegetables glowing in artfully arranged piles, forty different artisan breads made by hand from stone-ground flour, Fair Trade chocolates from around the world (chocolate and lavender, chocolate and chile, chocolate and espresso beans). The food of gods and goddesses, and I'm one of them, grateful and amazed, even as I know that this abundance can only be temporary, in a world of such disparities, where so few have so much and so many have so little.

When I was a kid growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, we shopped at the A&P grocery on 9th St - Wonder Bread, Hostess Twinkies, old wilted broccoli (who wanted fresh vegetables when canned and frozen lasted so much longer?), Folger's instant coffee.

"Organic" didn't exist.

The Wabash River flowed through town and an abandoned park on the river was my favorite haunt, but the river was so polluted that in all my years there I never dreamed of touching the water. Now my hometown has a restaurant where all the food has been grown or raised within one hundred miles, people catch and eat fish from the river, and The Nature Conservancy is working to protect the riparian forests of the Wabash which is - to my astonishment - the longest free-flowing river east of the Mississippi, an ecological treasure, a jewel.

from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsteup/4507766722/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Meanwhile, every day there is another story about the disappearing fish stocks in the world's oceans. Meanwhile the song birds are coming back from migration in fewer and fewer numbers. Meanwhile...well, you know the stories, you read them too. When I'm with a group of like-minded friends, sometimes we trade these stories, a badge of our shared despair. I've begun to wonder if this is helpful, for the song birds or for us.

When I was working in Southeast Alaska this summer, I saw abundance that seemed far beyond anything I'd ever known. The inlets and waterways were filled with diving murrelets (endangered south of Alaska), auklets and puffins; the streams were full of silver salmon; humpback whale spouts could be seen in all directions; every kelp bed was filled with flipper-waving sea otters. On land the deer barely bothered to lift their heads when we entered their rich sedge meadows; bear sign was everywhere (I would have been happy with a little less bear sign); and sandhill crane pairs trumpeted from their nests in secret muskegs.

It was wonderful and encouraging, and it would be easy to stop here, to write a few elegiac words about how the whole world must have once been like this - but it's not so simple. Here are a few examples of the not-simplicity of the abundance I saw....

Until a few years ago, there had been no sea otters in Sea Otter Sound for a hundred years or more - they had all been hunted out by the Russians and the English and anyone else who appreciated the warmth and value of otter-skin coats. Thanks to the Marine Mammal Protection Act and tireless work by biologists and others, they're back, more every year, but the local people say that they're eating all the shellfish, and the shellfish beds are barren and empty now.

The bears and deer move through a landscape that has been decimated by some of the most rapacious clear-cutting ever seen on this planet. The Tongass National Forest was, between the late 1960's and the late 1990's, nothing short of a national sacrifice area, its vast dark forests of old growth hemlock and Sitka spruce merely fodder for two huge pulp mills on the mainland, its landscape scarred by thousands of miles of roads. Our national heritage was sold for a pittance, a tiny fraction of its worth, to keep those two mills turning out toilet paper and newspaper - toilet paper no doubt sold at the A&P in Terre Haute, Indiana - and to keep the owners of those mills providing large donations to Alaskan politicians.

A small group of activists. local subsistence-based people, biologists and foresters fought to stop, or at least mitigate, the damage, and they won. The cutting on Prince of Wales Island has largely stopped (except, ironically, on native-owned lands.....that's a whole other story).

One biologist I know, who has been working on Prince of Wales for eighteen years, said he had never seen so many bears before. The bears are coming back, the forests are coming back, with each storm the land reclaims another road.

Some of the salmon I saw in such abundance are hatchery stock, moving upstream to where they were born, where they will be milked of their eggs before being hit over the head and their carcasses dumped nearby. The bears like this a lot.

Our fingerprints are everywhere, doing good, doing harm, one step forward, one step back. Sometimes we don't even know if it's good or harm, or both. Even as I write this on this rainy night, I look out on to the dark slopes of Mount Tamalpais. I am spending the winter here again because I love being in a place where open space is a stone's throw from where I sleep, where mountain lions and red-shouldered hawks are my neighbors.

Mt. Tam from outside my window

But Mount Tamalpais was - and continues to be - saved from urban sprawl by generations of wealthy or influential (or both) peope who fought and fought to protect it, some of whom are probably shopping at Whole Foods right now, debating with themselves about which fish is most "sustainably harvested" for their Saturday dinner.

The world of owls and whales and otters may be in big trouble. I suspect it is. We, goofy troublesome primates that we are, may be in very big trouble, and I'm almost certain we are. But some of us have the will and energy to fight for the world, and the world has immense powers of recuperation, of renewal, even as we mess with it in our various ways. I don't even pretend to understand what's going on, but I suspect that abundance and diminishment, kindness and rapaciousness, damage and renewal walk together.

I do know this: the rain and wind that soaks the hills tonight and that brings such misery to those without homes in the streets of San Francisco will also bring the salmon up the streams to dance their old dance above their redds again. And the willow saplings planted along those streams by a hundred volunteers will take root in the wet, take hold, begin to grow.

P.S. Let's continue the conversation...if you post an online comment, I promise to respond.

Southeast Alaska - Second Glimpse: The XtraTuf State

2010-09-09T00:26:00.001-07:00

A few weeks before I left for for my field work in Southeast Alaska, I was on a conference call with the four other biologists on the crew, all of whom had logged serious field time in Alaska, from seabird surveys in the remote Pribilof Islands to laying out huge timber sales on the Tongass National Forest. I was the newbie, the innocent, the lower-48-only idiot. I had no pride to lose, so I asked, “Hey, what is the best footwear for working in Southeast Alaska?”

The response was unhesitating and simultaneous: “XtraTufs, preferably with corks.”

I was not quite willing to admit at that moment that I had no idea what XtraTufs were, but I jotted the name down (Extra-Toughs? Extra-Tuffs?) in my little notebook with all the other tips (full working-man’s raingear – none of that Gore-Tex crap – boot dryers, fleece gloves with neoprene palms for the devil’s-club, Rite-In-The-Rain field paper….)

I was going to be PREPARED, by gum. I did know what corks were, though I’d never worked in them: they’re a set of wicked spikes that fit into the bottom of the sole of the boot, designed to grab on to slick logs so that you don’t go head over tea-kettle into the aforementioned devil’s-club.

(A digression here: devil’s-club, Oplopanax horridus, is a well-named Dr. Seuss-like being with enormous spiny leaves atop a long, bare spine-studded stem. I knew it well from the West Cascades of Washington, but only when I got to Alaska did I see devil’s-club growing in thickets tall enough to hide a basketball star. It seems to prefer steep slopes where an unwary sliding biologist will be likely to grab the spine-festooned stem as a last resort.)

An innocent-looking patch of devil's-club

I wasn’t so sure I wanted corks, especially after I heard stories of neophytes putting the spikes through their own raingear and shins, but I was determined to get XtraTufs, whatever they were. I went online and read this: “XTRATUFs are American-made neoprene boots that provide 100% waterproof protection with all-day comfort for the MOST SEVERE fishing, farming, and work conditions.” Sounded like the conditions I was heading toward. They looked like an expensive version of a basic rubber boot, but if my experienced Alaskan co-workers said I needed them, then clearly I needed them, and no questions asked.

Finding them – and extra-tough raingear to go with them -turned out to be another story altogether. I don’t want to go into the embarrassing details here, but I’m on the small side. I have been called (in a friendly manner) “height-challenged”, and I often save money by shopping in the children’s section of REI.

I quickly discovered that the iconic tan and brown XtraTufs are found primarily in marine supply stores, the kinds of places that cater to commercial fisherman and aspiring stars of “The Deadliest Catch”. Ditto for heavy-duty raingear. Now I KNOW there are women and children on boats all the time, but tell that to the makers of these things. In their world, all human beings are at least six feet tall and weigh over two hundred pounds. I could have fit at least two of me in the men’s extra-small rain bibs, and for a while it looked like my search for the essential XtraTufs might fail altogether.

Eventually I found a store that carried the smallest possible size of XtraTufs – men’s size 5 – and by some miracle, and with heavy socks and a pair of insoles – it seemed that they more or less fit me. I walked out the proud owner of the indispensable Alaska boots, and in retrospect, I shudder to think of how I would have felt if I had been unable to procure XtraTufs. I had no idea of their role in coastal Alaskan culture. Those of you who have been there are surely nodding knowingly now.

I will say that the raingear search was harder. Five marine stores in three different towns later, I was about to surrender and buy bright pink little girl’s raingear. I knew it was silly to care, I knew a Buddhist practitioner should be beyond “praise and gain”, but it was really hard on my dignity as a field biologist to imagine showing up in bright pink raingear. On the other hand, showing up without any raingear at all seemed like a truly bad idea.

In desperation, I spent two hours combing through a vast supply of raingear seemingly designed for Mr. Universe, until I found bright blue bibs and a jacket that I thought I could wear without tripping over my own hems or losing my hands inside the sleeves. I was quite pleased with myself, since I had avoided the deadly pink raingear, but I must admit that just the other day I put on the bibs for a walk in the rain with friends, and my friends burst out laughing. I have the sneaking suspicion that I looked like a large, overly ripe blueberry up there in the Alaskan rainforest. Maybe the only reason that the bears left me alone was that they were doubled up with laughter at the sight of me.

Photo by Emily Drew

Thus armed with a ridiculous quantity of brand new outdoor gear, I journeyed north, by Alaska airlines to Ketchikan, then by ancient float plane to Prince of Wales Island. I brought hiking boots along with my XtraTufs, because I’ve always worked in hiking boots and I couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t be appropriate somewhere, sometime. But they weren’t.

Nothing made it clearer just how wet this part of the world really is than discovering the astonishing, absolute necessity of high waterproof boots at all times. Years ago I did wetland delineations, using plants and soil to identify boundaries of wetlands. I’m pretty sure that a wetland delineator could draw a great big circle around Southeast Alaska and call it good. There are dryer forests there, but even dry forests are covered with a dense, deep layer of sopping wet moss – moss everywhere, on the ground, on fallen logs, on upright logs, on rocks….like an emerald green blanket thrown over anything remotely horizontal. In fact, not only did I wear my boots all the time, I wore raingear nearly all the time too, rain or no rain. The first time I crawled over a big moss-covered log with no raingear on was my last.

XtraTufs doing their stuff in a mudflat

Within days I discovered - and I’m really not exaggerating much here at all - that no one wears anything on his or her feet, at any time, other than XtraTufs. Not just my seasoned field crew, but everyone. Not that we saw many people, but those we saw had XtraTufs on. Outside fading, dilapidated cabins, you could see a line of XtraTufs on the porch, matching the sizes of the men and women inside. In fact, I remember, on our last day, checking in with the floatplane company, and seeing a young, very pretty, very chic, well-dressed woman, waiting for the plane too. What was she wearing on her elegantly crossed feet? ExtraTufs, turned fetchingly down at the ankle. She made XtraTufs look like the sexiest thing north of the Canadian border.

I’ve even had a fantasy that babies have been conceived in Southeast Alaska by parents wearing nothing but XtraTufs (giving “rubbers” a whole new twist).

Here’s the funny thing, after all: XtraTufs are not all that great in the woods. Their soft and flexible neoprene provide little ankle or arch support, which are real issues when a person is on his or her feet for many hours a day, covering miles of uneven, very slippery, sometimes steep terrain. Sometimes I’d be going downhill through the endless little muddy streams and sphagnum, wincing as I twisted one ankle or the other about every five minutes. They’re probably great on a fishing boat, but a fishing boat is a far cry from the woods. A good pair of ordinary rubber boots would have probably been better. Nonetheless, I cringe to think of myself pulling out my cute little bright blue rubber boots (and oh, wouldn’t they have been fetching with my bright blue raingear?)

I have a suspicion that part of the reason terrestrial biologists wear XtraTufs in Southeast Alaska is the same reason that I might wear XtraTufs again if I went back, even if it meant sprained ankles after a day in the woods: they are a true symbol of Southeast Alaska, recognized by everyone there. They express your knowledge of the conditions and your readiness for anything – a day in the rain, a day fishing for salmon along the river, a day stalking your winter deer in the muskeg, a day out crabbing on the high seas, even a day hunting rare plants in the woods. The way they say, “This is one hell of a wet, difficult place, but I’m up for it, I’m prepared, I’m tough.”

Spencer Richter, with his pit bull Bristol and his XtraTufs

And Southeast Alaska demands a lot of her people. Her people are not just tough, but extra tough. And they have the boots to prove it.

Southeast Alaska - First Glimpse

2010-09-02T17:51:00.000-07:00

I'm back from three and a half weeks of work in Southeast Alaska, where I hunted rare plants as part of a team of botanists on the Tongass National Forest.

We worked on mountaintops, cliffs, salt marshes, beaches, bogs, lakes, meadows and old growth Sitka spruce forests on about a half dozen islands west of Ketchikan, most of which most people have never heard of: Prince of Wales Island (the fourth largest island in the US), Heceta Island, Whalehead Island, Blashke Island, Kosciusko Island, and Tuxekan Island, all in the Alexander Archipelago, made up of over a thousand islands off the west coast of the Alaskan mainland.

This was my first trip to Alaska. I've avoided Alaska all this years because -- and I'm just going to be really honest about this -- I'M AFRAID OF BEARS. I'm somewhat rational about this: I'm much more afraid of grizzlies than I am of black bears. But I'm also embarrassingly afraid of black bears. Embarrassing because as a field biologist for nearly twenty-five years, I should know better, or at least be a little less paranoid than some city slicker. I wouldn't have taken the job if it had been in grizzly country, but Prince of Wales only has black bears. More about bears later.

As a Southeast Alaska newbie, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had ideas - large bearded men, rain, insects, wildlife, big trees. But it's a long way from one's ideas about a place to the actual, living place. Still, some of my ideas were more or less accurate....

Large bearded men? Check - although there weren't many people on Prince of Wales, where there were men, they tended to be large and scruffy and bearded, though quite friendly. (Here's an Alaska joke for single women: "The odds are good but the goods are odd.") It's a guys' place, with an emphasis on functionality and a de-emphasis on aesthetics. In the few tiny settlements, trucks lay rotting in the weeds, minus their tires (imagine the difficulty and expense of getting a dead truck off a remote island); houses looked like they'd been put up in an afternoon a half century ago and never painted again, and blue tarps reigned supreme. One is visible as a make-shift door in the photo below. There was even a spectacular collection of enormous, long-abandoned and rusted logging equipment, called, with some heavy irony, "The Logging Museum".

The Ruff-It General Store, accessible only by boat. Whale Pass, Prince of Wales Island

Rain? Check - it rained nearly every day we were working, and on the rare days when it wasn't raining or drizzling, the underbrush was so wet that it might as well have been raining. We never really dried out, just like everything and everyone else there. The whole place is dripping wet, a great big sponge soaking up the North Pacific storms. About half the "land" is muskeg, which is essentially a spot that hasn't dried out since the last Ice Age, covered in layers of peat and sphagnum moss and carnivorous plants and little ponds and too wet even for most trees. There is no point to wearing any clothing other than layers of fleece, and no point wearing any footgear other than high rubber boots (more on those later too), preferably ones with cork spikes in the bottom ot prevent slipping off the giant wet mossy logs that must be clambered over to get anywhere.

That's me, in XtraTuf boots and rain-gear, walking through a saltmarsh.

Photo by Emily Drew.

Insects? They weren't as bad as I had feared, except for "white socks", little flies that removed chunks of flesh from our faces and necks, then worked their way under our clothing. I wouldn't know I'd been bitten (they must inject some anesthetic) until I touched my face and felt dried streams of blood. Sometime after the initial bite - hours or days later - the spot would begin to swell and itch. The itch would build to a nearly unbearable intensity, and all our faces were swollen and bloody, like sixteen-year-olds with terminal acne. It lasted about a week, until the next set of fly bites.

Me again, bug-netted, trying to document a rare plant location in a skunk cabbage swamp.

Photo by Emily Drew.

And bears? What Prince of Wales Island lacks in grizzlies, it makes up for in black bears, which like everything in Southeast - trees, slugs, devils-club, skunk cabbage - are prone to a certain gigantism. The bears on Prince of Wales are the largest black bears in North America. And like the rain, they are everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. Big piles of dark bear scat litter the sides of main roads, line every game trail, stand like proud monuments out in the middle of meadows, and even show up on the tops of mountains. It doesn't seem possible that any animal smaller than an elephant could produce such humongous dumps. I can't even begin to express how large these things are - the scat that is, not to mention the bears themselves, which we encountered nearly every day.

Despite an ecological understanding of the importance of large carnivores, I have to admit that I prefer my woods without bears, or, if there are bears, I prefer my bears to be secretive and shy. The bears OWN Southeast Alaska, as far as I could tell.

All that aside, though - even as I chronically damp, nervous, and covered in intensely itchy welts - every day was a wonder, an amazing encounter with a land and creatures beyond what I had ever imagined seeing. I feel grateful and lucky to have had the opportunity to work in those primeval forests, on uninhabited islands, in a dreamlike place of mists and water.

It's been hard to begin to write about it, perhaps because the scale of the experience was so large, so multi-layered. I pull one thread and a whole island lands in my lap, mud and moss and forests and all. Or perhaps because it was so far beyond what I've experienced before - flying in a small helicopter a few hundred feet above the ocean, listening to the breathing of humpback whales, walking alone along the edge of a cliff, standing in places where there is no one else for many miles, happening upon courting, bugling sandhill cranes in hidden meadows.

I hardly know how to share it. I think the only way is in little glimpses, vignettes, like getting on to one's hands and knees and looking at the moss gardens in the muskeg, up close.

So, in the next series of posts, over the next few weeks, Southeast Alaska, glimpsed.

Field Season Sabbatical From Blogging - in Alaska!

2010-06-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

I won't be posting for at least the next month....I'm going to be in Southeast Alaska doing botanical fieldwork on Prince of Wales and other islands, with limited internet connections (but plenty of wolves!), and then traveling up in the Canadian islands. I'll post pictures and stories from the other side of all this adventuring.

Meanwhile, here's a link to the anthology that I've been working on for the last couple of years, due out in September and available for pre-order now from University of Utah Press or Amazon. The writings in the book, by nearly fifty authors, are truly beautiful and inspiring.

Wildbranch: an anthology of nature, environmental, and place-based writing

Mother's Day

2010-05-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

On this Mother's Day I've been driving across the springtime desert, a great bouquet spread across the mountains and canyons and vast sweeps of the Southwest. And I've been thinking about the power of mothers, the sheer unbelievable exhausting work and terror and joy of mothering that women all across the world take on with their whole hearts.

In the Metta Sutta, an early Buddhist sutra about compassion and loving-kindness, the practitioner is urged to love others "even as a mother loves her only child." The Tibetans teach loving-kindness by suggesting that since all beings have, in one lifetime or another, been our mother, how can we help but feel boundless gratitude to all of them? And Prajnaparamita, the deepest possible wisdom, is described as "the mother of the Buddhas" and is always depicted as a woman.

Personally, I've been learning a few things about what it takes to be a mother, directly from the source. For the past few months, before I started my annual fieldwork, I've been the "token non-mother" in a small meditation group for mothers that my friend Monica and I started together. All the women (except me) have school age children, and some are on the second round of raising children - a child in college and a young child still at home.

We meet at 8:30 AM on Mondays, since mothers generally can't get to an evening meditation group. Anyone can show up as late as they need to, since everyone knows that getting kids off to school can be filled with the unexpected. If someone has a child home from school, she can bring him or her to the house too. After we sit together in silence on couches and chairs and comfortable cushions, we pass around a little statue of Kuan Yin, the female bodhisattva of compassion, and each woman has a few minutes to speak about anything she wants. We all listen with our full attention. Sometimes the person speaking begins to cry. Sometimes we all start to cry. Sometimes we all laugh. And then, after each woman has said what she wants to say, we talk for a bit and then go our separate ways.

Every time is moving, extraordinary, and the hard-won wisdom in the room is palpable. And each of these women, who spend all week listening and responding - to children, husbands, a whole family - have one place where she is completely listened to and heard, and where she can say whatever needs to be said, the thing that perhaps can't be said anywhere else.

This what I've learned, through the tremendous honesty of the women in the group: mothering is infinitely harder than anyone ever acknowledges (and I can imagine all the mothers reading this snorting and rolling their eyes at my great insight). My respect for mothers - any mother - has increased tenfold. All you non-mothers out there, male or female, just try it for a week. Take someone's kids for a week - even your own kids if you're not the primary caregiver - and see what it's like. See if you're not reduced to a puddle of exhaustion, frustration, infantile responses, confusion, and self-doubt by the end of the week. See if you're not horrified by the thoughts that have arisen in your mind. See if you haven't wanted, at least once, to throw something across the room, maybe even that sweet child that you love so much who has just pushed you over an edge you never imagined you had.

And yet, on the other side, ask any mother whether she regrets what she's taken on. I remember when my friend Katy had her first child, at 40, after most of a lifetime of not wanting children. She said, over and over again, "I can't believe I almost missed this. I have never felt love like this, my heart has opened wider than I knew was possible, there is nothing more wonderful." She was transformed, radiant, new-born herself. She's walked a tough road as a mother, with some terrifying moments - the kind of moments that no parent even wants to think about - but I know she would still say the same things that she said when her first beautiful daughter was born.

To be a mother is to open yourself up to everything - to all the struggle and heart-ache, to being unappreciated or even hated by your children, to risk the loss of your children, to weep, to sacrifice what matters to you for your children, to be helpless to ease their suffering, to fail and fail again. And to love with every cell in your body.

When Tibetan teachers first came to the West, they couldn't understand why their practice of generating gratitude by thinking of one's mother often went so poorly with their Western students. It seems that deep trouble between mothers and children is a hallmark of our culture. If we're lucky we can spend a few days with our mothers without going mad. But admiration? Devotion? Very rare.

We can't pretend that trouble away, but at least we can consider what it takes to be a mother, every once in a while. I know that my contact with the women I was sitting with every Monday morning has changed me irrevocably, and has given me a new view of the tremendous nobility of the practice of mothering. A bodhisattva is a being who is dedicated to the well-being of others; however imperfectly, every mother is engaged in bodhisattva practice, doing the best she can with her own heart and the challenge of a child. Now when I see a harassed mother with a screaming child - or two, or three - in the grocery store I want to bow down and kiss her fee, or at least hand her a coupon for a good massage and a glass of wine. I am in the presence of a bodhisattva.

I want to end with part of an ancient koan:

A certain laywoman was a student of a famous Zen teacher in China. From time to time she would come to the monastery to visit the teacher, and she would be treated with great respect and was housed in the teacher's best guestroom. The senior monk at the monastery resented the woman and didn't think it was proper that she was treated so well. He kept complaining to his teacher, and finally the teacher said, "If this bothers you so much, go talk to her yourself."

So the monk went off reluctantly to see the woman. When he knocked at her door with his attendants, she met him and said, "Is this a worldly conversation, or a Zen conversation?"

He said, "A Zen conversation."

She said, "Then dismiss your attendents and come in alone in a few minutes."

When he came in she was lying on the bed, naked. He pointed to her body and said (and I can imagine the tone here), "What is this?"

She said, "This is the gate through which all the Buddhas and great teachers come into the world."

Every great man, every great woman, every humanitarian, every saint, every president, every philosopher, every artist, every writer, every peacemaker has come into the world through the body of a woman. On this Mother's Day, I bow down to all women everywhere, and especially I bow down all mothers. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo.

And a special bow to my own mother, the amazing Harriet McNeal, off in Romania having more adventures as I write this. Thank you for all the ways you've taken care of and inspired me.

Blessings

2010-03-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

It’s a cold, sunny November day in San Francisco, and I’m walking up Fillmore Street near Japantown. I don’t live in the city, but I enjoy coming in for the day from my little place in the oak-covered hills to the north. I’ve already indulged in a fine latte at a tiny French café, sitting at a table in the sun reading the New York Times and feeling comfortably and exquisitely urbane. Now I’m near the Duxiana store, which sells high-end luxury mattresses, and I notice an older man sitting on an overturned bucket by the corner. He’s wearing a gray canvas smock and he’s holding an empty soup can carelessly in his right hand. He’s looking across the street, as if he’s just resting there on his bucket, resting rather than begging. I walk by him and up to the gorgeous windows of Duxiana, and then I remember my tax.

I used to live in the country in the Pacific Northwest. Every few months I’d drive to Seattle, and invariably, as I came down the off-ramp from the freeway I would see a person at the corner near the first traffic light, usually holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign: “Need food or a job,” “Please help,” “Mother and two children,” ”Veteran.” I would roll down the window and hand a few coins or a dollar or two to whoever was on the corner that day. I began to think of this as my “city tax.” I was coming to Seattle to enjoy the city for the day; the least I could do was hand a few coins to someone willing to stand on a busy off-ramp in the ceaseless drizzle.

I know and understand the arguments against handing money to homeless people. But I tend to see asking for money on the street as a very difficult, very poorly paid job, one that I – and most people I know - would be utterly unwilling to do. I can’t imagine standing on the street for hours at a time on sore feet, begging for help, ignored, sometimes cold or wet or both, all for a little bit of cash, perhaps barely enough to buy a warm cup of coffee.

So I’m standing by the Duxiana windows, looking in at the beds as soft as clouds, and I remember all this. I turn and walk back to the man with his bucket and empty soup can, and I drop a little money in the can. He’s surprised. Without thinking, I also touch his hand and wish him well. He, in turn, looks me in the eyes and says, “Bless you, bless you.” And I feel blessed. Thoroughly and genuinely blessed and warmed and touched, like a sudden shaft of sunlight on a dark day.

This is what I’ve found, from these many years of giving money to people on the street - men and women with their shopping carts in big cities like Washington D.C. or New York or San Francisco, homeless pierced teenagers in small towns, old ladies dressed in black on the steps of churches in Mexico, gypsies playing accordions in Italy or in Greece - the response, nearly every time, from every sort of person in every language, is “Bless you,” or “God bless you.”

This is the most wondrous and mysterious thing to me. I hand fifty cents to a stranger and they bless me, like an ancient ceremony, like the kiss on the head by a wise man or woman. I never expect the blessing – why should they bless me from their cold street corner, comfortable and secure and oblivious as I am? And yet, when the blessing appears, I understand again that this is what they have to offer. When you have nothing, what can you offer but your blessing? And perhaps, when you have nothing, when you find yourself begging for food or change while others walk by you on the way to warm restaurants and cafes, your blessing is a gift far beyond what even you yourself can know.

All I know is that it feels like more than a fair exchange. Fifty cents in my pocket will buy me very little happiness; a blessing, a real blessing, and that glance into each others’ eyes, is beyond price.

Clinging To Words

2010-02-15T22:50:00.000-08:00

The Saturday before last I spent the afternoon at Green Gulch Farm, my old haunt in a valley on the Marin coast just north of San Francisco, then drove the curves of Highway 1 high above the Pacific, then past Bolinas Lagoon and up Bear Valley, where the San Andreas fault separates the North American tectonic plate from the oceanic tectonic plate, and thence to the tiny town of Point Reyes Station,at the southern end of Tomales Bay.

Two of my literary heroes were reading and speaking together in Pt. Reyes that night: Robert Hass, two-time poet laureate, and Michael Ondaatje, Sri-Lankan-born author of The English Patient and other great novels. I had found out about the talk two days before, and had been almost beside myself with excitement about it.

Why, you might wonder, are two towering world literary figures hanging out in a small town in West Marin on a Saturday night? Well, they're locals- Robert Hass lives in Inverness, just across Tomales Bay from Point Reyes Station, and Michael Ondaatje spends the winter in Marin. And they're old pals. In fact, they even look alike - both grey-haired, a little short, a little paunchy, with kind faces and laugh lines around their eyes. They were doing a benefit for the Tomales Bay Library Association, which sends writers into the local schools, teaches English to ranch workers, and hosts a major literary conference every couple of years, the last one dedicated to the memory of Wallace Stegner.

As I sat in the Point Reyes "Dance Palace", the local community center, waiting for the talk to begin, I was reading the book I'd brought along, Bill Porter's Zen Baggage: a pilgrimage to China. Bill Porter, come to think of it, would have fit right in that night - he's also gray-haired, a bit round, with laugh lines around his eyes, and he's also one of my literary heroes.

Bill lives in a place like Point Reyes Station, though larger: Port Townsend, Washington. Port Townsend is - like Point Reyes Station - filled with writers and wannabe writers, tourists and poets and artists and eccentrics and organic farmers, boat-builders and old Zen guys.

Bill lived for years in Taiwan, some of those years in a Zen monastery, then started translating ancient poetry from Chinese. He and his wife came to the US a number of years ago, and now he is one of the pre-eminent translators of Chinese Buddhist sutras. Sutras are teachings of the Buddha or expositions by great teachers on Buddhist philosophy, often quite deep and difficult to understand. Translating Buddhist sutras does not make one rich: in one of his books he thanks the local food bank in his acknowledgements. His pen name is Red Pine.

Zen Baggage is the story of one of his recent wanderings around China. That night, as I sat on a hard chair in the Dance Palace waiting for my heroes, I read about a cave he visited in the Taihang Mountains. From 581 to 1100 AD, more than a thousand Buddhist sutras, each one many thousands of lines long, were carved into the stone walls of a series of nine caves. In 1100, the caves were sealed, and they were only unsealed in 1956. Every inch of these caves is covered with ancient sutras. The versions of the sutras in the caves are in many cases older than any other known version. Paper and books can be burned; stone has a way of staying around.

As Bill wandered around the caves looking at all the words, he thought of the Lankavata ra Sutra, and he quotes a long passage from it: "a noble son or daughter [a Buddhist practitioner] should not become attached to words, because what is true is beyond words. ...if someone points to something with their finger, and a foolish person looks at their finger, they won't see what it is pointing at. In the same manner, foolish people become so attached to the finger of words, they refuse to abandon it to grasp the truth, even at the point of death..."

Bill appreciates the irony of this - the Lankavatara Sutra, which was revered by early Chinese Buddhists, was undoubtedly carved in stone somewhere in those caves. Monks spent years of their lives painstakingly carving words - were they attached to them? How could they not be?

After reading that passage, I had to put the book down, because Robert Hass and Michael Ondaatje were coming on stage. For the next two hours I was filled with nearly unceasing happiness at the beauty of the language in the room. Robert Hass read first. I'd been reading his poetry for years, but I'd never heard him read aloud. In his mouth his words came alive in a new way, imbued with his humility, his honesty, his willingness to be moved and amazed by the world around him. One poem was about feeling like the shadows underneath pine needles on a spring day....

I'm no fool - I know that authors are often at their best in their language, and in person are arrogant alcoholics or worse - but I couldn't help liking Robert Hass. And his writing, which had impressed me for a long time, was suddenly full of sparkles, like sunlight on water, alive in a new way for me.

Then Michael read. I read The English Patient when it was first released and won the Booker Prize, and I had thought then that it was a masterpiece (the film adaptation, as good as it was, didn't even come close to the book). To be in the presence of someone who could write a book like that...to hear his language, and to hear him talk with his old friend Robert Hass and with the audience about his writing process - well, it was extraordinary.

As I walked out into the misty night air, I considered the power of words in those two men. Their words had raised $3,000 for the Tomales Bay Library Association that night - an organization dedicated to words and to the sharing of them - and a hundred people or so had spent their evening, eyes alight, in the presence of great language and humanity.

Robert Hass's gift lies in the most minute and loving attention to detail - to the detail of a lover's shoulders, the detail of a bird's song, the detail of a facial expression or fleeting emotion - and yet that description, no matter how good, is only a simulacrum of the real thing - that pine needle, there, the needle on the tree that perhaps he looks at every day outside his office window; that actual lover, maybe not quite the woman that he saw and wrote about. I once wrote an essay about a relationship, trying to be honest and true...when the person who was the other half of that relationship read the essay, he said, "Very nice, but you know, it's fiction." And he was right. All writing is fiction. "What is true is beyond words," as the Lankavatara Sutra says.

Ah, but the beauty of words! What they can do to us! There is the beauty of the bird in the sky, but sometimes we only see it in a poet's words about the bird, revealed in its poignancy. A memory of a visual image, turned into language, written down, then heard or seen and brought into the mind of the hearer or reader, who "sees" the bird, and is stunned by the seeing. And yet, there's also a gap, between the direct experience and the re-imagined experience, and a kind of longing there, in that gap. But still, can we perhaps say that "what is true is also within words", or am I just fooling myself, caught in my own clinging to language, my own ecstatic love of language?

Later, after the talk, greedy for more Robert Hass, I looked him up on the internet and found several poems on the Poetry Foundation website that I'd never read, including one called Meditation at Lagunitas. I discovered that Robert Hass asks these same questions to himself, He says, "because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies", but he keeps thinking about it, and ends the poem with, "There are moments when the body is as numinous as words... Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry."

So here's what I think right now... let us say - and write - blackberry - and take joy in the reading and writing, "as numinous as words", and also eat actual blackberries, the juice running down our chins, joy in both, knowing that both these words and this mouth are temporary flashings, like "dewdrops, lightning, a rainbow". There are some lines from Tennyson that have always moved me:

"Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight."

It's like that.

Meditation at Lagunitas

by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

In the Deep Midwinter

2009-12-30T20:21:00.000-08:00

We all have our ways of celebrating the winter holidays. Some ways are more eccentric than others, I'll admit. This year I spent the day after Christmas looking for birds from dawn to dusk. The next day, the 27th of December, I spent the whole day in a silent retreat led by a Theravadan Buddhist nun. I've been thinking about these two days and how, mysteriously, they reflect one another. Each was a day of silence, of careful awareness, of gratitude, and of giving.

My bird-watching day was no random event: I was participating in the Christmas Bird Count, a census of birds in the western hemisphere that has been conducted annually over a few weeks in mid-winter by the Audubon Society for more than a hundred years.

According to the Audubon website, the count was begun in 1900 by an early bird conservationist, Frank Chapman, as an alternative to Christmas "side hunts" where hunters competed against each other in teams for the largest number of birds killed in a day. Now more than 50,000 volunteers in 17 countries participate in the count, and the results are used by ornithologists and conservation organizations to monitor the health of bird populations in their winter ranges.

I did the count with a friend, and we were assigned to an area of about one by seven miles in the hills above Bolinas Lagoon, out on the outer coast just north of San Francisco. Our day began at about 5:15 am - hours before either of us normally wakes up - followed by a groggy breakfast and a drive in the dark across the hills to the coast.

We're relative neophytes, so we were paired with two more experienced birders - an ecologist and an ornithologist - whom we met just before dawn in a muddy parking lot near the lagoon.

After minimal introductions, we headed up into the hills in silence, all four of us listening intently to the tweets and chirps and little sounds all around us in the dim woodland, though really only two of us (guess which two?) knew what they were hearing. Every few minutes someone would see something and we would all be peering into the tangle with our binoculars, trying to see a sparrow or a towhee or whatever might be lurking there, keeping a count of how many birds of each species we saw or - in the case of our companions - heard.

And so the day went, mostly in silence, hiking on or off trail through the canyons filled with coast live oak (and poison oak) or willow and bay, sometimes up in the chaparral or grassland of the open hills, sometimes all four of us together and sometimes split apart, each one of us completely intent on seeing and counting, eyes and ears and senses fully engaged, not stopping to eat or chat or even sit down. It was cold and gray, and in the afternoon it started to rain, first gently and then with determination, and we kept working as long as we could, until the rain came down so heavily in the early dusk that we were blinded and the birds were essentially invisible.

Part of what I loved about the day was the way that EACH BIRD MATTERED. In ordinary birdwatching, when I see one kinglet, I'm pleased, but the next one I see doesn't matter so much, and by the tenth I'm usually oblivious. But in the Christmas Bird Count, each raven, each crow, each jay matters, no matter how common, no matter how many have been seen before. Ah, if only we treated everything this way!

After a nine hour day in the cold and rain and muck, We drove back across the foggy slopes of Mt. Tamalpais to a warm cafe where we sat and drank hot chocolate, still in our wet jackets, still completely focused on the count. We added up what we had seen: sixty-three species, about average for a Christmas Bird Count in this area.

For each species our leader added up our individual counts, "Robins?" he would say, "how many robins?", and each of us would peer at our wet notebooks and scribbled, pencilled, nearly illegible numbers. "Sixteen, no, wait a minute, that's twenty, with those four I saw near the farmhouse," remembering the bright birds high up in the trees like so many orange Christmas ornaments. "Kestrels?" and we would get into a brief discussion about whether MY two kestrels were the same or different birds than the ones someone else had seen hovering like tiny kites above the hills.

Then we all shook hands and went our separate ways out into the dark. Our little count will be added to the count for all of southern Marin County, and that will be added to counts all across the hemisphere, and someday someone might comb through the data, noticing that this year, like the last few, no oak titmice were seen on the Marin coast, another population winked out, or our fleeting glimpse of a peregrine might tell a researcher that peregrines still hunt the flocks of ducks out in Bolinas Lagoon, a conservation victory after the birds came so close to extinction.

Strange to know that what felt so inconsequential - our day of effort counting robins and chickadees - would be added into a grand continental pattern created by thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of birds, a tapestry across time and space and the usual barriers between species. Even now as I write this there are people out with binoculars and spotting scopes, perhaps in your neighborhood, looking up into the trees, recording the often unnoticed life that fills the air with song and flight.

***************************

The next morning I woke up early again and drove to Spirit Rock Meditation Center, part way back toward the coast. Another gray, foggy day. The grassy hills of Spirit Rock were lost in the cold fog, but inside the meditation hall a hundred people or more sat quietly on chairs or cushions. At the front of the room were two striking women, both with shaved heads, one in brown robes, one in white: Ajahn (which means teacher) Anandabodhi and a novice nun, Anagarika Santussika.

Ajahn Anandabodhi and two other siladharas (nuns that take ten precepts, including celibacy, not handling money, depending entirely on alms, and eating only once per day) just arrived in San Francisco to start the first Buddhist nun's community in North America (Saranaloka).

Photo from Saranaloka website

The nuns, who are British, come from a monastery in Great Britain, the only one I know of in the west that trains nuns as well as monks. Although a women's order of nuns has been part of the Buddhist world since the time of the Buddha, the history of women renunciants is a history of marginalization. In many parts of Asia the women's order has died out altogether; in other areas women practice as nuns but in desperate poverty, not supported by lay people in the same ways that monks are, and often not empowered to teach.

As a consequence of this sad history, in all my years of meditation practice with many teachers, I had never been taught by a Buddhist nun before this midwinter day. I sat down near the front and listened as the Ajahn gave basic meditation instructions, struck by her clarity and steadiness. Then the hall settled into silence, silent sitting alternating with silent walking out under the dripping trees.

Usually at one day retreats each person brings their own bag lunch, but for this event, which was also offered without charge (monks and nuns cannot charge for the teachings), we were invited to bring something to share and to offer to the nuns, since they can only eat what is explicitly offered. At about 11 AM, when the nuns eat their one meal for the day, Ajahn Anandabodhi came and received the individual dishes from those of us who had brought an offering, gently taking the dish from our hands and placing it on the tables. Then she and her novice nun offered a meal blessing. Afterward we all went through the line, sharing the bounty of a hundred gifts to one another.

I've written before of how moved I am when I see the power of generosity, and this day I felt it very deeply, almost to tears, seeing both the radical trust of these women's lives, and the tremendous kindness of my fellow retreatants. It was particularly poignant to know that after two thousand years of being pushed aside, ordained women could now step forward with their gifts and be appreciated, even celebrated.

This is the best of us as human beings, I think, this generosity, just as the generosity and caring of the Christmas Bird Count represents the best of us - crazy people willing to go out in all weather in the depth of winter while their friends and relatives are at the mall or in front of the television, all for the sake of the birds of our world.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in silence and attention, just as I had the day before, though my attention was on breath and silence itself, rather than birdsong and movement, and I was grateful to be drier (!). When I walked outside, once again I saw each crow, each jay, each black phoebe, and almost without thinking found myself counting them, amused and glad at the way that my vision had been clarified by the day before.

These two worlds are both my worlds - the world of inner attention and the world of birds and trees and fog....I am so grateful for both of them, and for the people who share my love for them.

In the depths of winter, nourishment and renewal.

A Table for Four Hundred

2009-12-07T15:57:00.001-08:00

I celebrated Thanksgiving this year up in Sonoma County. Ah, it was great. We had organic roasted vegetables from local farms, a huge selection of fine cheeses, fresh organic artisanal bread, organic roast turkey, poached wild salmon, roast lamb, local pears poached in Merlot, a selection of locally-produced wines, overflowing tables of pies and deserts.... There were linen tablecloths, white napkins, china, and lovely garden flower arrangements on every table.

And this cost nothing, not for us and not for the other four hundred people celebrating together, whether poor or rich, young or old. We went up early and spent all day with about fifty other volunteers, guided by some of the best chefs in the county, turning boxes and boxes of donated organic food from local farms and from Whole Foods into a free Thanksgiving feast, and then some of us helped serve, and then we sat down at the beautiful tables and enjoyed the abundance with everyone else, just as one does at home with friends and family.

And abundance it was - an abundance of kindness, of laughter, of good will and hard work, gourmet food and great wine, all offered generously. Kids ran around everywhere, older folks in wheelchairs chatted together or with families nearby, and street people sat next to doctors, lawyers and migrant workers. The feeling in the big community center hall was like one big four-hundred-person smile.

There were people who would have spent Thanksgiving alone, people who came to spend Thanksgiving with their friends, people who spoke no English, people who volunteered every year, people taking food back for bedridden family members - every sort of person, in every sort of situation, side by side at the long, happy tables.

What I found most inspiring was the way that there were no boundaries. I've served Thanksgiving in shelters, and found it very moving, but this was something else, a wide hospitality and a wide open door for whoever wanted to enter, vineyard owner or street kid. And no cheap donated old vegetables and canned food on paper plates, dressed up pitifully as a "Thanksgiving meal". This was the best of the best, served with love and pride.

It reminded me of Dorothy Day's radical Catholic teaching of how to be with the poor or homeless: "Bring them bread and roses." Not just bread: people need roses too - dignity and beauty. Herding a bunch of poor people into a line for canned cranberries and green beans is better than nothing, but it's not roses. Creating a place where everyone is welcome, where rich and poor sit down together, and where everyone is served beautiful, organic food - that's I think what Dorothy Day meant by 'roses'.

Over the years I've struggled with my relationship with Thanksgiving. On the one hand it seems like a perfectly lovely holiday, a celebration of the harvest and of gratitude. On the other hand, sometimes I feel that it has degenerated into a kind of family food orgy, the table groaning under vast plates of food, soon to be followed by a vast mess in the kitchen and the next day by Black Friday, the beginning of the Christmas buying frenzy. Maybe it's because most of us don't grow our own food, so the food has lost its connection to the land and its abundance. Perhaps my problem is a feeling that in a country that has grown fat on the wealth of the world, something is subtly off about a holiday that's primarily about consumption.

Some years I've fasted for the day. A few times I treated it as a normal work day - it was a fabulous day to get a lot done and I had an entire six story building to myself. But those things didn't feel quite right, as if I was out of step with something quite important, even primal. Last year I served a Thanksgiving meal in a shelter in Flagstaff, Arizona - not a very good Thanksgiving meal, to be honest, served amidst the bunk beds in a cold concrete-block building - but the gratitude on the faces of the men there was palpable, and I felt like I was finally touching something closer to the way I want and need to celebrate this holiday.

This year I'm in the Bay Area, and although there are plenty of poor people here, there aren't many free Thanksgiving meals, especially outside the churches and Salvation Armies. I was spending Thanksgiving with a friend who is allergic to organized religion, so those places were not possibilities for us. When I found out about the Sonoma Thanksgiving, I was intrigued by the idea, and my friend was particularly delighted about the organic turkey, so we traveled an hour north into the little town of Sonoma, and proceeded to have so much fun that I'm surprised it was legal.

I don't know why it's SO MUCH FUN to work really, really hard to make a free Thanksgiving, but believe me, it is. My friend carved organic turkeys to his heart's content, to the admiration of the other guys. I had the rather amusing job of trying to serve roasted parsnips to a highly skeptical crowd, "What are those? Parsnips? What are they? What do they taste like? No thank you." (A hint to other Thanksgiving volunteers: don't get stuck with the parsnips.)

Nonetheless, it was great. At the end of the day, after helping with the mountain of dishes, we were exhausted and utterly happy. The four-hundred-person smile had seeped into us and our sense of a true participation in 'Thanksgiving' was deep and complete.

Maybe the message of Thanksgiving is not just abundance, but generosity. Perhaps that's why we were so utterly happy - we had spent the day drenched in generosity, poached in generosity like those pears in Merlot (mmmmm...those were good).

Many thanks to Gary Edwards, the mastermind behind the Sonoma Community Center Thanksgiving, who somehow coordinated a bunch of raw, restless recruits and got a hundred-course meal out on time, the other great chefs and caterers, the many volunteers, the farms and businesses that donated food, and to Bob Kinsey, one of the loyal volunteers who took the photos in this post. We'll be back for the Christmas Day meal!

Crete

2009-11-12T23:38:00.000-08:00

Last month I traveled to the island of Crete, in the southern Greek islands. I was traveling with my 81-year-old mother, although we met up with some friends for part of our journey.

It was a very rich and full experience – it felt like several months worth of life – so much so that I’ve found it hard to write about, despite being back for more than a month. What I’ve decided is to write two posts about the trip – one of thoughts and musings about Cretan history and culture, and one more straightforward travelogue, for those of you who might want to travel there yourselves someday. This first post is the “thoughts and musings” one.

A number of people asked me, “Why Crete?” Why does a Zen Buddhist priest with not much money fly halfway around the world to visit a Greek island? The easiest answer is that I was drawn like a moth to the light of an ancient people.

Five thousand years ago, when most of my ancestors in northern Europe were probably still standing nervously behind wooden stockades hoping that the most recent wave of barbarians wouldn’t do us in (or were the barbarians headed for the stockade), an extraordinary culture grew up on Crete. We don’t know what they called themselves; the later Greeks called them the Minoans, and named their island the birthplace of Zeus, the greatest of the gods.

Crete is one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean, more than 100 miles long, and it was - and is - full of high forested mountains and deep caves, gorges and rivers and fertile soils, wild olives and wild grapes and wild herbs, surrounded by the rich waters of the southern Mediterranean.

There, a long way from the waves of barbarians, there was enough peace and enough prosperity for something utterly unique and highly sophisticated to develop, at the very dawn of Western history and culture. Their world continued for sixteen centuries. And even though the Minoan culture has been gone for 3,400 years, a few of its gifts were passed to the Greeks and Egyptians and through them, faintly, to us.

I only wish that more of those gifts had come our way. From the many archaeological sites (and it seems like every little village has at least one Minoan site), it seems that the Minoans lived with extraordinary grace, playfulness, awareness of the natural world, and appreciation of both men and women.

The shrines to their divinities were simple structures on the heights of the mountains, rather than heavy-handed temples, and most of the images of divinities that have been found are of goddesses.

The frescoes that remain in the ruins of their “palaces” are full of leaping dolphins, flowers, bold unveiled women, and lifelike animals, as if the artist could feel the animals from the inside.

Their architecture was human-centered and extremely graceful – I would happily live in a Minoan house, with its colonnades and light wells, its brightly painted walls and smooth stone floors, its clever waterways and drains, its gardens and terraces.

No fortified Minoan site has been found, nor any images of slaves. Artisans lived side by side with nobility, and Minoan artisans were the finest in the Western world at the time. They knew how to work gold into delicate filigree, how to make glass paste figurines, how to cast bronze, how to throw and fire elaborately decorated terracotta pots six feet high, how to make fantastically beautiful frescoes that have survived for four thousand years … and those are just the things we know and that survived the many earthquakes and invasions and wars since their time.

We don’t know their music or their poetry (their script has yet to be deciphered), but I imagine that it was equal to their art and craft and architecture. Some researchers believe that they were the first people to cultivate olives for olive oil and crocuses for saffron, and they had great wooden boats that traveled all across the Mediterranean. Evidence of their fine craftsmanship have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs and on mainland Greece, and there were Minoan settlements on many other islands.

I find this tremendously sustaining and uplifting. If the Minoans could create and maintain such a culture, perhaps we too can someday create and maintain a humane and graceful culture. If it was in them, it’s in us. As different as we seem to be, with our vast technologies and complex economic and social structures, genetically we are virtually the same. I know I may be idealizing them, and it’s impossible to know what it might have been like to live as a Cretan woman or farmer or artisan, but I choose to believe that there was truly something good there, so far back in our history. Their beauty, so long gone, gives me hope.

The cynics among you are probably thinking, “Yeah, and I know what happened to the Minoans. Run over by some warlike tribe from somewhere, right? The nice peaceful people never win in the end.” Well, not quite. Instead, as far as the archaeologists can tell, what destroyed the Minoans was the very land that had nurtured them. In about 1450, one of the Minoan islands, the modern-day Santorini, not far from Crete, blew up in a massive volcanic explosion, the largest in early history. Violent earthquakes and tsunamis rocked the entire eastern Mediterranean. The Minoan “palaces” and houses burned and fell into rubble, and the Minoan settlements on Santorini were buried in pumice and ash. The culture never recovered.

Fifty years later a warlike group from mainland Greece, the Mycenaeans, invaded and took over the ruins of the old palaces and settlements, driving the Minoans deep into the mountains. For a few hundred years, refugee artisans continued to make beautiful objects in these mountain holdouts, but now made of clay rather than gold. The jewels and glass and bronze was gone. The work became rougher and rougher as conditions deteriorated, and eventually even the mountain refuges disappeared.

But the Mycenaeans must have been in awe of what they found in the rubble on Crete, and maybe a few of the Minoans stayed and taught their new overlords, because many aspects of Minoan culture began to appear in Mycenaean art and myth, and spread throughout Greece. The last vestiges of the encounter between the Greeks and the Minoans is preserved in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, the great half-bull (a symbol of the Minoan’s connection to the animal realm?) hidden in the middle of the labyrinth of the palace at Knossos.

So that’s why I went to Crete: to see, up close, the vestiges of that world. And this is the great thing about traveling…..whatever you think you will find is always not exactly what you find, and who would have it any other way? If you stay home your ideas are never shaken by reality.

I did see the palaces and the frescoes, the gold jewelry and the painted pottery, but all of it was somehow unapproachable, sanitized, inspiring but no longer alive. The ruins of the palace of Knossos were buried in busload after busload of cruise ship tourists, waiting in line for hours for the chance of a photograph in the “throne room”, their guides shouting at them in a dozen languages. All I wanted to do at Knossos was escape the crowds and go look at the birds in the pines.

The huge archaeological museum in Iraklion was undergoing renovations and only a few things were visible, although those few things were beautiful beyond belief.

I felt closest to the Minoans on top of Mount Yiouhta, which towers over ancient Knossos and the modern village of Archanes. We were there in the late afternoon, the only people on the mountain.

There was a Minoan shrine on the north peak, just a tumble-down group of stones surrounded by a half-hearted chain-link fence. On the south peak was a small Greek Orthodox church, built for local pilgrims who still walk up the mountain on holy days.

The sky was huge and misty blue, and enormous griffin vultures and a dozen hawks were catching the thermals along the ridge. It felt like a charged place, where the powers of the earth and sky meet and mingle.

* * * *

But mostly what I experienced on Crete were the many layers of post-Minoan time that sit heavily on the people and the land. One could say, with some accuracy, that Crete was a conquered place, a colonized place, from 1450 BC to 1905 AD – more than three thousand years. The Dorians, Romans, Arabs, Venetians, Turks, British and Germans all had their turn on the island. The forests were stripped from the mountains for naval fleets, leaving the soil unprotected from erosion. Goats kept the forests from growing back, leaving only stones and spiny shrubs. The people were brutalized, forcibly converted, turned into guerilla fighters hiding in caves.

Under the Turks there were bloody uprisings every few years, and every man became a warrior. While I was on the island I was reading Nikos Kazantzakis’ great book Freedom and Death, which is the fictionalized account of one of the last uprisings, and of the character of his own father. It reads like a book about modern-day Afghanistan, where the whole culture glorifies the man with the gun, the glorious, violent, hyper-masculine patriot who dies in a rain of bullets.

We stayed in the converted farmhouse of an old family in the village of Archanes, and on the walls were framed 19th century photographs of the fiercest-looking men and women I’ve ever seen, nearly every one brandishing a gun or a knife. It took the Nazis, by the way, six weeks to subdue the Cretans, and some believe that the delay cost them a victory in Russia. Without Crete, WW2 could have ended very differently.

I could still feel this in the people of Crete. They were friendly but rough; rough with each other, rough with us. Crete isn’t a gentle place; it’s a hard place, hewn through war and conquest and resistance. During the day we walked through beautiful gorges and swam in clear water, but at night my dreams were full of death, as if the ground itself was soaked with so much of it that it rose in the night like mist. The famous hand-worked Cretan knives, razor-sharp, hung incongruously in the tourist shops.

One night in the ancient city of Chania, four of us went out to hear traditional Cretan music at a small taverna in the old Turkish quarter, and for hours we sat at a table listening to the wildest, most beautiful, stirring and haunting music I’ve ever heard.

There was a small stage up front, and when we arrived there were three young men, dressed in black, one playing a lute, one playing a lyra (like a violin bowed and held upright in the lap), and one playing a small hand drum. As the night went on, other men would come in and join or replace the ones on stage, and the music grew more and more unrestrained.

My Greek friend leaned over and translated some of the songs, full of poetry - images of eagles and the sea and the moon and the mountains, unrequited desire, yearnings for freedom, love for the island (watch and listen here for to get a sense of the music I heard that night, played on traditional instruments, accompanied by photos of Crete, or here for a footage of one of the most famous Cretan lyra players, in his home village). Even without knowing the words, my eyes kept filling with tears.

Finally, late, late at night, a group of men began enacting a very old tradition – nearly lost, my Greek friend said – of linking improvised rhyming verses, like a battle in song. One would sing a verse, and then another man, staring straight into the eyes of the first, would take an image or a feeling and carry it further, turn it, and then another would turn the verse again. The intensity and fierceness between the singers was palpable, a vibrato of power, as if their feet were buried in the earth and the energy of the land was rising through them and between them.

Later I realized that my two ways of seeing the island came together that night. The Minoans aren’t gone – those men singing in the taverna are their descendents, most surely, full of poetry born from the land. And those men are also the descendents of the desperate guerillas, all softness beaten out of them by their conquerors. We carry the past in our bodies and voices, as surely as we carry the genetic gifts – and curses – handed down to us.

Now that I’ve written this, I have to admit that I don’t know why I went to Crete, really.

Maybe I went for that night of soul-stirring music in the dingy taverna in Chania.

Maybe I went for a moment standing with my mother in the crystal clear water of the Libyan Sea, while a brilliant kingfisher flashed by us, like a jewel in flight.

Maybe I needed to see and stand in a place where once something wonderful happened, for a few centuries long ago.

Like all traveling, we never really know why, though, if we’re lucky, our hearts are a little wider, a little less certain, when we come home again.

"The Mountains Belong to Those Who Love Them"

2009-09-04T17:49:00.001-07:00

The Zen wanderer has temporarily alighted on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, the guardian mountain that stands to the northwest of San Francisco Bay.

“Mt. Tam”, as people say around here, has been an important place to me for a couple of decades now. Green Gulch Farm, my home temple for many years, lies on its southwestern flanks in a narrow valley that leads to Muir Beach; Spirit Rock, where I’ve spend so much time in silence, lies to the north of the mountain, and on a clear day I would climb up to the ridge about the retreat center and gaze at Mt. Tam on the southern horizon.

I’ve wandered its great grassy green flowery western meadows above the Pacific, walked a pilgrimage route around it, sat with friends on the serpentine outcrops high on its slopes, slept in the dark on its northwestern flank and then woken up in deep fog, toasted the moon with wine at Inspiration Point (and gotten a ticket for being up on the peak too late), and a hundred other adventures, large and small. So now, to find myself living on the ridge above Blythedale Canyon, looking north and west to the peak of the mountain, so close it feels like I could run my hands along its rough chaparral-covered slopes…well, it’s a wonderful thing.

I’m in a studio surrounded by manzanita and coast live oak, near the end of the road and the beginning of the wild country.

My landlords are below me, in a hand-built Japanese-style house that Ed Ross, who is now 94, mostly designed and built himself, starting 60 years ago. He was an entomologist for the California Academy of Sciences for many decades, and crisscrossed India and Africa and South America and nearly everywhere else through much of the 20th century. Ed is also an extraordinary photographer, with hundreds of striking, powerful images of indigenous people from all over the world. I feel very lucky to be here for the next few months, on this land that Ed and his wife Sandy love and care for so well, sitting and writing and looking at the mountain.

Last Sunday I drove around the mountain to Green Gulch for the weekly public talk, this one given by Hoitsu Suzuki, the 70-year-old son of the late Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, founded the San Francisco Zen Center, and brought Soto Zen to the West. Hoitsu stayed in Japan when his father came to America in 1959, and has lived a mostly quiet life as a temple priest at the temple that he inherited from his father.

He is my dharma great-grandfather: my teacher, Norman Fischer, was given dharma transmission (full ordination as a priest) by Mel Weitsman the abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, who was given dharma transmission by Hoitsu. So when I hear him speak, I feel like I’m hearing my great-grandfather speak. In Zen, the “feeling”, or “flavor” of a particular lineage tends to persist, and I think the flavor of Hoitsu is very gentle and warm, very unassuming and humble, “nothing special”.

Much to my delight, he talked about mountains, and what Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen in the 13th century, had to say about mountains. “The mountains belong to those who love them” is a quote from Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra (which could be translated as, "The Teachings Spoken by Mountains and Rivers”). Dogen also said that mountains are walking – we just can’t see their walking. We see what we can see, and to our little, short-lived species, mountains are static, monumental, still. But is Mt. Tam still? It is bird song and leaf-fall, underground waters, the shifting of stone, the rattle of pebbles off the trail, clouds coming and going, darkness and light and darkness and light again – with just a little shift of perception, Mt. Tam breathes and shrugs its great shoulders, gazing over the Pacific to the Farallones, breathing with me as I perch here, like a small bird in a great big tree.

Even more wonderfully, Hoitsu talked about the spirit of zazen, or meditation. He started by saying that zazen is inhalation and exhalation. And indeed it is – the breath, and the breath within the body, and the awareness of body and breath. But then he said something else. He said that zazen is also a soft, warm heart.

“A soft, warm heart”. What we do is not just what we do, or what we focus on, but the spirit we bring to it. This is true of anything, but particularly of spiritual practices. We can do a spiritual practice perfectly, but if the spirit is cold and judgmental, no amount of perfection will bring grace, to oneself or anyone else.

So that’s what I carried with me as I got up from the talk last Sunday. To remember the soft, warm heart that lives at the heart of our lives, always possible, with every breath.

Meanwhile the crows are cawing, and the wind has come up. I can see it moving the gnarled branches of the manzanitas. Gratitude to Mt. Tam, to Ed and Sandy Ross, to Hoitsu Suzuki, and to life itself, which can bring such sweetness.

Hoitsu Suzuki's talk will be posted in the next week or two, here.

"From This Day Forward..."

2009-08-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

My apologies for a long posting hiatus: I've been finishing up fieldwork in the California Sierras and the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon/Washington border (and driving back and forth between the two!). My 2009 field season, which started at the beginning of March, is finally over, though I'm not complaining - surely I have some of the best work in the world, from walking the Mohave desert in spring flower time to walking the edges of clear sub-alpine lakes with mountains all around. That said, there were some moments this year when I wondered how many other people in their mid-40's make their living bashing and crawling their way through thick brush for hours, or struggling up steep slopes climbing hand over hand through vine maple in ninety degree heat. Some days in the field are bliss, and some days are...well...slightly less than blissful.

But I really want to write about weddings today. A few months ago two very sweet young people, Sophie and Justin, asked me if I would officiate at their wedding. As an ordained priest, I can legally perform weddings, but their wedding was my first. Neither of them are Buddhist. I was honored that they asked, and I also knew that a "traditional" Zen wedding would not make any sense to them. I write "traditional" in quotes, because in many parts of Asia it's not at all traditional that Buddhist clergy perform weddings - in Japan, Shinto priests perform weddings (and Zen priests are in charge of funerals), and in SE Asia, couples are married in civil ceremonies and go to the local monastery for blessings.

But since Zen came to the West, there have been Zen weddings. Zen weddings generally look like other vow-taking Zen ceremonies, but in a wedding the couple take the bodhisattva precepts together, rather than individually, as people do in ordinations. Zen weddings are quite beautiful, in their way, but rather serious and stripped-down compared to most American weddings - very appropriate for Zen students, but not so much for people outside that world.

Sophie and Justin and I worked together to develop a wedding ceremony that was true to them. I had found a version of the precepts developed particularly for weddings by a priest at San Francisco Zen Center (and which I modified a little more), and they really liked it, which made me happy too. I realized that I needed to bring some of the forms of Zen to the wedding - to wear robes, to have an altar, to offer incense - and that all those forms helped me to help support them, and to be true to myself. The rest of the ceremony was much like a traditional American ceremony - vows and rings and attendants and our other lovely rituals.

I realized at the rehearsal that the most important gift I could give them was stability and centered calm. Weddings are really insane events, particularly for the bride and the bride's mother, but really for all the family members. I could bring the thousands of hours of zazen that are woven into my body right there into the middle of the wedding, and it could help everyone. And that's what I did. I felt like my body became a big bowl that was large enough to hold everyone - the bride and groom in their innocence and beauty, family, friends, caterers scurrying around,sky, oak trees - everyone and everything there. And I asked the people who were gathered there to help me make the bowl, so that together we could support the two who were marrying. The ceremony itself was surprising, emotional, and filled with beauty and heart.

What was most surprising was what Sophie and Justin gave me, as they made their vows of commitment to one another, smiling into each other's tear-filled eyes.

I come from a family of many divorces, and I've been married and divorced. I married sixteen years ago, and I married with all my heart and with every intention of being together for a lifetime. Five years later it came apart in fire and pain, and nearly swept my life away. Not surprisingly, I'm a little cynical about marriage and its possibilities - so much so that I wondered whether I was the right person to "celebrate" a wedding. I tend to think and say that marriage is an outrageously brave and foolhardy and noble act, in this time of such easily broken vows - like two people diving off a cliff together, the blue water far below.

But as soon as I stood there with them I knew that this wedding was not about me, and I completely forgot all my ideas about marriage when I saw and felt the love and happiness radiating from those two, all the way through them. To stand with a man and a woman as they make lifelong vows to one another, as they prepare to have children together, as they are moved to tears by the beauty of the other - well, I can't think of anything more inspiring, more of an honor to witness and support.

I can't believe that the universe has arranged itself so that this is possible for me. Somehow I'm empowered to help with these sacred vows. It feels a little like being a midwife, helping a marriage to be born, with all the wonder at the miracle that one feels when a new life appears. And after all, a new life IS appearing - the new life of the long journey of marriage. We said the old words, "Till death do you part," and I felt the resonance of life all the way to death, and the grief of parting, right there in the middle of the new life coming into being.

And something in me was born that day too. I don't have words for it yet, but I can feel it in me. Something humbling, sweet, and unexpected.

I had worried about marrying people and then having the marriage "fail", but that changed for me. I realized that no marriage "fails". Some last a lifetime, some last a year, but I think all marriages actually last forever. The resonance of those vows and that love goes on forever, whatever happens next, even through other marriages and vows. I knew that before, because I feel my own vows and marriage inside me, but I really knew it as I midwifed those vows that day two weeks ago. And what happens next is out of all our hands - everyone's hands. Like a new child, the marriage will have its own life, its own joys, its own sorrows. All we can do is bow at the wonder of it.

So I feel pretty lucky right now. And even luckier that in two weeks I will help with another wedding. Maybe I'm not so cynical after all. Or maybe something in me is healing, as I stand in a circle of lovers, surprised, amazed, and grateful.

Here are the precepts that Sophie and Justin took that day, with my introduction:

As a support and preparation for your wedding vows, and for a life of kindness, peace, and happiness with one another, I offer you these ten ancient precepts, or vows of harmony. As I say each one, please bring them into your heart. Please remember and practice them as an ever-deeper path of love, through all that the future may bring you. In this way, you can ride out the storms when clouds hide the face of the sun in your lives -remembering that even if you lose sight of it for a moment, the sun is still there. And if each of you takes this responsibility, your lives together will be touched with beauty, compassion, and delight.

I vow to love you, to cherish you, and to support your happiness.
I vow to appreciate you and the gift of our lives together.
I vow to stay faithful to you, and to trust your faithfulness.
I vow to speak the truth to you.
I vow to keep my mind and heart clear and loving toward you.
I vow to speak of you with kindness.
I vow to see you as my teacher and friend.
I vow not to hold to anger or hurt toward you.
I vow to willingly share you with the world.
I vow to honor your true nature, my own true nature, and the true nature of all beings.

These are based on the ten "grave precepts" taken by Zen practitioners. If you're interested in the more traditional Zen precepts, you can find several versions on the Everyday Zen website.

Real Capital

2009-06-05T12:32:00.000-07:00

For every outer challenge in the world there is an internal place to stand that enables us to meet that challenge with courage, conviction and generosity. The present difficulties of the world - economic, existential, or ecological - call for a radical shift in our wants and needs and therefore our very identities. - David Whyte

I have seven friends and colleagues who are losing their jobs or who are unemployed: seven highly educated, experienced, professional people. Three of them have been been unable to find work for more than six months, despite every effort. I know other people who have lost nearly all of their savings in the last few months. Amidst the news of "recovery", I'm seeing something unprecedented in my lifetime, and despite the positive headlines, almost everyone I know feels frightened. What had seemed like solid ground beneath our feet - a job, a house - now heaves and swells like a raft in mid-ocean.

And beneath the immediate questions of livelihood lurk deeper, even more unsettling questions about the world, and many people I know feel these questions at the edges of their consciousness too, a sense that perhaps something is coming to an end, whole ways of life falling into bankruptcy, the unsustainable now evident, cracking and shifting at the seams.

I've had conversations about buying gold, buying land, growing food - all the tricks of survival - and I think those conversations are helpful as we grope toward new, and perhaps more sustainable ways of living. But I sense that all strategies of survival depend ultimately on a kind of desperate individuality, a "gonna grab me a gun and dig a hole in the ground" mentality.

And I wonder: what are the true sources of security and prosperity? How can we - I - best take of ourselves as the world bends dangerously around us? I don't pretend to know the answers, but these are some of my thoughts, based partly on the life I've been living for much of the last three years - without a home or a job, radically contingent and dependent on circumstances and on kindness.

These are the words that come to mind when I think of real security:

Friendship

Gratitude

Path

All the rest - savings and gold buried in the ground, or a gun in your pocket - might buy a little safety, for a little while, but I don't know if I'd trust any of them in the long term. That's just me, I know, and maybe for someone else those things would be enough. But let me tell you why I think friendship and gratitude and path are the real capital in a human life.

Here's a story about friendship: I know a generous, warm-hearted man who, when an old college friend of his moved to his city, offered a room in his apartment until his friend got settled. He told his friend not to worry about rent until he had a job. Eventually his friend found a very good job, and then bought a house in Seattle, and invited my friend to rent a room from him. They've shared the house for years. Now my friend is unemployed, and his savings are running thin. But his friend has already told him that if he can't pay the rent for a while, that's all right. The man I know doesn't have to lie awake at night wondering where he will live if he doesn't find a job soon. Their friendship is true capital, for both of them, as is history of generosity between them.

In my own hard times, my friends have been my deepest resource. I remember when my marriage ended and I was utterly lost, I knew that without the love of friends I would have been swept under. And at other times I have held up my friends, knowing that some day we would change roles. I can barely imagine the narrowness and vulnerability I would feel without their imperfect yet steadfast love.

When we are planning for the future, wouldn't it make sense to consider how we can best nurture our friendships and relationships? Relationships pay dividends twice, to all who are part of them: in the present, through the joy and love we can feel in one another's presence, and in the future, through the support we can offer each another if times get hard - if illness strikes, or sadness, or a hundred other difficulties.

Recent studies have shown that friendships and relationships increase longevity and happiness. And yet some people I know treat friendships as a luxury or a burden, something extra around the edges of making a living or the many tasks that can fill our days, rather than central to a human life. What if we valued others' love, and took care of it, as much or more than we valued our retirement accounts?

There's a story from the life of the Buddha of a time when his attendant and cousin, Ananda, came to him with a revelation. "Honored one," he said, "half of the holy life is in our friendship with one another." The Buddha replied, "No, Ananda, that is not right. All of the holy life is our friendship with one another."

And then there's gratitude. I've thought a lot about gratitude in the last few years, and developed a practice of it, and I've decided that it's a kind of magic. Gratitude turns fear and disappointment into a broader, brighter road. If I wake up feeling sick and all I have is my misery, the morning is very small and difficult indeed. But if remember that I also feel gratitude for the sunlight through the window, or the cup of tea in my hand, the morning expands outward into happiness, even though the difficulty is still there. In hard and frightening times, the cultivation of gratitude in a daily way could show us the possibility of happiness even if our lives are not turning out as we would wish. Sometimes money can buy us out of difficulty, but when it can't.....what do we have? The morning sun through the window, still. The sweetness of a smile.

My favorite web resource on gratitude is a site developed by Brother David-Steindle-Rast, a joy-filled Benedictine monk in his 80's: www.gratefulness.org . He has dedicated the last part of his life to teaching gratitude.

And finally, path. I was going to write, "faith", but faith is a tricky word for a Buddhist. Still, I mean faith too. What I mean is the feeling that one's life is not bound entirely by conventional identities as a consumer, or a worker, or a wife, or a student, but is instead held within a larger container, as a "child of God", or a person dedicated to awakening and compassion, or whatever it is that is a meaning far beyond and far larger than our small identities.

Several of my colleagues whose jobs are disappearing are people of faith - Baha'i or Christian - and I can see that they hold what is a disastrous event (by any standard) within a certain deep and beautiful trust. When our identities are limited, and we lose that identity, we lose everything. When we are held within vastness, within love, within a purpose beyond our small selves, the loss is different - still significant, still painful, but not shattering in the same way.

So I see these three as true capital in hard times, or for hard times to come. If each of us truly nurtured mutually supportive friendships, gratitude, and whatever path sustains us, we would be rich beyond belief, protected and blessed. The winds could roar, our house could be swept away, and we could suffer, but we would also be held by priceless gifts. What more is there to wish for in this brief life?

Of Resurrection

2009-05-16T19:08:00.000-07:00

These last few weeks I’ve been considering a kind of paradox, one that I’m reminded of every time I walk along the shoreline here where I’ve been staying: to what lengths must we go to undo the damage we’ve done? And if to undo the damage we must use a kind of poison, are we right to play with such fire?

I’m staying on the shores of Willapa Bay, a big bay on the southern Washington coast that opens out to the Pacific, the largest bay north of San Francisco. The first time I saw this place, it stole my heart: the light on the water and sandy shoals, the birds wheeling above in the gray skies. A few years later, a village on the north shore of Willapa Bay became my refuge and occasional home.

Shoalwater, Willapa …the words soft in the mouth, sibilant like rain on water. Shoalwater Bay was the old name for the bay, back when schooners tried to thread their way forty miles from the mouth of the bay through the sand shoals and squalls and big tides to the harbor at the mouth of the Willapa River.

Back then the low hills were rich in old-growth western red cedar and hemlock, the huge, shallow bay was rich with native Olympia oysters, and the eelgrass beds nurturedmillions of young salmon. Every year hundreds of thousands of shorebirds would settle on the shoals and mudflats on their journeys to and from their breeding grounds in the north, recovering and growing strong for the next leg of their flight.

The early settlers got rich gathering up the native oysters and sending them to Gold Rush San Francisco, and by 1894, the oysters were nearly gone. The old growth lasted longer, until the mid-20^th century. Then Willapa Bay became a backwater, a quiet, poor place, left mostly to the rain and tides.

One thing still thrived and grew in the bay, a slow cancer. Back in 1894, when oyster spat was brought from the East Coast to replace the native oysters that had been decimated by over-harvesting, something else came with them. The spat were kept alive in boxes packed with moist layers of another East Coast native, Spartina alterniflora.

The Atlantic oysters failed, but the spartina thrived, growing on the sand and mud below the high tide line where the shorebirds fed, seemingly barren places that supported great life and diversity just beneath the surface. The spartina formed dense patches that trapped more sediment, converting the intertidal zone to meadow. Eelgrass beds, juvenile salmon habitat, shorebird feeding areas…all gone.

For most of its first one hundred years in the bay, the spartina spread slowly. In 1984, there were just a few hundred acres of the grass in the bay. Then it exploded, and by 2003, there were 20,000 acres of the tidelands completely dominated by the grass, and it was increasing by 20% a year. It was like a wildfire, killing everything in sight.

The cabin where I stay is close to a tidal channel that drains a large salt marsh and sand flats. Across the channel is a deserted sandy island. In the few years that I’ve been here, I watched the spartina fill in the tidelands and saltmarsh, until there was little else. I would try to dig the smaller clumps, but it was like flailing at the edges of a monstrous growth; the next year there would be even more.

I seldom saw shorebirds here, because the invertebrates they depended upon couldn’t survive amongst the spartina, and the dense growth provided cover for their predators. I knew that this was happening everywhere else in the bay, an inexorable loss, a helpless grief I felt every time I walked the shoreline.

I came back to the bay a few weeks ago. I’d been gone a long time, since late summer last year. I arrived back at Willapa in early twilight. I got out of the car, stretching cramped muscles from the long drive, and heard the thin high calls of godwits nearby. I hurried down through the beachgrass and then stood, stunned at what I saw.

The tide was low and shorebirds were everywhere, feeding, calling, flying. Plovers and sandpipers and dowitchers and dunlins, companionably chatting with one another as their bills probed the wet sand. The big shorebirds were there too: godwits and curlews and whimbrels and willets, their very names a kind of ancient poetry. I had arrived at a place I thought I knew and found it reborn, alive in a way I’d never known.

Over the next few days I visited the beach many times, each time near to tears, grateful beyond words. The water flowed smoothly between the open sand shoals, eelgrass exposed at the lowest tides. At night I heard flocks of shorebirds calling out of the dark sky as they flew, and wheeling down to land just a few hundred yards from where I lay. Brant- beautiful black geese – roosted on the island. A place that I thought I knew had been transformed, had come alive like a beautiful animal, breathing in the dark, life flowing richly in its veins.

The rebirth I saw wasn’t a fluke. It was born of hard work and controversy and a great determination to bring Willapa back to health, a valiant attempt to undo the damage that had begun nearly a century ago, and that threatened not just my little spot, but the very fabric of the bay, its rich and extraordinary ecological integrity.

It took a long time for anyone to realize that there was a problem in Willapa Bay, but when the bay began disappearing under the dark green grass, there was finally a rush to stop it. Millions of dollars of federal and state money were thrown at the problem. The biologists – some of them people I know - tried everything – digging, mowing, plowing, biocontrols…nothing worked. Finally they went to pesticides. The two that worked are called, quaintly, Rodeo and Habitat, two “less toxic”, non-bio-accumulating herbicides approved for aquatic environments. When they combined the herbicides with mowing, the spartina was killed.

In 2007 and 2008 the people with their sprays and special mowing machines came to my corner of the bay, and I watched acres of dense grass open up again. Above high tide, the native plants began to come back. And by this year, 2009, the shorebirds had their habitat back. This part of the bay teemed with life in a way I had never known. By this year, through great effort, they had reduced the spartina in the bay to less than 1000 acres.

But what about the herbicides? Even “less toxic” herbicides are still toxic to some extent. Some people fought tooth and nail to keep the spraying away from their beloved bay. Can I blame them? We’ve made so many mistakes in the past, overlooked effects we didn’t want to know or see. It’s hard even for me to write this; I feel that I’m somehow betraying my own ideals of working in harmony with the natural world.

But on the other hand, we made this terrible mess here, inadvertently. A whole system was dying – I saw it with my own eyes - a system that millions of non-human beings depended upon. I know people with cancer who did everything they could to avoid chemotherapy, as I’m sure I would. But would you withhold chemotherapy from someone if it meant a good chance of recovery? Could we have said, “Ah, too bad about Willapa Bay and its beautiful shorebirds, its salmon, its ancient harmony. Let it go.”?

There’s something beautiful about what was done here – a great effort to save a place, beyond human needs. I think that’s what moves me. Maybe we’ll find out it was a mistake. But meanwhile, I listen to the shorebirds happily feeding, and I bow to those who worked so hard to bring them back, mistaken or not: the politicians, the biologists, the humble people who walked the mud with backpack sprayers, day after day in the rain and wind. Thank you, thank you.

Naming, Seeing, Knowing

2009-04-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. - Georgia O'Keefe

Three weeks ago I led a wildflower walk in the coastal hills just north of San Francisco, on a blue-skied, blue-oceaned, emerald-green-hilled California early April afternoon. A poet and Zen practitioner named Genine Lentine had asked me to lead the walk as part of a series she’d organized (Space Walks). I had said I’d be happy to lead a wildflower walk, but I wanted to do more than point out the flowers and give them names: I wanted to explore the relationships between botanical language, deeply seeing the natural world, and the flowers themselves, blooming so extravagantly in the spring wind. So that’s what we did together, a little group of people gathered on a weekday afternoon, admiring spring wildflowers and thinking together about naming, seeing, knowing.

I carried a shoulder bag full of heavy books out into the hills with us: my huge Jepson Manual of the Plants of California, my slightly smaller Flora of Marin County, a little paperback book on spring wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay area, and finally, a folded brochure of the wildflowers of the Marin Headlands. Botanizing and heavy books go together. As a child I never went anywhere without a book; as an adult I carry books into the wilderness, my keys to knowing what I see, my keys to the door of intimacy with the wild plants around me, my keys to conserving and protecting the rare plants hiding in the deserts and forests. It fits somehow with who I am, my twin passions of language and the natural world, married in the books I so willingly carry on my aching shoulders.

It was language that brought me to plants in the first place. Specifically, a little poem by Gary Snyder, read first when I was eighteen or so ("For The Children"):

To climb these coming crests, one word to you, to you and your children:
stay together learn the flowers go light

He’s speaking of knowing where we live, what we live amongst, as native people know the living world around them in deep and sensuous and essential detail. Living not on the land, but within it. I read that little stanza and knew that I wanted to “know the flowers”. I had no idea that knowing the flowers would lead to a lifelong commitment and love for the green, unspeaking world. I could never have imagined that my “knowing the flowers” would support me, literally, for much of my life.

Botanical jargon is a language of deep observation. The Inuit may have many words for different kinds of snow, but botanists have just as many elegant and exact words for the shape of a leaf or the kinds of tiny hairs on the stem of a flower. Leaves can be simple, compound, pinnate, palmate, bipinnate, tripinnate, lanceolate, oblanceolate, caudate, spathulate, acute, dentate, lobed, ovate, crenate, spinulate….these are just the words that come to mind at the moment – there are dozens more, each with a very specific meaning, a shape in the world. Hairs can be stellate, dendritic, hispid, sericeous, tomentose, glandular, postulate, puberulent…again, just a few of the words that come to mind, among many others.

This is a language of seeing, seeing made manifest on the page. When a plant is first described, formally, a description of the whole plant, from roots to stems and leaves and flowers and fruits, is written and published in Latin. Anywhere in the world, someone who knows this botanical language could make a painting from the Latin description which would strongly resemble the plant itself, enough that someone could probably match the illustration to the plant. This language, and the scientific names that go with it, is a language of seeing and knowing.

With this language, I can go anywhere in the world, look carefully at a plant, and begin to know it, begin the knowing of it. It’s just the first step, and not the only one, but it’s a great step forward into relationship.

It’s not uncommon for me to come across people who feel that classification and naming are actually a problem, a separation from the world rather than a meeting of it. What I say to them is, “When you first meet a person, you don’t know their name or anything about them. How close are you to them at that point? Then, over time, you learn not only their name but their family, the way they look when they’re sad or tired, where they went to college, the names of their children. Does this lead to great intimacy or less?”

It’s the same with plants. All that language is a bridge to intimacy, not a wall. I remember that before I began learning the names of trees, the forest was a “wall of green”. Then it became “beech, maple, oak”, and I began to see that some forests were mostly beech, others mostly oak, and that this was the land and soil itself speaking in trees. Some places say “beech”, some places say “oak”, but before I can hear that speaking, I have to know the difference between a beech and an oak.

I think there’s a notion that naming is new, a product of our scientific mania for classification, but I remember learning, years ago, that the people of the Yakama Nation in eastern Washington, whose culture is strongly tied to the root plants of the arid shrub-steppe, distinguish MORE species of biscuit-root (Lomatium) than we do, not less. It matters more – they are deeply intimate with biscuit-root, and have been for thousands of years. Names matter.

At one point on our wildflower walk, on a spectacular bluff overlooking the Pacific, I invited everyone to sit down next to a plant and look at it closely for five minutes. When we gathered again, everyone’s eyes were sparkling. Each person described something wondrous: one woman had looked closely at a poppy, and had seen the individual pollen grains dusting the base of the petals, had seen the light through the orange petals as like the light of a flickering fire; another person had looked at the long fruit of stork’s-bill, and had noticed that as it dried it curled into a fantastic parasol. Each person was amazed at the beauty and intricacy of what they had seen.

This is what I do every day that I’m out in the field, using the language that I have painstakingly learned over the decades to look closely at plants - how they grow, their leaves, their flowers, their fruits,. And from that knowledge comes the ability to name – and protect – some of the rarest plants in North America.

And joy. The joy that each person felt on the bluff that day is a joy I still feel after all these years, a joy that arises naturally in, as Georgia O’Keefe said, “seeing a flower”. I don't know what it is exactly, but try looking closely at a flower, even a humble weed in your backyard, and see what happens.

I Am Not There, I Do Not Sleep

2009-04-08T14:21:00.000-07:00

I offer this old poem in honor of a beautiful lady, Hisako Kimura, who was born June 23rd, 1918, and who died gracefully at home this last Sunday evening, April 5, 2009. Everyone who met her loved her. Now her generous spirit has gone back into the world as a blessing.

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am in a thousand winds that blow,

I am the softly falling snow.

I am the gentle showers of rain,

I am the fields of ripening grain.

I am in the morning hush,

I am in the graceful rush

Of beautiful birds in circling flight,

I am the starshine of the night.

I am in the flowers that bloom,

I am in a quiet room.

I am in the birds that sing,

I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there. I do not die.

Mary Elizabeth Fry

Desert Prayer

2009-03-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

“It seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

Edward Abby, Desert Solitaire

I’m working in the California desert this spring. Every day I walk across the vast landscape, through sandy washes, over rocky low hills, amongst the creosote bush and wildflowers.

The sun is bright, the wind cold, and all day long I hear the crunching of the small stones beneath my boots. Lizards scurry under shrubs when they hear me, antelope ground squirrels flick their tails, and if I’m very lucky I might see a desert tortoise, infinitely dignified and every-so-slightly comical, blinking its ancient eyes. Some days there's a river of painted lady butterflies, streaming past me from the south, alighting now and again on the tiny bright desert flowers for a sip of nectar before flying on.

I drove through the desert last December in a blinding rain, and the glorious wildflowers all around me are the fruit of those winter storms. Sometimes I walk through a sea of golden desert dandelion, splashed with the blue and purple of phacelia. The beavertail cactus is just coming into bloom, a brilliant unlikely fuchsia. Tiny white “desert stars” dot the gravels, and evening primroses of every shape and color are splashed across the landscape. It’s a paradise for these few weeks of spring.

I’m working with a team of botanists, looking for rare plants on a huge swathe of public land. We’re here because this land may end up bulldozed to make way for one of many, many solar energy projects slated for the southwestern deserts. Everything we see and document may be gone in a few years.

The work is glorious, we all agree. We work long hours but we have the joy of seeing the desert in bloom and of working in a place that feels like wilderness, miles from the nearest paved road. Most of us are tremendously concerned about global warming and climate change, and cheered by the new emphasis on alternative energy. But to see this beautiful landscape and imagine it utterly changed is painful. We walk and wonder…is it worth it? Is this the only way?

Millions of acres of public land in the southwestern deserts, much in pristine condition, are currently being identified by energy companies as potential sites for solar and wind power projects, in a kind of 21^st century gold rush. I was told that if all these permits were actually granted, more public land would be destroyed than in all the mining since the passage of the mining act in the 1800’s.

Wind power leaves some natural habitat beneath the turbines, but most solar projects need to completely flatten the landscape to provide a stable surface for mirrors or solar panels. Nothing is left except the stones and gravel. And these projects can cover many square miles of land, enough solar power to be equivalent to a nuclear power plant.

Is this good? Is this bad? Some environmentalists – and the current administration in Washington - argue that these few million acres of our deserts are expendable, given the scope and scale of global warming, looming over us like a bad dream. They may be right. But how do you say that to these tortoises, to the whiptail lizards, to the painted ladies streaming across the land? What about the value of wilderness, of great open spaces of light and heat and emptiness?

Deserts have always gotten the short end of the stick. They’ve been the places we put our prisons, our bombing ranges, our landfills, our toxic waste dumps. They’re too dry for cattle, too stony to farm, too far from cities for suburbs. Most of the desert is public land, but there’s no money for the government to make on creosote bush and sunlight. Until now. And it’s a great deal for the energy companies, perhaps even what makes these huge projects feasible: rather than spend millions for private land, they can lease – and utterly alter – public land for a fraction of the cost.

“Public land” means “our land”. But no one seems to be considering yet where these projects will do the least harm, or how to plan for them on a regional scale. We do our surveys, but it’s not clear that they will have the slightest effect on the final decision. The government wants clean energy, NOW, and the desert is a long way from Washington.

So far not one major national environmental group has been willing to raise concerns about the effect of “clean energy” on desert lands. Only the tiny California Native Plant Society has stepped forward: Deserts Need Care in Rush to Clean Energy.

Last week, Senator Feinstein became the first senator to take a stand and ask for greater protection for desert lands that were specifically purchased by the public for wildlife conservation and are now being considered for solar projects: Feinstein Seeks Block Power from Public Land. I wonder whether any other legislators will be willing to join her, and whether the Department of Interior will be willing to listen.

Meanwhile, I walk through the desert, bending down to identify the small flowers, feeling the clean wind in my face, loving this place while it’s still here, knowing it may one day go to feed our great hunger for energy, like so many other places – our coal mines, our uranium mines, our oil fields, our pipelines…Even though part of my spiritual practice is to know that "all things that have a beginning have an end", still I can hope that this place, and others like it, will go on as they have for thousands of years, free of our insatiability.

Every day that I walk here I love it more, and wish for others to see it and love it as I do. Surely there’s a way to move toward more solar and wind power with less harm. Surely people can and will wake up and ask our government to care for the land that belongs to all of us, and to the plants and animals that live here, no matter how barren and empty it may seem at first glance.

That’s my prayer.

True Nature

2009-03-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

"The capacity of the mind is so great, it’s like space…In this world of ours, space has room for the sun and the moon and the stars, the earth and its mountains and rivers, every plant and tree, bad people and good people, bad teachings and good teachings, heavens and hells. All this exists in space. The emptiness of our nature is also like this….Our nature contains the ten thousand dharmas (things). That’s how great it is. "

The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, trans: Red Pine

Right now I’m sitting in a motel room in Barstow, California, deep in the Mohave desert. I just made myself a cup of tea, and as I sip it I’m remembering Spirit Rock, and the many times during my month of silence this February that I sat on the bench in front of the dining hall with a cup of tea warming my hands, looking over the hills to the sky beyond. How much I appreciated each sip, how much I appreciated the sky and clouds as they changed, the echoes with other retreats when I had sat on that same bench, the breeze against my face.

In some ways, that’s all that happened for that month of silence. I sipped cups of tea, I sat in my room with my breath, I walked the beautiful open hills, I listened to birds. Sometimes I walked in rain, sometimes in sunlight. Sometimes my mind was clear and light and easy, sometimes cloudy. I could just leave it at that, and it would be accurate. At the end of a retreat, the teachers advise that if someone asks you about your retreat, just smile and say, “It was great.” That’s all people want to know anyway. But I want to say more, at the risk of saying less, because the gifts that come from retreat feel beyond the personal. They’re glimpses into what it means to be human, what we really are, what our minds can know and hold, what is possible.

The quote above is from a teaching given in 8th century China by a great Zen teacher, Hui-Neng. The teaching was so inspiring and encouraging and powerful that it has been read and memorized and quoted for the last twelve hundred years or so, in China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and now the West. It sounds lofty and abstract, but I think he’s just talking about something as close as this mind, right now. Space is nothing special, but it can hold everything. The human mind seems confused, but it can hold everything too: heavens and hells, happiness and sadness, birdsong and the sky and the gritty feel of sand in the palm. That’s what I saw, in this month of silence – not “saw” in the sense of “intellectually understood”, but “saw” in the sense of “directly experienced”. And it came through an unlikely teacher: pain.

Those who know me know that I’ve wrestled with a chronic illness for a long time. One of the symptoms, when the illness is active, is severe body pain, like the pain of a high fever. I was in pain when the retreat started, and for about half the time I was there. Strong pain while in silence can be quite overwhelming, because there’s no distraction, no buffer between the mind and the pain – no book to read, no movie to watch, no telephone to pick up to call a friend. I’ve left retreats because the pain was too strong and my misery was too great. But developing a relationship with the illness and with pain is important, because it’s part of my life, not anything I can push away or pretend isn’t there, and I wanted to see if something other than misery was possible.

In the first few days, I wondered whether I would have to leave. I wasn’t sure I could be in silence and hurt that much. My mind felt like a white-water river, tumultuous and frightened. But as the days passed and my mind settled, I could feel myself getting calmer and wider and happier, like that same river when it comes out of the mountains and on to the plains.

I remembered a teaching by Darlene Cohen, the author of Turning Suffering Inside Out. Darlene has had rheumatoid arthritis for thirty years, and is also a Zen teacher. One of her teachings is, “Find what doesn’t hurt, what is pleasant. That’s there too.” When we’re in pain we tend to lock on to the pain, to close down around it, but at the same time that there’s pain, there’s also sweetness – the warmth of a cup of tea, the softness of fabric against the skin – and if we’re not careful we’ll miss the sweetness altogether, lost in our bad dream. When we open up a little, there’s room for pain and pleasure, sweetness and suffering, and that changes our relationship to both.

At the same time, one of the teachers at the retreat gave a talk on a traditional Buddhist teaching about how we relate to sense experiences. Basically, every time we have a sense experience – seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, thinking – right away there’s one of three possible visceral responses to it: we like it, we don’t like it, or we’re not sure whether we like it or don’t like it. That response is almost hard-wired, although we can grow to like things we once disliked, and grow to dislike things we once liked.

What usually happens is that we miss the moment of that visceral response, and go immediately to trying to get more of it (ice cream, for instance), or less of it (physical pain, for instance). This activity actually takes up a lot of our waking energy. Traditionally it’s taught that if you can just see that initial response in a neutral way (“Oh, this is unpleasant”), without going into the cascade of “Oh, make this go away”, there’s the possibility of freedom, right in that moment.

So I applied both those teachings to the physical pain I was experiencing: I opened up my senses to the things that were happening that weren’t painful, and I just noticed when something was pleasant or unpleasant. And, miracle of miracles, I found freedom, right in the midst of the pain. I found that I could know that pain was happening without contracting around it and desperately wanting it to go away, and that the experience of not contracting was actually joyful. I could be in pain, notice the light through the leaves of the tree, feel happiness in my heart, and sip a cup of tea. Room for everything, just as Hui-Neng said. The mind vast like the sky. What a discovery.

And the strange thing was that the pain itself responded, and instead of staying steady day in and day out, it would come and go, as if it was also more free, now that I wasn’t clenched around it. And whatever it was doing, I was OK. More than OK. Really happy.

I had a dream, while I was there, that I was in a high wind, and the wind was buffeting me and pelting me with stones and silt, but my mind was peaceful and steady, even in the middle of the chaos and roar of the wind. To know that it’s possible to be peaceful in the high winds of life, and not just when things are easy ….that’s freedom.

And it’s not just possible for people who spend months in meditation. People who spend months in meditation are like astronauts going to the moon or oceanographers diving deep in the ocean – they do it for the rest of us. We may never do those things, but what they learn about the nature of the universe opens us up to new possibilities. I learned a little about my own nature, which is the same as yours – and now I offer it to you.

“In your dark house of afflictions
keep the sun of wisdom shining”

The Platform Sutra

Pause

2009-01-31T18:34:00.000-08:00

I'll be disappearing from the blogosphere for the next month; on February 1st I'll enter a thirty day silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I thought, as my last blog for a while, that I might share some writing on the practice of silence. These are excerpts from an essay in a book manuscript that I'm hoping will find a publisher in the next year: Not Dwelling Anywhere: Essays From a Time of Pilgrimage.

"We’ve always been around – the people who go apart to some high hill or cave, the people who go on walk-about alone, the people who choose to marry Christ and listen for his whisper. Maybe others would do this if they could, but not all lives have room for such a luxury. And maybe, for some, there’s fear in the thought of silence.

I remember the first time I heard of the possibility of a silent retreat. It was the winter of 1983, I was eighteen, and I was in Washington D.C, living and working with a radical homeless advocacy group. My mother had an old friend in D.C., Tilford Dudley, a socialist lawyer who had come from Illinois during the Roosevelt. His wife, Martha, befriended me. She was a poet and birdwatcher, and I was living in the heart of poverty and concrete, faced with suffering on a scale I’d never seen before. She would scoop me up and take me on long walks along the creeks and forests outside the city, taking care of me in her quiet way. One day we were walking in the hills, our feet shuffling through dry leaves, and she began to tell me about another young friend of hers who had just returned from ten days of silence. We were both baffled by what that might be like, both intrigued. I can remember that we were walking beneath a bridge. I can remember something in me lighting up like a new star.

Six years later I finally made my way to my first retreat. It was a women’s vipassana meditation retreat, held in a Catholic convent outside Santa Rosa, California. It was late March, and the grassy hills were green as the finest brocade and covered in wildflowers. I remember two things from that retreat: realizing with relief that I actually didn’t have to believe all the ridiculous, self-centered thoughts in my mind, and moments of walking in the hills when pure joy flooded into me, so intense that I wondered whether my heart could bear it. The salmon had found its home stream.

Living in silence is not what it looks like from the outside. I think from the outside it seems like a form of asceticism, a relinquishment of community and relationship for some higher good, a voluntary descent into darkness. It doesn’t look like much fun: people in silence tend to look serious, if not downright dour. The inside of a person on retreat is a whole different story. Suzuki Roshi said, “I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing..” When I shut my mouth, I can start to hear, and it turns out that what I can hear is beautiful. Ditto with what I can see, what I can taste, what I can smell, what I can touch. Suzuki Roshi could have just as easily said that he tried to teach his students to look at a tree, to eat an orange, to meet another human being.

Ordinary life is, I think, like being wrapped in layers and layers of cotton wool, protected and defended from our direct experience. Silence unwraps some of those layers. I remember coming out of a retreat and reading a newspaper in the airport. There had been a disaster, as there are always disasters, but this one went right to my heart. I sat on the plastic chair with the newspaper in my hands and I wept. And I was glad to be weeping: it seemed like the sanest, most deeply human response to such news.

I never know what will happen on a retreat. I’ve learned over the years not to assume anything, and certainly not to plan for anything. With stunning accuracy, what needs to be healed appears, spontaneously and often in direct opposition to what I would like to have happen.

In the second year of pilgrimage, I spent a month in silence. Within the first day, a huge pain and sorrow appeared in the center of my heart. I had no idea why it was there, or what had triggered it. I’d spent my previous long retreat in a state of happiness and bliss, far beyond what I had ever known, and I half-expected to continue that bliss. Something had other ideas. For thirty long days I learned about courage. I sat with the pain, opening wider and wider to it like a woman in labor, learning to hold it with compassion, learning not to run away. When the retreat ended, so did the pain, as mysteriously as it appeared. What I do know is that those thirty days changed my relationship to great emotional difficulty, my own and that of others.

I think it can seem like a retreat is a retreat from the world, a retreat into solipsistic naval-gazing Paradoxically, to spend time with others in silence is intensely intimate. I spent a winter at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, more than ten years ago. Every morning we would wake well before dawn and walk down to the meditation hall beneath the bare-limbed trees in the cold mountain air, the way lit by kerosene lanterns. We all wore black Zen robes, so in some ways we looked alike, but by the end of the first month I could recognize every person in the dark by the way they walked, the tilt of a head, the gesture of a hand. Even from the back I knew my fellow-travelers. There were no locks or keys at Tassajara: it was inconceivable that we would steal from one another or hurt one another after sitting hour after hour together in the hall, the roar of the creek filling all our ears, the same gruel filling all our bellies. I learned to trust at Tassajara – to trust the inherent goodness and kindness that arises when those layers of cotton wool begin to come apart.

Tomorrow I’ll enter that silence again, as I have so many times before. I’ll sit with my own mind and heart, not knowing what will happen, trusting the silence. I do know that a few days into the retreat my heart will begin to open on its rusty hinges, and I’ll be filled with gratitude – for the courage of the people who sit around me, for the depth of this tradition, for the beauty of the world. Whatever else happens in a retreat, gratitude is always there, like the delicate scent of a single stick of incense, as natural as the blue of the sky."

God's Filling Station Revisited

2009-01-29T21:34:00.001-08:00

For those who read my blog on December 3rd (God's Filling Station), you may remember that I wrote about how moved and inspired I was by an NPR interview with the lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik. Yesterday I happened to pick up an old newspaper article from December, and read, with sadness, that Richard Cizik was asked to resign from his nearly 30-year position as the Washington lobbyist for the NAE, as a direct result of that interview with Terry Gross. You can read about here.

Apparently his primary mistake was to voice some tentative support for civil unions, but it's clear from the article that there have been powerful voices within the evangelical movement who have been hoping to find a way to silence him for a long time now. He was a fervent advocate of "creation care" - Christian environmentalism - and tremendously concerned about global warming. I can only hope that voices such as his - voices of tolerance, compassion, care for the non-human world, and willingness to compromise - will continue to step forward within all religious traditions. We need them so desperately.

On a related note, I just found an article in Buddhadharma on Buddhism and a response to global climate change. That lead me to a really quite wonderful online magazine: EcoBuddhism Quarterly Review. All religions - all people - run the risk of complacency in the face of global warming. We Buddhists may pride ourselves on our tolerance, but we can indeed by self-referential navel-gazers on occasion, and we too need to be reminded of the connection between our practice and compassion for the world, human and non-human.

And Yet, and Yet....

2009-01-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Last night I was attending the weekly seminar that my Zen teacher, Norman Fischer, offers in Corte Madera. Two days before, Norman lost his closest spiritual friend, his anam cara of 40 years, Rabbi Alan Lew. Rabbi Lew was teaching at a retreat on the East Coast, went for a walk, and died on the side of the road.

Norman and Alan practiced together at Tassajara Zen Monastery in the 1980's, and became life-long friends there. One became a Zen priest, one became a rabbi, seemingly divergent paths, but for the last three decades they have continued to practice and teach together, illuminating each other's lives and bringing back contemplative practices into American Judaism in ways that have reverberated throughout the world and have touched hundreds or thousands of people. What finer example of spiritual friendship could there be?

I didn't think Norman would be at the seminar this week. I knew he'd been with Rabbi Lew's family since Monday, carrying not only his own huge grief but the grief of the people who most loved and needed his friend. But he came and sat and spoke to us. This month we're studying the Heart Sutra , which is the most important and widely chanted text from the Buddhist emptiness teachings...teachings that form the basis of both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.

The emptiness teachings offer a radical, fluid and open view of reality - one that emphasizes interconnection, grasplessness, boundlessness. We think we know what we are and what the world is, but it (and we) are essentially ungraspable, beyond categories and thought, not independently existing in the way we tend to think we are. This can be either frightening or freeing, depending on how comfortable one is with not knowing exactly what's going on.

There is a poem about life and reality from the end of the Diamond Sutra:

"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space

an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble

a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning

view all created things like this." (trans Red Pine, 2001)

So from this perspective, even life and death are not what they seem and there's nothing to mourn. Rabbi Lew has simply (as Norman said at one point in his talk), "radically changed form". And there's truth, and sometimes even comfort in seeing things this way. But then there is the matter of the human heart.

The 18th century Haiku poet Issa endured a life of extraordinary tragedy, including the early deaths of his wife and all three of his children. His most powerful haiku was composed at the grave of his daughter, Sato:

The world of dew

is a world of dew, and yet

and yet...

No matter what we know, no matter how clearly we know that the nature of the world and our lives is fundamental impermanence, we cry when the flowers fall, or as Norman said last night, "Love dictates that I not give up my tears."

There's a beautiful koan, a Zen story, about a woman, a student of the famous teacher Hakuin, whose beloved niece had died. She was standing in front of the altar, sobbing, when another of Hakuin's students entered the hall. He scolded her and said, "I thought you were a true Zen person. Why are you crying?" (in other words, "I thought you understood the emptiness teachings, but it looks like you don't"). She turned to him and said, "My tears are my offerings to my niece, the candles and flowers on the altar to honor her life and death."

I've heard the teachings of the Heart Sutra many times, but seeing my teacher sitting in front of us in all of his tremendous sorrow, teaching with his whole body the deep paradox of life- that everything slips away, and nothing slips away, and still we cry, still we love, still we break over and over again - well, last night I felt the Heart Sutra in my bones, in the center of the center of my heart.

You can hear Norman's talk here.

Silence and the Mind of Winter

2009-01-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I'm humbled and awed by something I've just read, an extraordinary essay about silence by a man now silenced by Lou Gehrig's disease. I'd love to share it - if you have a moment, please read it - it's astonishingly beautiful, and utterly evocative of winter and its gifts: Winter Mind.

Here's the Wallace Stevens poem that begins the essay:

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

of the January sun; and not to think

of any misery in the sound of the wind...

from The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954, Alfred A. Knopf.

Winter and silence dance with one another....I think of the traditional Zen 90-day practice periods and the silence of the zendo in the winter dark, the rain on the roof the only sound in the whole world. Or the silence of a morning after a deep snow, the single set of footprints or the brush-stroke of an owl's wing as it swept down on a mouse the only marks of life in the whiteness.

In a month I'll enter 30 days of silence at Spirit Rock . Although I've entered into silence many times in my life, I never know what gifts will come my way from such a radical choice. I know that I'm already leaning toward it, like a tree leaning toward the season when the sap goes down into the roots and the moon tangles itself in the bare branches, dreaming in the dark.

Musings from a snow-covered houseboat

2008-12-29T14:58:00.000-08:00

What makes community, REAL community? I mean people who take care of one another, not because they've made a New Year's resolution to be a better neighbor or friend or church member, but as naturally as one would reach behind for a pillow in the middle of the night, without weighing the trouble or effort.

In some places this wouldn't even be a question; I don't think my African brother-in-law spends a lot of time wondering about how to create community - he's part of many communities, as simply as drawing breath. But some of us seem to have lost the knack. As a neighbor said to me once years ago, with a perfectly straight face, "I'm from southern California. We don't believe in talking to our neighbors." I have a few thoughts on the ingredients of real community: proximity, mutuality, interdependence...all the usual suspects. But after the last week, I think there may be one ingredient often overlooked by the urban planners and idealists: genuine hardship or danger - the kind that makes everyone remember that none of us can make it alone.

I spent Christmas week snow-bound on my sister's houseboat in Seattle. It began snowing the week before Christmas, and just never stopped, and the snow piled up deeper and deeper on the twenty or so little Victorian-era houseboats tied cheek-by-jowl on her dock, whispering down on to every surface, turning all but the water white. Every morning I would wake to the grating of many snow shovels just outside the window of my room. I would peer between the wooden slats of the Venetian blinds, and would see all the men of the dock out clearing the snow and ice that had accumulated overnight, working together to keep us from slipping off into that cold, dark water on either side. There was talk and laughter amid the serious work, and by the time we went outside with my sister's two month old baby, the long dock was cleared of snow.

One night after dark, as I was singing to the baby so that my sister could get some work done, a neighbor came to the door, a woman in her sixties. She had noticed that the snow had slid off our roof on to the deck around the first floor, and she was concerned that the snow would unbalance us. She had two shovels; one for herself and one for my sister. Another morning I heard a commotion on a neighbor's roof: she and several other neighbors were on her slanted roof shoveling the snow and ice into the water, seemingly calm in the face of the danger of sliding into the water along with the snow. A houseboat unbalanced by snow is no joke: each is held up by a system of underwater air-filled barrels, and too much weight on one side could cause serious trouble, for the boat itself and for the whole dock.

All the houseboats are tied to the same dock with many lines, and so a problem for one becomes a problem for all. All of us had to negotiate the slippery dock to make it to the street. There was a strong sense of camaraderie and tolerance for one another on the dock, and I felt that if we had needed anything, a dozen hands would have reached out to help. It felt very different than an ordinary urban neighborhood: closer, warmer, more interdependent. But then again, people had chosen to live this way - in small spaces, close together, on floating homes that are vulnerable to the natural forces in a way we land-livers don't usually consider.

Years ago, I spent three months in the depths of winter at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, deep in the Los Padres Wilderness Area east of Big Sur. That January, it rained without ceasing, and all of Monterey County was declared a disaster area, wracked by floods and mudslides and tremendous difficulty. Tassajara is a cluster of mostly unheated buildings, surrounded by wilderness, and 15 miles in on a road that is rough even on a good day in midsummer. Multiple slides on the road blocked us from the outside world for days at a time, but we were fine, better than most of the rest of the county. There were sixty people there; we had food and geothermal energy and strong hands and a commitment to take care of each other. What would have been dangerous in an ordinary suburban community was just another winter day at Tassajara.

This summer Tassajara faced even more extraordinary challenges: a huge wildfire raged for weeks in the mountains, and eventually the fire-fighters retreated. It was too dangerous to stay and fight the fire, they said. But some of the residents of Tassajara stayed, and when the fire arrived from four sides simultaneously, they saved the place (see the dramatic story here).

We live in a big, seemingly anonymous country, where many of us feel isolated and inconsequential, disconnected from others and from our own power to be helpful, to be bodhisattvas, whether by shoveling a neighbor's roof as the water looms below, or fighting a fire to save a place you love. (Instead our biggest contribution, we're told by the news, is to go out and spend our dwindling dollars to "save" the economy.) We think we choose this way of life, like my neighbor from Southern California, but we're also trapped by it, and by the coldness it breeds in the heart.

I wonder a bit, as things get harder economically, whether there may be a place for real community to grow again, like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk, born of actually needing each other just a little bit more, born of hardship, of discovering that we are truly like my sister's houseboat community, all tied to the same dock, knowing that when one is in danger, all are at risk, and when one is helped, all are made more whole.

More Slipping Glimpser

2008-12-21T19:33:00.000-08:00

Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right;

when I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!

It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me:

I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff.

As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping, most of the time,

into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser…..

(Wllem de Kooning, Sketchbook1: Three Americans, 1960)

Winter in the Bosque

2008-12-20T00:57:00.000-08:00

One of the most beautiful sights I know in this whole wide world is the rising up just after dawn of thousands upon thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes from the wetlands of the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico. Seeing this is like....seeing the first day of creation. For three winters now I've been able to make my way to this place, the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, sometime between November and February. It's become a winter ritual, an annual renewal of wonder.

We stay nearby, then wake up in the cold New Mexican dark, an hour or more before even the faintest glimmer of dawn light, and drive to the refuge. We huddle in the car in our winter jackets with thermoses of hot tea and chocolate, sleepy and a little disoriented. The refuge is big, and we never know which shallow pond will be the one the birds have chosen to roost in for the night, so we drive with the windows open to the cold night air, listening for the speaking of geese in the dark, the stars big and bright above us.

Finally we choose our spot. By then there is a hint of light to the east. We can see the water,but not the birds - just their sleepy calls, beginning to build in intensity out beyond our sight. All around the refuge are our fellow pilgrims, waiting too, some of whom have traveled from across the country to see this daily miracle. The air is bitingly cold, that cold that descends at the last hour of the night. We pile out of the car and wait, binoculars ready.

Then time speeds up somehow, and the light is coming fast, and we can see the birds. Spread out before us are hundreds - no, thousands - of sleeping sandhill cranes, knee-deep in water, their heads still tucked into their warm tail bustles. A few begin to move like slow dancers. And between them and beyond them like a drift of snow are the geese, wide awake, calling to one another louder and louder, an urgency surging through the flock. The water is still, mirror-like, and the birds are reflected in it.

A few geese leap into the air, but the others aren't ready to follow- though the calls are deafening by now. The eastern horizon is stained with orange and pink. The human anticipation is building too...at one of the most popular spots, huddled people line a wooden deck with spotting scopes and cameras, nearly silent as they wait.

Then, without warning,it's time for the geese to rise. With a sound like a freight train, voices lifted and thousands of wings beating the water and then the air, two, three, ten thousand geese rise up at once into the now-blue sky, the black tips of their wings only accentuating their utter, snowy whiteness. Sometime they fly only a little way over our heads,and we lean backward, half in flight ourselves, as if we were briefly members of that ecstatic flock. I have felt like my heart was going to leap from my chest as the geese circled higher and higher, headed out into the dawn.

And then the geese are gone, their calls fading. But there are still the cranes, slower and more dignified in their entrance to the day. They drift across the ponds as if still dreaming, wreathed in mist,sometimes calling in their strange purring, bugling voices, sometimes leaping in the air for a moment, a prelude to their spring courtship dances. Then they too begin to fly, lifting their huge wings in the first sunlight, and eventually the ponds are nearly empty, a few pintail ducks floating about, a few downy feathers scattered across the surface.

To see such a sight in this 21st century is to be reminded of the almost unimaginable abundance of wildlife that once filled the skies and water and land all over the world: the red shoals of salmon nearly blocking the northwest rivers, the great migrations of bison, the passenger pigeons darkening the sky for hours. Now there are just glimpses, like this one, reminders that this is what life does, given half a chance. It sings in cranes and rises up on ten thousand snow geese into the dawn, and it sings in us too, inexplicably. Whatever our troubles as a species, and they are myriad, we are also animals that would come to this place before dawn and stand here together, just to be reminded of the deep grace at the heart of the world.

Paradox and submission

2008-12-08T20:34:00.000-08:00

I'm posting a quote I found recently....provocative, and not something a free spirit like me really likes to hear, but a powerful suggestion for the spiritual path.

"Because paradox is at our very core, the spirituality of imperfection suggests that only be embracing the dark side of our ambiguous natures can we ever come to know the light. We find ourselves only by giving up our selves, we gain freedom by submitting to the will of others...Saints and sages throughout the centuries have maintained that it is in the willingness to give up the self and give in to others that the road to human wholeness can be found. And for those who would give up "self" the first step is to give up certainty."

Ernest Kurtz The Spirituality of Imperfection

The photo is of my dear friend Michael Sawyer, a few months before his death from Parkinson's. He deeply embodied this way, in his willingness to submit to the many indignities of his disease, in his humble acceptance of dependence, and in the way he embraced all the paradoxes of being human, the dark and the light.

To see some of Michael's wild psychedelic Buddhist art, go to Michaelsawyerart.com

Anam Cara: soul friend

2008-12-08T16:21:00.000-08:00

“….so anam cara in the Celtic world was the ‘soul friend’. ….it originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the ‘friend of your soul’”

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

I have been thinking about spiritual friendship recently: what it is, how it is different from other kinds of friendship, how I recognize it, what it means in my life.

In the last few months I’ve been spending time – for the first time in many years – with someone who was a soul friend, an anam cara, when I was a child and a young person. I knew, even then, that there was a different quality to this friendship, and that I needed it the way young fish need the water, or the way young birds need the air. As a teenager I entered a long time of darkness and depression, and the light of this friendship was the only light I could see. I didn’t have a name for it then. What I would say was, “Without Colleen I wouldn’t have any hope at all.”

Colleen was a student of my mother’s, thirteen years older than I was, and a Christian Scientist. You could say that we had little in common, in a relative way. But what Colleen showed and shared with me – above and beyond her love for me, which was a great gift – was the life of a person – a woman - on a spiritual path, Homo spiritualis. That was the hope that sustained me as a teenager: that a spiritual path was possible, even if I was lost, even if I didn’t know how to find it. She gave me faith and hope to walk through the darkness….showing me that the darkness itself is a prerequisite to the path.

Now, thirty years later, when Colleen and I meet, as we did the other day in the courtyard of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, sitting and talking beneath the delicate green leaves of the ironwood trees, we meet outside time, outside the particulars of our lives. Our concern is always, “What are you seeing? What are you learning? What is the leading edge of your understanding about how to live this life?”, and this concern and leaning forward is surrounded by our love for one another, which flows as easily as breathing. Without “teaching” each other anything, what each of us has come to understand shines a light on the other person’s understanding, like two ladders side by side, leaning against the sky. We walk away nourished and widened by the field between us.

Since Colleen first offered her friendship to me, I’ve been graced (and graced is the word) with an extraordinary number of anam caras, soul friends. And this is the strangest thing: in many cases these friendships have transcended every possible human difference – age, culture, faith, race, education – all that matters so much in ordinary relationships. It’s a recognition that goes beyond divisions. My friend Willie Cooper was an elderly Lummi Indian woman, married at fourteen, thirteen pregnancies, a person who loved spirituality in any form, from a weekend tent revival to the deepest secrets of traditional Salish religious practice. My friend Echodu is a Ugandan, an evangelical Christian who has witnessed sufferings that I can barely imagine. My new friend Patricia is 87 years old and sitting in a retirement home, trying to find her way. But when we look each other in the eyes, there’s just two souls meeting.

In each case we recognized each other, very quickly, as if the heart knew something the mind could barely imagine. “This person is on the path. No matter how different it may seem from my own, we are walking together.”

Time and space are shockingly irrelevant to anam caras. Colleen and I have sometimes gone years without speaking or seeing on another. It doesn’t matter. Willie Cooper is gone now, but I still hear her wisdom and feel her love. I have met people just once and felt that deep recognition, and yet we’ve never crossed paths again. Others have been life-long friends, or lovers, or teachers. But however often we meet, or whatever we may speak about, there is only one thing being said: “I know you, I see you, I understand.”

This is not to denigrate other kinds of relationships and friendships, or to elevate the anam cara to some special position. I am grateful for the people who have shared my life in all sorts of forms, and where love is between two people, what one calls it hardly matters. But I’ve come to see that I might not even be alive today without this particular kind of friendship. I might have gotten lost and never found my way. At Lummi it was understood that someone who chose to walk a spiritual path assented to a special kind of vulnerability, and they needed all the help and protection that those around them could give them. I feel that vulnerability, though I think I was born that way, rather than choosing it. I felt strange and alone as a child, different in some way I had no words for from the people around me.

My anam caras have shown me that I’m never alone.

“This, I say, is what is broken by no chances, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part.” John Cassian, Conferences

God's filling station

2008-12-03T18:51:00.000-08:00

This religion thing...

I'm a Zen Buddhist now, a Zen Buddhist priest, but I was raised by a mother who was and is a secular humanist, and proud of it. On my mother's side, I have to go back three generations before I find a church-going ancestor. My great-grandfather founded a Unitarian church in the tiny prairie town of Cherokee, Iowa, around about 1890. Unitarians- those apostles (if I may be so bold to use the term) of religious and intellectual tolerance - are not even considered Christians by most Christians, and often don't consider themselves Christians. Needless to say, my great-grandfather's church was short-lived. What was he thinking? That farmers wanted to drive into town to hear about tolerance on Sundays? Later generations dispensed with church altogether. There were better things to do on Sunday mornings. Gardening. Reading the Chicago Tribune. Sleeping late after a night of drinking and talking. Oh, the possibilities were endless.

So it's hard for me to connect with Christianity as a belief system...it's just not in my family culture. I grew up in a Midwestern Bible belt town, and not being Christian was like....being a communist (even now I feel like whispering), but I wasn't Christian, so I kept pretty quiet and went to my friends' churches some Sundays. When I visited my father, we went to the Episcopal Church, well washed and well dressed. But Methodists, Mormons, Episcopalians and Catholics were all equally mysterious to me, and I would listen to the readings and sermons like an anthropologist hearing of strange aboriginal rituals. As an adult, I watched the rise of the Christian right, as we all have, and I was frightened by what seemed like a movement opposed to all I believed and all I was. Over the years, as I became a more religious person myself, I developed a deep appreciation for Catholic monastics and others who give themselves fully to their faith, but I was and am still afraid of evangelicals and the world they seem to want.

But maybe all this would have been relatively abstract without a personal connection. I have a beloved person in my life who is a strong evangelical Christian. I think I can write with some certainty that she wishes with all her heart that I would wake up one day and be done with this Buddhist stuff, and for her, that wish is part of her love for me. I struggle not to take personally her sense of the deep mistakenness of the religion that has brought so much joy and depth to my life. And if I'm honest, I have to admit that I wish she practiced a different form of Christianity, one more open to the beliefs of people like me. I wish she could celebrate my happiness as a Zen Buddhist, rather than mourn it, and in that way I'm also intolerant, also wanting her to be different, as she wants me to be different. I write this calmly, but it's been a potent source of suffering between us for years now, and sometimes a barrier in our connection with one another.

I don't like where I stand with all this. I can feel my own intolerance and fear,and I know in some ways it's justified, but I still don't like it. Finding a way beyond it has been elusive, but there are little glimpses, now and again.

I got a little glimpse on election night this year. I was standing in the brightly lit lobby of the local community college, exactly 50 ft. from the polling place as per regulations, handing out fliers from the local Democratic Party on the Democratic position on each of the many, many state propositions, including one (which ultimately passed) creating a constitutional amendment that stated that marriage could only be between one man and one woman. I hate doing stuff like this, I hate the polarity of it, but I felt that I had to participate, so I nervously handed out my fliers to those who were interested, and, coward that I am, hoped that no one would start yelling at me for my political beliefs. A nicely dressed woman walked by me and politely refused my flier. After she voted, she came back out and started chatting with me. She was a Republican, and not just a garden-variety Republican, but a fundamentalist Christian and a stalwart member of the local Republican Party. She and I talked and talked, there in the lobby on election night as history was unfolding, knowing that we stood opposed to almost everything the other believed.

We laughed at our differences, we talked about writing - she was a freelance writer - and the economy and her business and my health. She would sometimes catch someone walking by who I had missed with my fliers, and she would say, motioning toward me, "This lady has something for you." Astonishing. We talked for nearly an hour, standing in front of the polling place. Talking with her was a great balm for my spirit, because even though I knew that my candidate had a good chance of winning that night, and hers of losing, I desperately wanted to go beyond the divisions that separate so many of us. That night, we met, she and I, and we did go beyond those divisions, without ever losing our integrity. I don't know how - it felt like a kind of miracle, an election night miracle, what I would have most wanted that night.

Another miracle happened last night. I was driving the long stretch of freeway up, up, up from the desert to the mountains and Flagstaff, and I was listening to Terri Gross on Fresh Air. She was interviewing the Reverend Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, a powerful lobbying organization that represents 45,000 churches. I got a big surprise as I listened to the interview: he had a calm thoughtfulness, a sense of a deep personal moral compass without the concomitant judgment of others I can easily associate with evangelicals. He said that he believes that contraception should be available to prevent unwanted pregnancies. He said that he believes in the importance of caring the the earth, and that he's worked hard to bring global warming to the table in his organization. I thought, "If I found myself across the table from this man, I would like him, I would respect his views, I would feel that we could talk." I found it tremendously uplifting and hopeful, to hear an evangelical voice that didn't scare me. I could have hugged him, then and there.

It's a long road toward peace, and that's how I think of it. There's a quiet war (and sometimes not so quiet) war going on in this country, and even in my own family and my own heart. Although I don't want to be naive, I also don't want to feed that war. I want to see beyond it. Every once in a while I do, and I realize how much I wish to live in a world where all religions, and their deep commitment to goodness, can flourish without impeding one another.

If you'd like to listen to the interview, go to Fresh Air:Cizik

The view from The Peaks

2008-12-01T19:34:00.000-08:00

I just spent the evening with Patricia Bradley, 87 years old and a new resident of The Peaks, a retirement center in Flagstaff, AZ. Patricia and her daughter came to a "gratitude circle" I hosted before Thanksgiving. A "gratitude circle" is a small group that meets to explore the cultivation of gratitude in our lives (see www.gratefulness.org), and Patricia floored me by saying this that night:

"I've explored a lot of religions in my life, and I know one thing for sure now. There is only one true religion, and that's the religion of love."

After the gratitude circle, I knew I wanted to get to know this person, who had been so honest about herself and how hard it was to know how to be at this time in her life: without her home, without her beloved husband of more than 60 years, without the clear mind she had once had, without independence, without the sense of meaning we find in our work and how we give to others. I was moved by her, by her spirituality, and by her clear expression of a deep question about how to find grace in the midst of old age and all its difficulties.

So I visited her tonight, in her little room with a single bed, like the cell of a nun: a few books from what were once walls full of books, a photo of an Indian saint dressed in orange on her night-stand. Her white hair is neatly waved, and she is well dressed and sprightly, somehow too alive to be in this place of walkers and oxygen tanks. She tells me again that the big question in her life now is how to be, here, in this place, at this age. When she was younger, she was a healer, teaching and working with a healing system called "Creative Healing", along with husband, going all over the world. Before that she and her husband were in the Peace Corps. This is a person who knows about service and about leading a spiritual life, but what kind of service to others is possible as you sit in your little room at the retirement center, trying to remember what once came so easily to you? What kind of spiritual life is possible?

These are not glib questions; these are koans - deep, difficult, knotty life questions that only she can answer. It is humbling and beautiful to be in the presence of someone who is asking those questions. Sacred questions.

And so we sat in her little room, our eyes occasionally filling up with tears. The great mystery of being human, alive and well in the heart of this person sitting across from me, and in my own heart. No answers.