I went to Franklin Canyon today—a local park off of Coldwater Canyon Drive, a few miles from my home. You forget you’re in L.A. when you’re walking there among the sycamore and redwood trees, the sky a brilliant blue and the winding trails that lead steeply upward or circle the small pond with mallards and wood ducks vying for position in case you have bread to give them. My friend and I walked and talked—about our work, our families, travels we’ve had, or were going to take, what was to come and what had been. It was a simple walk, not profound in any way, not life-changing, but calm and sweet, gentle in a way that was like drinking a glass of cold water on a warm day or taking a nap in the afternoon, a kind of reverie that nourishes body, mind and soul.

Toward the end of our walk we met a couple who said they had been coming to the park every day for twenty years. They were probably in their seventies. He was tall and bearded and held the leash of their Airedale dog. She walked with a cane and wore a fur trimmed, knit cap that she popped off just long enough to reveal the brilliant white color of her hair, just growing back after undergoing chemo. She laughed about how it had a slight curl to it now, which was not there before. The husband knew much about the trees in the park, showing us the tiny pine cones at the tips of the towering redwoods, the drooping branches of the deodar cedar and told us how the water that flowed into the small reservoir there was not pumped, but siphoned from the source. The wife was Finnish and spoke with a soft voice about when she was a child in school and had learned all the trees and plants in her home region, had made a notebook of samples of each one and had labeled each with their common and Latin names. We strolled with them for awhile until it was time for my friend and I to turn off and return to our car and drive back into the city.

When I was visiting my mother a couple of weeks ago she and I were sitting in her living room one evening and she started talking about the neighborhood where she grew up in Portland, near the railroad tracks on 20th Street—how there was every nationality represented: Italian, Asian, African, Russian, Irish and Mexican. She talked about living as a young child during the Depression, her first job as a secretary and working six days a week for $5 and splitting that with her mother 50/50 to help cover expenses. She talked about the scandals in the neighborhood: divorces, beatings and even murder. There were the decent people and the rotten ones, and it didn’t matter the color of their skin or how long ago they’d stepped off the boat—it was how they treated their neighbors, how they watched out for each other that mattered. I vowed, after hearing her talk, to get these stories down on paper—for our family, for the generations.

Perhaps I’m getting sentimental, seeing the earth spinning so fast that it wrenches my stomach these days and I want to hold onto something that is solid, like the center post in the merry-go-round, where life is not a blur. but more like a leaf-strewn path, meandering through time and space, where precious, precious souls leave their footprints, their stories. Maybe, it’s because I’m a writer of poems, one who fingers the scales of what was, what is and what could be. It seems that poetry is about honoring and preserving what is absolutely unique in each of us—of all that has ever existed and will exist—burrowing into what is so different and finding, there, in the center that still place where we are gloriously at one. The thousand-year old redwood, the wood duck and its mate, the Finnish couple walking in the park, my mother and her long-ago neighbors and the stories they have to tell—all we have to do is listen, just listen.

May your 2008 spin a little less and meander a little more.

I can hear the wind blustering, see the leaves on the camellia bush outside my window waving furiously and when I went for a walk with the dogs there were tree branches and palm fronds scattered across lawns, sidewalk and into the street. Nothing like a windy day to evoke the wildness – in nature and in people. What is it about the wind that gets us going? Here in L.A. we have Santa Ana winds that blow off the desert, warm and dry they are known to make men (and women) mad. Only temporarily, of course, but I am sure crime rates go up, as well as traffic accidents and luniness, in general. Of course there is no hard evidence of the latter, but those who live in it know what goes on, how we all get antsy, itchy, and no manner of scratching can relieve the need to move or just do something inanely destructive. Who says we aren’t affected by the forces of nature?

Navigating around town on this bright, smogless day was invigorating. I hit some of the spiritual spaces/places that I have come to cherish over the years. It’s one of things I love about L.A. – these places where people are making an effort to provide food for the soul, where you can go to read books on great spiritual traditions, listen to uplifting music and inhale sandalwood incense. This is the Bodhi Tree, a metaphysical bookstore on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, where the floorboards squeak and the stacks are a warren of respite from the Borders and Barnes & Noble of the world. It has a devoted clientele and in spite of the lack of parking and encroachment of high-end shops and office buildings, persists in its determination to provide spiritual sustenance to the community.

Before getting to the Bodhi Tree I stopped at our “family” yoga center, Yoga West, on Robertson Blvd to pick up some meditation music. The vibe there is so welcoming and gentle. For many, many years our teacher, Yogi Bhajan would teach classes there, always drawing a full house, booming out his messages of “Keep up and you’ll be kept up,” and “It’s not the life that matters, but the courage you bring to it.” A lot of yoga has been done in that space, a lot of meditation. Tears of joy and pain have been shed on those floors as students stretch not only their legs and arms and spine, but their understanding of what it is to be human, to be a spiritual being. It is another one of those places where it’s not about the money made but the difference made every day with every inhale and exhale.

After Yoga West and a quick stop at the bank (even I have to take care of business sometimes) I headed over to Elixir, a tea and tonic shop just a block west of Bodhi Tree to meet with my good friend, Heidi. We met a few years ago at a David Whyte seminar at Santa Monica University, where we sat in the same row and ended up doing some “exercises” together. She’s a great astrologer, writer, stage director, mom and all round caring and loving person. She ordered a “Virtual Buddha” and I got the “Depth Recharger” purported to replenish “jing,” revitalize liver & kidneys and clear “heat.” Sounded good to me, so I ordered mine hot and we took our beautifully sculpted mugs of tea out to the garden in the back to catch up on what has been going on in our lives. The water fountain gurgled, the sun sifted through the bamboo and the sounds of a woman’s voice singing (either next door or maybe from the CD playing) floated over us like an angel of the highest order. It was just good – good to be somewhere so nurturing, with a friend sharing warm tea and sweet muffins, an environment where giving and receiving kindness flowed so naturally.

In the Bodhi Tree I picked up a couple of books of poetry, The Forbidden Rumi and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Below is a poem from each book. I hope you’ll also enjoy a track from a CD I bought at Yoga West from Healing in Africa by Siri Dharma Kaur and The Alexandra Community Choir.

May the winds of change ever inspire you to be more and more yourself and may you get a little crazy every once in awhile, feel the wind-spirit blow you to new territory, new frontiers of consciousness. Up, up and away!!

The Eggshell of the Body

If you want to feel rapture,
then give up thinking, and quit worrying.

You’re like a bizarre bird
in the shell of the body’s egg.
You can’t fly because you’re inside the egg.

But when this egg is crushed,
you’ll fly free and save your soul.

Rumi
The Forbidden Rumi
Tr by Nevit O. Ergin and Will Johnson
Inner Traditions, Publisher

The Forge

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

Seamus Heaney
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet
Edited by Phillis Levin
Penguin Books, Publisher

Heidi Rose

A rainbow of Buddhas inside Elixir 

Teapots

The fountain and back garden at Elixir

Bodhi Tree front window with stained glass mandala. 

Inside the Bodhi Tree 

Bodhi Tree Checkout 

Teachers Bench at Yoga West 

Meditation for Communication from the CD Healing in Africa by Siri Dharma and the Alexandra Community Choir of Johannesburg, South Africa.

I read in the paper today that Ruth Bernhard, the celebrated photographer, passed away in her home in San Francisco at the age of 101. I know of Ms. Bernhard and her work from my studies at Vermont College. In my third semester my study was centered around an overview of art, artists and creating my own art. My dear advisor, Charlotte Hastings, who knew I wanted to explore individuals who not only crafted beautiful art but a rich and meaningful life,  sent me a book about Ms. Bernhard written by Margaretta K. Mitchell entitled Ruth Bernhard: Between Art and Life. I found the photography striking and unusual. She was renowned for her beautiful and sensitive female nudes in black and white. She was also a beloved teacher and mentor to hundreds (maybe thousands) of young photographers.

In reading about her, as much as I was impressed with her art and dedication to teaching, I was even more so with her philosophy of life and her willingness to walk a daring and controversial path as a woman in the early twentieth century. She never married or had children, understanding that to have a family would be a compromise to her art and that she would consider friends, students and colleagues as her "family." After reading her book for my study, I wrote a short piece for my e-letter about her and included her Recipe for a Long and Happy Life. I print it below and include some photos of hers. If you’d like to read more and see more of her photos you can go to the Women in Photography web site.

Recipe for a Long and Happy Life

Last night I was looking through a book about the photographer, Ruth Bernard, who at the time (1999) was 95 years old and still teaching, exhibiting and vitally involved in producing art. Her story and her work are inspirational. I was also thinking about when a friend and I were watching a video about another artist and my friend asked, “Why are all artists so crazy?” I found myself contemplating what it takes to really give yourself to your art and how it is different for every individual. How, each individual has circumstances and choices that influence how they approach life and art. It is certainly true that great poetry, novels, paintings and performances can be created even though the artist is a tortured soul, but it is also true that an artist can produce dynamic work and live happily. Perhaps the latter takes more vigilance, patience, attention to nurturing other aspects of one’s life besides one’s art. Perhaps it is a compromise or, perhaps, simply the grace of God.

Ruth Bernard is an example of someone who certainly lived an unconventional life, but it was one she carved out for herself, one that was particularly suited for who she was and how she wanted to navigate the world. She never married nor had children. She found that the love she so valued could be found among friends, lovers, sharing her knowledge with students. She decided not to confine herself to society’s dictums and to trust her intuition and to “fall madly in love with the world.”

Below is Ruth’s Recipe for a Long and Happy Life. I found it inspiring and plan to refer to it often, especially when I am in one of those emotional valleys that come along every so often.

Recipe for a Long and Happy Life

1.  Never get used to anything.
2.  Hold on to the child in you.
3.  Keep your curiosity alive.
4.  Trust your intuition.
5.  Delight in simple things.
6.  Say “Yes” to life with passion.
7.  Fall madly in love with the world.
8.  Remember: Today is the Day!

Folding 

Straws 

Trees Walking 

I was surprised to find the poem “Why Regret?” in the new volume of Galway Kinnell’s poetry. I had just been thinking about regret on Sunday while driving to the airport on my way back to L.A. from Oregon. I don’t know why it came up, maybe it was because I was in my old-stomping grounds, where I grew up and made so, so many blunders, as adolescents and teenagers have a proclivity to do. Maybe it was because I always have second thoughts after I speak in front of a crowd, immediately have a hundred different thoughts about what I could have said better, or why didn’t I say thank you to so-and-so, or tell a good joke or story, or slow down when I read, look up and smile at the audience, etc.

When the word “regret” passed through me my first thought was that it was such a small and pitiful emotion, that it was the forerunner of guilt and remorse and shame, all of which have the power to rend a human being helpless in having any kind of happiness in their lives. Oh, I’m not saying that we should bounce along doing all sorts of nasty and self-serving acts, have no sense of the harm we cause others by our actions and feel we completely deserve to get off scot-free. I fully agree it’s important to own up to where you’ve let others down, brought suffering or just plain been a jerk. You could say it comes down to semantics and I guess I see regret as another one of those heavy stones that you put in your sack of woes and drag around with you, along with resentment, hurt, grudges, etc, until you can’t walk, can hardly stand up straight anymore.

Reflection, realization and responsibility all seem to be more productive “re” words to me in healing and moving on in life. I love that Kinnell’s poem never once addresses the question of “Why Regret?” directly. He shows us everything to not regret, beautiful, tender, wild, images that fill us everyday with wonder: “ironworkers / sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable” and “the wren / and how little flesh is needed to make a song” and “pinworms as some kind of tiny batons / giving cadence to the squeezes and releases / around the downward march of debris.” If we must regret (and I believe it is possible to not), then regret only a little, only a fraction of what you have beheld in life, maybe three per-cent, at most five. For the other, the ninety-five to ninety-seven look around, inhale, reach out, swallow, lie down in a shallow stream, look into the eyes of a child, meditate so deeply you forget where you are and who you are. These are places where regret and guilt and shame do not survive. This is joy. This is the “mayfly struggling free,” the monarch’s “inner blazonry.” This is waking in the night to, “find ourselves / holding hands in our sleep.”

Galway Kinnell

Why Regret?

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of the world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-arts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

On Thursday in my home town of Redmond, Oregon a high school auditorium will be dedicated to my father, Clyde Moore. He is 85 and lives in Portland with my mother. He was the band teacher in the Redmond school system for 28 years, teaching in grades five through twelve. In a few short years he put our little town of 5000 residents on the map by developing one of the top bands in the state. He dedicated his life to the kids and to music. He spent evenings in the spring and summer marching the band through the town’s streets in preparation for the County Fair, Spud Festival and often the Rose Parade in Portland where we wore our military style uniforms of maroon with gold trim. There was a Christmas Concert in December and a Pops Concert in the spring. There was a dance band and marching and pep bands for the football and basketball games. We competed individually at recitals all over the state and as a group went to band competitions and festivals all over the country, including Hawaii, Canada and Mexico.

Dad was big on practicing and being one of his kids I was expected to tow the line. I played the flute in the concert band, piccolo and sometimes cymbals in the marching band. My older brother played the clarinet and saxophone and was by far the best musician in the family. My sisters and I did the best we could and were fairly competitive in vying for the “chairs” in the section that we played. I look back on it now and I suppose I would have been better suited to sing in the choir than play an instrument, but the choir was the ugly stepchild to band in those days, and of course, my father would not have heard of it. Band was his life and therefore our life. It was important that we play and it was doubly important that we play well. It was a tough row to hoe at times but, as time has the ability to do, I see now where there were so many gifts in being in the band, most of all it was being a part of something—something that brought these rowdy, headstrong, and terribly insecure teenagers together in a common endeavor. We were expected to excel, to show up, dress up and damn well do our best out there. We were part of the band, part of his band.

God, I haven’t thought about it in so long. I can see the band room at the high school; the practice and instrument rooms the windows along the north side facing the street where yellow school buses loaded and unloaded twice a day, the tiered risers set in a semi-circle with the director’s podium at their center, my father’s glassed in office in the corner, the smell of the cleaning oil, the squeak of tennis shoes and scrape of chairs on the brown tiled floor. I remember my flute in it’s felt lined case, pulling it out, twisting the three pieces together, blowing into the cold mouthpiece, starting with C and running up and down the scales, my fingers knowing exactly when to lift and when to fall. I remember turning to Carol or Betsy in first chair and leaning in to them, tuning to their C, the whole band tuning, woodwinds, brass, percussion tapping and rumbling in the background. I remember the rap-rap of the baton on the music stand, looking up to see my six-foot father raising his right arm in an arc, the look of authority in his eyes and posture, the look that bodes no monkey-business, that lets every one in that room know exactly who’s in charge and we are about to begin and you better stop goofing off and pay attention
while you’re in his classroom.

I know it was impossible then, but now when I go back and look up from my chair in the front row, brush away my drooping bangs and teenage angst and rebellion, when I look now at the imposing figure of this man, my father, my teacher, I see so clearly the heart and soul of someone who loved what he did, gave everything he had to impart courage and confidence in his students and I if I listen closely I am sure I will hear softly flowing out of his cloaked heart and into all of us sitting there, all of us who would be forever changed by him, the rhythmic, melodic, and entrancing wonder that is music.

My parents in San Diego right after they were married and he was still a Navy man.

This must have been in the fifties when I was still in diapers.

The concert band. If you get your microscope out you can see I’m the third flute on the left, first row (after Betsy & Nancy, of course).

The Pep Band at a basketball game.

At the football game–a page out of my junior yearbook.

*****

Here’s a poem I wrote this summer on his 85th birthday when I was at our house in Sisters. It came while I was looking out the window at the tall grass moving in the breeze.

Spirito

In slanted light long grasses sway, bow
to the east, a swirling concert of blades—

flats and sharps, tempo and cadence, allegro,
andante, pianissimo, piano, oh, insistent forte,

intrepid crescendo, glide of diminuendo,
flaming sky cantata slurs to lengthy shadows.

And the winds rest and the woods fall dark.
Still the roots play on…dolce, dolce, dolce.

Last night when I was dozing off to sleep with a book in my hands, trying to read just one more line, get through at least five pages before giving over to sleep, I had this realization that I was feeling content. The whole day I had this feeling, though I had not named it. It was one of those days in L.A. where the morning haze never did burn off and it was that kind of overcast where no rain is going to happen but everything is muffled; colors, sounds, movements. I spent most of the day in the house, only went out in the afternoon to run to the pet store for dog food, the beauty shop to pick up some facial cleanser and Trader Joes for the macaroni and cheese I just had to have for dinner. I didn’t do anything special during the day, though everything I did felt special in some way or another. Even paying the bills or watching TV later on in the evening–taking in a few minutes of a Laker game and liking the look of the team this year, actually considering going to a game and cheering them on (which I haven’t felt since Magic & Kareem hung up their tennies).

It was elusive, really, where that contentment originated, but I think most likely it was a response to all the traveling I’ve done in the last few months and the appreciation deep in my bones, to being home, to being secure and comfortable–an appreciation for all that I have and not wanting to be anywhere else or with anyone else at that moment. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. I was just as I was supposed to be. It was sweet to drift off to sleep with these thoughts in my mind. I thanked the comforter on my bed, the green water glass on the nightstand, the carpet on the floor, pictures on the wall of my son and my teacher and the Golden Temple in India. It was all right. Perfect. In harmony. Ah, to be human in these moments is such a blessing and helps me understand the other side, those dark nights of the soul, so much more. They exist side by side. Just as there are dragons and goblins and mice that come into my life to shake lose what I hold onto and open me up to what I fear, there are those moments so soft and tender where no one is witness; those moments when life is poetry and poetry is all around, not in words but in essence, in vibration, in every cell and molecule in and around me.

********

Ten Thousand Flowers

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

Wu-Men

***

Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen

In the high seat,
before-dawn dark,

Polished hubs gleam
And the shiny diesel stack
Warms and flutters
Up the Tyler Road grade
To the logging on Poorman Creek.
Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life.

Gary Snyder

***

The Perfume of Flowers!…

The perfume
of flowers! A haw

drops such odour
it stops me

in the wall
of its fall. Love

arrests

Lime-trees
saturate

the night. We walk
in it

On a path jonquils
fill

the air. Love
is a scent.

Charles Olson

***

West Wall

In the unmade light I can see the world
as the leaves brighten I see the air
the shadows melt and the apricots appear
now that the branches vanish I see the apricots
from a thousand trees ripening in the air
they are ripening in the sun along the west wall
apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.

Whatever was there
I never saw those apricots swaying in the light
I might have stood in orchards forever
without beholding the day in the apricots
or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air
or touching the apricots in your skin
or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots.

W. S. Merwin

***

from
Vacillation

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

William Butler Yeats

Artwork from AllPoster.com

The food here is fantastic (didn’t I say that in the last post?) and last night Cindy outdid herself with herbed soup, pasta with garlic, mixed green salad with homemade dressing and these little breaded eggplant rolls stuffed with cream cheese and ricotta that were so delicious of course I had to have seconds. And everything is vegetarian, which is such a blessing when there are so many of these kind of workshops or retreats where I’m reduced to eating lettuce, tomato and cheese sandwiches.

Before each meal all the fellows (that’s the term for the artists here, male or female) all hang out eating hors d’oeuvres and talking about our projects, our day and anything that happens to come up. Last night the discussion included Rilke’s poems, if the artist can ever make art without imprinting his/her mood or intention into the art, the thousands of swarming lady bugs (most of which were laying dead on the windowsills, floor and tables all over the enclosed porch), and about the bear hunters who might have been out that day treeing a bear.

Janet, Kathy and Liza

Dick and Norma

Fereydoon & James

I slept at the cabin last night, watched a couple of my movies from The Spiritual Cinema Circle, locked all the doors and turned on the night light so I could find my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep particularly well, but that’s not news these days. I loved the quiet and felt very warm and secure in this little cabin. In the morning the light coming through the mist onto the leaves was exquisite and a good omen for a creative and productive day.

In the morning I read and wrote for a couple of hours then organized my printed essays to prepare for the afternoon when Liza came over and we put them up on the white board into preliminary categories with poems to go with them. Tomorrow I’m going through quotes I have saved over the years to match a quote with each piece. This is all such a great process and we were so stoked by the end just looking at them all hanging there–actual manifestation of a budding manuscript.

This morning while walking I realized that there are dueling opinions about the state of the world (mine and the greater one) that play out in my head. There’s the complainer and the praiser—the first is dissatisfied with my body, my thoughts, my environments, accomplishments, attitudes, my neighbors, friends, the president, air, water and noise pollution, and on and on and on. This one, the kvetcher, seems to think it’s important to be vigilant about what’s not perfect, dilapidated, sliding, tainted and just NOT RIGHT. There’s some kind of belief that enumerating these less-than-perfect attributes is important—that be doing so one (well, I) will be in a better position to improve them. If I don’t remind myself 20-30 times a day that my back would feel better, I’d drop a dress size and extend my life a few months if I lost twenty pounds, well then, I’m not doing my job, which is, of course, to improve, to attain what I know is possible and best for myself. Otherwise, gulp, I’ve failed, I’m a loser and I’ll be back next time around weighing 350 pounds and have to deal with it all over again, only worse.

At our house here in L.A. we have a beautiful oval-shaped swimming pool in the back and a hot tub that we bought when we moved here. This morning, after walking the dogs and watering the plants I was feeling hot and sweaty so I jumped in the pool (which was pretty cold, since we don’t heat it) and then in the hot tub for a while, then back in the pool. Afterwards, I sat outside, relaxed, enjoying the sun. I realized it had been a couple of weeks since I had slowed down long enough to really see the world around me—the way the light plays off the water, the brilliant orange flower draping over the wall, the shimmer of the fichus leaves against the sky. Oh, I had noticed, but I hadn’t seen, hadn’t taken them in. My head had been too full of stuff that needs to get done, stuff I need to figure out, stuff I believe or don’t believe, blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean.

So, sitting there I felt the presence of gratitude, of the praiser, inside—in awe of the wonder of existence. I started thinking about the difference between the perception of how screwed up everything is and the perception that everything is just as it is supposed to be. Listening to the traffic out on the street and thinking of the people in the cars, in the malls, at work, at home, all across the country and the globe—thinking how few of them, how very few of them, ever stop, ever give over to the fragility of their lives, the precious moments that slip by, slip by, and are gone. It made me wonder what would happen if, instead of the bravado and posturing of politicians (like what we witnessed at the U.N. this week), these leaders, these men and women went together on a retreat to meditate, chant, write, speak in a scared circle, tell their stories, if they got real, and felt each other and the pain inside each other’s hearts. I wonder what would happen if each of us vowed to go past the fear and anger that masks our vulnerability and decided it was okay to weep at the sight of beauty, to sing out the truth, to affirm every moment of every day that what is here, what is now, will not always be, that we are here only temporarily and what we do while we are here is the legacy we leave those who come after us—our children and their children.

I’m not sure if the complainer will ever completely fade out of my head. She’s pretty tenacious. I’m thinking though, if I make the effort to slow down and catch up with myself, take in what “is” and see it as so very right and so very perfect—I might just get the upper hand. I’m not naive enough to think that I’ll see President Bush and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sit side by side in a seminar to learn “nonviolent communication” and heal their differences. It does occur to me though, that the most important work being done on this planet today is by those who attend those conferences, who do go to meditation and poetry and yoga retreats. As often as it has been quoted, what MhaAtma Ghandi said will always ring true, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It’s the only thing we really have control over, our hearts, our minds, the way we see each other as we walk down the street, the way we see ourselves when we look in the mirror. Why not live in kindness, in hope, in gratitude? Why not?

I am sitting out on the bench in our yard. Mt. Jefferson is wrapped in a smoky haze from some distant wildfire, giving its contours a soft, floating look. There is still snow on much of its slopes, curving in and out of the dips and falls of its immense girth. Tomorrow I return to Los Angeles. All of a sudden I am not ready to go. Last night, when I was tossing and turning and imagining strange things that go bump in the night, I was more than ready to get back to the city, to husband and friends, to leave this more solitary existence behind. But today, as I sit in the shade of the Ponderosas and listen to the birds chirp and twitter, the grasshopper’s cackle and even the saws and hammers of the construction work across the meadow, I hesitate, realize that I have only just begun to settle in to the rhythms of this place and want more time to absorb it and be absorbed by it.Having two homes is a new experience for me. It is both expansive and confusing. Each place offers so much of what I love and neither is complete in all those things. In Oregon is the solitude, the quiet, time to find my own pace. Here I notice more, my dreams grow larger, my thoughts slow. Here, the earth and sky, the wind and rain, coyote howl and hoot of the owl touch my primitive soul, calling up great longing, as well as the terror of complete vulnerability to the wild, the vast.

Right now a band of quail is bobbing across the grass, a mother hen and her three adolescent chicks. They move away from where I am sitting and are joined by more hens and chicks as they make their way to a woodpile and safe cover. This dodging between exposure and safety, I believe, is embedded in a kind of primal survival pocket deep inside our brains. In love, business, friendship, and art, in mind, body and spirit there is a kind of calculation that goes on: How much can I risk here? What might the cost be? Who will I be if I do this? Who will I be if I don’t?

I don’t want to huddle in the woodpile of my comfort, crouching there in the dark cover, fearing the coyote or the badger, but so often when I am on the verge of change it is where I find myself seeking refuge, feverishly doubting my ability to navigate the wide open spaces of what is calling me over the horizon.

Yesterday, out the window, I watched as flycatchers dodged and swooped to snap up grasshoppers and darting insects. Their agility and acuity had no forethought. They had never taken a workshop or had a mentor to school them in the right moves to make or not make. They were born to it and knew it to be the way of their survival. I believe that under all the things we have learned there is, for each of us, as for the quail, the coyote, and flycatcher, an innate knowing of how we are meant to move in this world–our natural rhythm, where our heart, our head and our soul converge and we move across the fields and rivers of our life in harmony, not fearing the perils, but welcoming them as a vital part of the journey.

Even as I prepare in these next two days to leave one part of this earth and fly to another I will still carry with me the scent of the pines, the touch of the breeze on my shoulder, the call of the flicker and the nuthatch in the chill morning. And if I emerge from the dark of my doubt (and I will) and out into the wide open spaces of possibility, I know I will know that there is no coming or going, no here or there, no now or then anywhere but in my mind. I will know in that place of convergence inside of me, that all that exists is memory–a vivid, radiant, undying memory–of how courageously we have lived and how well we have loved.

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

The quail family

The smoky Cascades

Caught

The buck startles over the fence past
the house and I run from window
to window to see where he has gone,

if he is still near. I haven’t been out
to the meadow in the five days since
I arrived and deny I am frightened now

that the neighbor says a family of coyotes
have a den in the brush. I want to see
them like a movie on the big screen,

like the Discovery channel in my own
backyard, like how I watch the chipmunks
this afternoon, laugh at what is play to me

but might very well be war, with their tails
switching and chasing and tumbling and
I start to think that cutting the grass

yesterday might have left them easy prey
to owls or the mother coyote and how
there is no birdseed in the feeder and I want

desperately to see again the trees near
the stream, felled and gnawed by a beaver,
want to rest my head there on the damp

ground and wait for the insects to come,
the geese to touch down, for night,
to not bolt, to stay, to be rooted like

rabbit, like deer, bear and wolf, to know
what the hunted know and still to call
forth the breath, the will, the morning.

Hari Bhajan

August, 2006