Yesterday I was with family, both four-legged and two, at Muir Beach and on the coastal trail between Muir Beach and Tennessee Valley. Some of us walked further than others, and we all indulged in these words of Vincent Van Gogh.
Don’t just look at the spring, touch it, taste it. Get it inside you.
Silence is so accurate.
– Mark Rothko
It’s a day to pause and reflect on the seed resting in darkness like the chick in the egg, resting and mobilizing to rise and break into even more radiant light.
This week, like all weeks, is Holy but for many there is even deeper intention to come together to celebrate in ways that honor the past even as we allow our own precious flow to unfold.
My friend Anna Shemin sent me two photos today. One is of her home decorated for Easter. The other is what she created from petals falling on her kitchen counter when she was arranging flowers.
My son was out walking in his neighborhood in San Jose, and took this photo. I’m reminded of a book I love, Make Way for Ducklings. Abundance abounds.
Now I know a little more to the story. They were actually walking down the center of the street when my son and his two rescue greyhounds, gently nudged them to the sidewalk which was a safer place to be.
This morning during meditation I hear birds tweeting and singing as day begins to come to light. Perhaps, spring finally arrives on April Fool’s day.
When Kobun Chino Otagawam, a Zen priest, shot an arrow over the target into the ocean at Esalen he shouted, Bullseye. When he did it three times, he was asked “Where’s the target?” He answered “Everywhere!”
Albert Einstein:
Never lose a holy curiosity.
Diane Ackerman:
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
I offer haiku from A White Tea Bowl, 100 Haiku from 100 Years of Life. The haiku are by Mitsu Suzuki, the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center.
Her laughter
comes ahead to greet me –
spring in motion
Leaves of speech –
unable to put words in order
I stamp through fallen leaves
Jizo Bodhisattva
protector against dementia –
fringed iris
The rain pours down, and the wind chimes play their notes. I sit in the pause, reflect and come back to myself. What rings inside?
I’m with these words of Ruth Denison:
Breath is the food on which sensations live – on which aliveness lives. When the sensations are fed they come out of their dullness. It’s not simply the air, it is the force of movement. Breath is the switch that turns on the lights of the sensations. When they come to life, they flicker and shine, just like the stars at night …
Allen Ginsberg wrote that the three lines of haiku ‘make the mind leap”. A good one lets the mind experience “a small sensation of space which is nothing less than God”.
Natalie Goldberg says a photo can do the same.
A loving project can do that too. Here’s an inspirational story on saving Monarch butterflies.
The kitchen is completed to where I can bring dishes back in from the garage to the house. Because they are so precious and delicate, my grandmother’s dishes sit in a heavy box on top of other boxes. They are labeled “fragile”.
The box is too heavy to lift, so I take out cup after cup, and carry each one up five steps, unwrap it, and go back down for another. I feel it as a pilgrimage, not as strenuous as walking The Camino de Santiago, but still each step mindful as I carry and cherish my grandmother’s dishes. She passed away when I was 13, and my mother gave them to me when I was married at 21.
Now, I learn they are worthless to others, that they can’t even be given away. The suggestion is to use them now, so they might as well go into the dishwasher, though it could risk their rims of gold. Instead I think of the beauty and mindfulness in hand-washing them, the caress and connection between present and past, the cleansing and renewing of ancestral memory.
I wash them by hand and place them in a sacred place, cup by cup, plate by plate, breath by breath, step by step.
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