Rowdy Abundance

new abstract "If Trees Were Mountains" 11"x14"

I am still gulping in this season of rowdy abundance that has thrown itself at my doorstep. The sun gets up early and stays up late and somehow I try to keep up.  The settling darkness laughs at my foolish tag along attempts as I fall into bed exhausted. I don't want to miss a minute.  I am full of energy for all that needs to be done, for sipping in the deliciousness of the greenness and the savouring the occasional tepid breeze. The grass is waist high in parts of the meadow. The tent caterpillars have consumed the leaves from entire trees giving them an eerie silvery glow. They are cocooned in in a tangle of emptiness. Soon their little moth selves will bump against my windows at night like little winged zombies.

The birds dart about in frenzied feeding. Even the tiny woodpecker comes to tap at the plastic feeder hoping to find something to his liking. The quail keep look out for each other as they eat, this seems so endearingly sweet, but of course it is merely a survival behaviour. The hot pink hawthorne tree who showed no sign of blooming last week is tosses it hot pinkness into the sky, even in the distance. In my human way I am constantly reading meaning into the natural world where there is none, or at least not my imagined stories of sweetness or worry or delight. They have their stories but not the ones I stitch together for them, charged with my own hope and fear.

And I  have been plunged into this radical abundance, feeling the energetic pull to be part of it. The lazy slow days of hibernation have disappeared into the drawer with the wool socks. The stack of books I am reading is as tall as the grass. There is "In Buddha's Kitchen" and "Gardening At Dragons Gate", both written by women Dharma practitioners.  Wendy Johnson gardens at Green Gulch Zen Centre in California, Kimberley Snow cooks at a Tibetan Centre in Northern California.  As I read these books at different times over the days the stories seem to merge together and I weave one book out of two. But as I travel deeper into the books  their roads of similarity diverge with the writing and story of the gardening book emerging stronger and more vivid. And so the stories separate and the reading of one increases and the other falls quietly into the background.

New Buddha 16"x20"  heading off to Norway this week

Also traveling  from bedside to coffee table are: "Long Life" and "Why I Wake Early" by Mary Oliver, "Pilgrim" by David Whyte, "Broken Open" by Elizabeth Lesser, "Journey In Ladakh" by Andrew Harvey, and "Collage Discovery Workshop" by Claudine Hellmuth. I am living in the waist tall grass of my reading list, sometimes feeling overwhelmed and sometimes simply picking up what I fancy and reading a bit. I imagine the birds and dear (ha, ha, good typo, deer), must feel this sense of lush madness each day as they make their way through the world.

And between reading list and my infatuation with the outdoor world there seems little time left for virtual living. I read the odd blog. I watch Jeane broadcast from the shed, check a few emails but this is the stuff of colder seasons or rainy days. I suspect many of us have the same inclination, torn from our screens by the the energy of growing things, of warm breezes, a world that offers us so much for so little.

How about you? How has the energy of the season tangled and mixed with your life creating a new you? I am reminded of a quote attributed to the Buddha that I have used on a painting: "Each day we are born again. What we do today is what matters most."

A Small Bird Built A Nest In My Heart

A small bird

 built

A nest

In my heart

I saw her

carefully tugging

Prayer flag threads

I didn't see her carry

the dry twigs of despair

the brittle lichen of longing

instead she placed them secretly

knowing they would hold

what was

waiting to fly

from my heart

It is the season of earth's great generosity and abundance. The natural world is bursting with voluptuous Spring greenness, a colour so rich and vibrant that it tickles you from the inside. The maples, the lilacs and the green fingered pine trees.  And all the while in the garden, the weeds grow like -- weeds.

And as a human living in this divine explosion of energy I make some attempt, in my foolishness, to tame a small part of this world that grows up around my door. I pull weeds.  I use the weedeater and the lawn mower. I plant seeds in a garden whose clay soil is a better host to hardy, practiced weeds than to tender veggie seeds. In my grumbling and digging I realize my need to amend the soil. Tiny lights are lit from the candle of despair.

And so the list of tasks that rattle around in my head is also made abundant by this lush season. I am humbled by my role of lion tamer to the natural world. Each morning the overnight surges and spurts of growth greet me and ask me "who do you think you are?"

The deer browse hungrily, eyeing the trellis rose just out of reach, scratching the itch of their velvety antlers. Quail take a dust bath in hollows they have etched with their round bodies and crazy scratching. We watch them argue over whose turn it is in the prime spot under the bird feeder. Seven tiny ducklings swim under the willow that hangs into the pond. Their is always new snacks for the eyes.

I watch the feelings of delight at the sights of nature untamed and then am swamped by the sense of overwhelm that rises in an instant, feeding on my desire to manicure a small square of earth for the part of me that savours order and tidiness. It is a constant movement like the breeze that comes over the hill. My work is to delight in the coexistence of these two senses like a parent of children that like to argue a bit.

And how is it in your part of this lovely planet as it springs to life?

Getting A Big, Free Unusual Happy Life

Small Abstract in matte 11"x14"

For my birthday I got myself a big new free happy unusual life! Nice of me, don't you think? I've been wanting this for quite some time now but every year I forget. Mostly I am never quite sure where to get this, what it looks like and if I can afford it.  Can you think of a better gift, really?  You might even want this yourself?  Oh, did I mention it's a book? By Nina Wise. No I forgot, well memory's not what it used to be and there are up sides to that. The book is subtitled "self-expression and spiritual practice for those who have time for neither" It is my good fortune to have time for both, but still the book appeals.

I like to think of a birthday the same way I think of the turning of the year on January 1st.  Our birth was a new year for us as we inhaled our first breath and this is the anniversary of it. I like to think of my birthday as a time of re-orientation and reflection, a time to consider where I might  go from here, to consider and set intentions, instead of just stumbling along the well worn ruts or reciting the lines of my life by rote. And always with a nod to the bigger picture and the fact that life may have other plans for me.

And of course more than anything, a birthday is a time to be grateful for life so far.  The normal inclination is to pick at what remains undone like some small sore, to notice what doesn't please and what we wish we hadn't done. But there is a moratorium on this line of thinking that comes accompanied by a bar of chocolate (it's a party, right?). This is a time of celebration, don't you think? We tend, in our busyness, in our usual state of partial awareness to forget the essence of these defining moments. Someone bakes a cake, someone buys us a gift, we get a few phone calls, maybe have a nice dinner but the deeper essence of it scuttles along the ocean floor of our lives. I say, get out the Zen pom poms and do a little cheer, shout into the forest. What is the sound of one more year passing? Which way are we pointing ourselves, deeper into the forest or craning, like a wise seedling toward the light?

This year my dharma radar has picked up some previously hidden hot spots.  The power of our minds and how we can train them  in more wholesome ways of being has been an important aspect of practice this year.  A retreat, a general tiredness of the landscape of fear and the book the Buddha's Brain were all auspicious opportunities, pointing me in this direction. I have spent some time just being with worry and fear, getting a taste of their particular flavour in the body and then watching them move through time and again like little dust storms of angst. Seeing how these emotions pull like twisted stitches on the fabric of my days has been sobering.  Seeing that I have a choice to sew a different stitch has made all the difference.  The power of the mind led me to consider  the energy of intention and its cultivation. Like any year, this one has been rich with opportunity to wake up. I like to think that the keel of my little boat has balanced a little more evenly and steadily this turn around the pond (even if I don't have both oars in the water all the time). I have been reminded of the preciousness of this human life by some brave souls which has encouraged me to consider how I really want to spend my time.

So in the tradition of the native people of this land who give gifts when they hold a celebration, I would like to invite anyone who would like a small trinket of art to send me their snail mail address and I will pop a little something in the mail to you. It seems a fitting way to hold a party.

And here are few of the treasures that have come to live with me and give me great delight, bring beauty to my eyes and  and inspire me.

By Jeane Myers

by Juana Almaguer (Gallery Juana on etsy)

Tag by Leslie Avon Miller 

Are You Looking Into The Future From The Back Of The Caboose?

Commissioned piece in progress (waiting for Buddha words)

I have a whole lot of things swirling around in my Dharma brain these days. Some totally unrelated events and thoughts have been funneling themselves into a single decanter, waiting for the particulate to settle.

So here's the list of ingredients that have been spilling into the decanter.  Ingredient # 1. My friend Thelma died, somewhat suddenly causing me to fall into a rather groundless place. I realized in a very real way, that anything can happen at anytime, to anyone (read: that means me!). Mostly we forget this and not without motive. The motive of course is comfort.  And it reminded me that although time is a human construct (in an absolute kind of way) in a relative way, the clock is always ticking. So questions starting asking themselves at the oddest  times. What do I want to do with my time, really ? Is it important to pull one more weed, "Miss-like-it-neat- and tidy"? Is my house too big? Are my aspirations too small? Koans, all of them.

But I am uncomfortable in this groundless place. I have a hard time settling into free fall.  I am not much of a dare devil.  You're more likely to find me clawing for the roots sticking out of the cliff wall  after I've been chased over the edge by a tiger, rather than enjoying the strawberry I just picked.  So of course after a few days of this space travel, I got quite grumpy. And then I was in a double bind. I had this grumpiness to keep me company as I hurtled through groundless space, trying to shake it off.  Can you hear it now, the squawk of the grumpy bird spinning around as falls from it's nest? Cover your cute little ears, it's not a pretty sound! Where's my blankey and my hemp milk latte? (Thelma used to say, "there are a thousand ways to suck your thumb! These are a couple of mine.)

you can see the texture here!

And as I listened to my latest Dharma Darling, Nina Wise, one evening,  she talked about meeting Carlos Castaneda. In their conversation he said something like, "most people sit in the caboose looking back down the track and imagining their future from there.  Me," he said, "I'm sitting in the engine looking out and I have no idea what's going to happen."  Something about this struck me deeply, the bravery, the exhilarating quality, the truth of it. It reminded me that I want to sit up front and look out into the unknown but mostly, when I am pushed up front I have the blankey pulled  up over my head and am peering out with one eye (and of course spilling my latte all over myself). But there it is my aspiration, to ride up front with Carlos.

And the next ingredient that got tossed into the decanter was a post by my friend Lynette, over at 108 Zen Books.  Her post was about our reactions to adversity and of course that resonated in terms of Thelma's death, but her post also addressed an important issue which was "there are some things we can  never know". Yep, back to "we are always wading into the great ocean of the unknown". It's like the old question we all ask at some point in our human life, like when the 14 yr old next door gets leukemia and dies, "why do bad things happen to good people, to innocent people?" And that begs a lot of questions, such as "what is bad?" But her post reminded me that to really feel the breeze touch our faces we must be willing to stand in the wind of the unknown.  And well, I didn't really want to answer how I handled adversity. I suspected the answer "just muddling along" wasn't the one in the Coles notes version of the Dharma.

And the final ingredient appeared as we did our primordial qi gong today in the last class of the Spring session. It somehow came to me, that I don't need to push away the thoughts that scare me. I don't need to say that's impossible to the things that seem impossible. I don't need to say anything. All the mind chatter is just stories from the back of the caboose. It is my intention to sit in the engine and look out front and embrace the scenery that's coming up in front of me. Want to keep me company? I promise not to spill my latte on you.

Freedom: Living Outside Your Cage

Space Travel

It's funny how shards of truth can show up on the shore of your life, glinting like pieces of beach glass. If you've got your eyes trained on the distant horizon, you're likely to miss the shining bits at your feet. During my qi gong class as we went through our movements the instructor travelled around the room to demonstrate. When she stood by me, an old song started playing in my head "oh, oh, what if I do it wrong." I could feel muscles tense. And then the voice of wisdom interrupted the currently playing program with an important message sponsored by the Dharma, "you know it isn't about how you look, it's about keeping your eye on what you're doing." And somehow this simple observation washed over the edges of qi gong practice and poured into the river of my life. This is the thief, the furtive figure of ego that separates me from what I am doing. Whenever I lose touch with the task at hand and do the big shoulder check or look into the mirror of other people's eyes to see how I'm doing, I enter a cage of my own making.  It was an instant lesson in how not  to be free.

Rock Climbing

For many of us (could I say all of us??), this desire for approval is imprinted early in life, feeding behaviour that has us scanning the terrain to see how we're doing, how we're measuring up. Perhaps it is simply a perversion of the human need to be part of the tribe that causes us to check and see if we've been voted off the island for some infraction, some display of foolishness.  But for some reason as I stood in my wu-ji posture I could see how this thought "of not wanting to be wrong" was like a cage. To become free I simply had to turn my focus to what really mattered, pay attention to what I was doing, not imagining what others were thinking. In a lot of ways it's the simple practice of awareness that we learn in meditation.  We simply need to carry it into every crevice of our life to be free.

This is not to encourage myopic vision and discourage an outward orientation to the world. It is not about focusing on the self and not caring about the needs of others. It's simply about paying attention with care to what needs to be done at the moment, not trailing off into stories on the imaginary horizon and dividing our energies. The ability to give up the worry and stories finds its origins in fearlessness and bravery. This is the tradition of the spiritual warrior that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about.

My use of the image of a cage reminds me of  a Zen story about a golden bird locked in a cage. The bird struggles to get out but the door is closed. Turns out in, amidst all the struggling and flapping about, the bird neglects to look down and see that the cage has no bottom.

What cages do you live in? What ones have you set yourself free from, dear lovely birds of the great virtual sky?

Personal Earthquakes and Tsunamis

Crossing

This past week my personal landscape hosted an internal earthquake. A sweet friend of mine who fearlessly and gracefully navigated some health challenges in the last couple of years, took gravely ill. She had done a round of tests, which came out clean and she mused on how many ways there was to say yippee.  But suddenly everything changed. Her daughters chronicled her progress for friends and family with daily email updates. We kept watch as Thelma hoisted herself from life support and ICU into a world of conversation and condo renovation plans. Each day I opened my paper free envelope to smile and cheer her progress. Wednesday when I greedily tore open my note, hungry for more good news, I found that instead, she had taken a turn for the worse the previous morning and died peacefully in the evening.

Even though we know death is inevitable for all of us, there is a great sense of loss when someone dear to us leaves the world. Wordless tsunamis of grief washed over me during the week. Snuggled right up against the  quivering news of Thelma's death was a week long visit by birding friends which pulled us out into dripping forests to hear the call of wrens, view the totem pole work of woodpeckers and shimmy under giant fallen trees. It was a time to hold both joy and sorrow in the same container. It was a time to say quiet prayers under the canopy of old firs afloat in deep carpets of velvety moss, to wish Thelma auspicious good fortune on her new journey, through her own forest.

On the easel

It is always a surprise to me, how we can, as humans, hold contradictory ideas and feelings in our heart, how one doesn't stand against the other, how sadness and joy can lock fingers.  There is, if we allow it, a gentle back and forth movement like sunlight  peeking through the trees as the wind plays in its branches. My old Zen teacher used to say this: "one thing doesn't stand against the other." It's simply our western minds carving things into black and white.

Thelma's gifts to us were many but mostly I remember her for her gentleness, grace and fearlessness in facing life's difficulties. As a parting gift she tapped me on the shoulder to remind me of the fragility and preciousness of this human life. She lifted the cloud of stupour to remind me to attend to what is important because we never really know what day our next journey will begin. To Thelma, may she return to this lovely blue planet as a beautiful being to enrich the lives of others as she did here, perhaps as an actress or a songstress in some exotic locale with a heart free as a bird, that's how I imagine her. Here's to you Thelma Midori. And to you, dear reader, may your life be filled with gentle beings as sweet as Thelma. And may you constantly savour the preciousness of your life and attend to what your heart longs for.

"Just To Be Alive Is A Grand Thing"

an oldie hanging out in the sunroom

"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable,

racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly 
that just to be alive is a grand thing."
-- Agatha Christie


These days I am feeling that it is a "grand thing to be alive", really it is. Think about it, it really is kind of miraculous.  How did you get here?  Where did you come from? And how does all this apparatus called a body know how to work? And yet I haven't always felt this way.  And I have no particular idea of why I feel this way now but I am grateful that I do. I hope I can remember this when at some time in the future I am "racked with sorrow". 


Perhaps we don't remember this because we are so self centred, focused in on the minutiae of our lives, things like I wish we could get the stairs sanded or how did that mouse get into the basement. But when somehow we take ourselves out of the centre of the snapshot our view changes. I think of the poster I have seen on facebook with man at the top and animals in their descending pyramid. Next to it is another poster with the human placed somewhere in this great web of life, that's where we belong, really.  Who put us in charge anyway? Modern man hasn't been the best steward. I think we should be fired and an ad put out for new custodians of this lovely blue planet. And yet in some strange way it is all just fine. We get what we need, not what we want.  Does that sound new agey? It's not meant at all in that woo woo sort of way. It's meant in the way that actions produce results and reactions which is simply karma. Everything reverberates out into the universe. No exceptions.


But I am filling both our heads with words when really all I wanted to say was this:


the tiny heart bird
inside me
pitches a small song
into the landscape
of life

view from the kitchen

Happy Friday! And here's a small tap with the "ain't it grand to be alive" stick.