Today I read the news and then I balanced it with the poem “Thanks” by W.S. Merwin. You can read the poem here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57937/thanks
He ends with:
we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
In reading The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, I learned that “When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.”
I’ve been at Green Gulch Zen Center and farm for four days. I parked at Muir Beach and after crossing a wooden bridge, I walked into a land of gardens, bunnies, quail, deer, and flights and songs of birds. I can’t imagine one country dropping a bomb on another but I can imagine the mycelium web of mushrooms surviving the damage. I offer photos of invitation.
Thursday through Sunday I’ll be in a Sensory Awareness workshop at Green Gulch Zen Center with Lee Klinger Lesser titled How does my love for life want to express itself? She suggests we bring an object or symbol that represents how our love for life wants to express itself in the midst of these times that we are living.
As I reflect on this, two poems of Naomi Shihab Nye come to mind. One is called “Kindness”. The other is “So Much Happiness”.
You can find both poems at poets.org.
Here is the last stanza of “So Much Happiness”.
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
Yesterday I had a tooth extracted, and a bone graft put in place. In four months, the bone will have integrated with my own bone, so I can have an implant. For now, I am aware of the integration, the curiosity of my bone with this, what may seem like an intrusion, and the care with which the procedure was done. My dentist’s son, who is 18, wants to be a dentist, so I gave permission for him to be there, too. Sometimes I close my eyes for dental procedures, but yesterday when I opened them, I saw three faces peering in, the dentist, the assistant, and his son. Three people were taking care of one small area in the rear of my mouth. How amazing is that?
Yesterday I was at the beach for a five year old’s birthday party. Five children to celebrate a five year old. Each child’s party favor was a kite. In the howling wind, the father patiently put each kite together and each child waited patiently for their turn. Grandson got a green King Cobra kite, which he found thrilling since he loves snakes and the color green.
I’m with the words of Julia Butterfly Hill:
If we take action out of anger, we’re only making more problems in the world. But when you can take action out of love, then miracles can happen.
We spent the night at Safari West, a refuge for animals, the environment, and visitors.
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
Photos from where I live.
I went to Rodeo Beach early this morning where it was sunny and warm, no wind. I watched the changing waves, some flat, others crashing and flaring. I saw a Great Blue Heron, bluebirds, and otters in the lagoon. Sitting down on a “bench”, I learned from a passerby that the bench wasn’t there yesterday, and yet there it was, for a moment, today.
Mushrooms are decomposers, recyclers, that nourish the soil. With the rain, they popped up overnight in our yard representing what works unseen.
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