Today in a meditation for peace I felt the words U Crane – and thought You Crane, as we each reach with the beauty and long curving necks of the bird, and the strength of the cranes that raise buildings into the sky to create a halo of peace for this region.

This morning I read of the deaths of a woman and her two children killed by Russian military artillery in Ukraine.  She worked for a software company with one location in Palo Alto, and now I read of the destruction of a maternity hospital. Where do we put such pain?

I focus on the intricacy of the sunflower, a symbol of this region.  The sunflower is a bouquet, a composite of many smaller flowers. It’s thick stalk holds a heavy flower to the sky and gives us oil, the new gold.

May we each gather and focus the energy of desire, like a magnifying glass focuses the sun, radiating spirals of smoke to signal a return to peace.  

We have returned from a family trip to the island of Kauai.

Though she wasn’t with us on the trip, Gnoc is married to my son’s wife’s brother.

She shares her story here.

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/20/refugees-vietnam-afghanistan-fall?fbclid=IwAR0NVO_Ro2gqX-MfByP_rh8TJm5s4_R61oMYEnTcBnTxElwAI4R_obm-82Q

Ricky, my niece’s partner, was with us. His family escaped from Cambodia. You can check out some of what he does now on You Tube at adobofishsauce.com.

More and more I find myself sitting with trees.  Last night I was with the Maples as twilight came, dusk.  Birds were twittering so that I could have been in the jungle but I was here, listening, feeling, absorbing, touched.  And then with darkness, an owl with it’s who, who, who.

Herman Hesse wrote:

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.