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Our local Methodist Church has an American flag standing parallel to the alter.

Not only is this flag an eye-sore, neon-light like in a small church decorated with sweet stained glass, and simple Protestant decor, it’s wrong theologically and wrong in our Constitutional Republic.

Our congregation doesn’t worship America — or at least I don’t, nor do I believe any Methodist worth their salt would so worship.  And I suspect I am not “worshipping” as many of theses folks, for I use imagination to shape and bend the words to my meaning, while not alienating the community.  It’s a practice.

The most mportant thing about this flag is that it smells of nationalism, and there’s a little thing called the wall separating church and state.

The wall that the theocrats are always trying to tear down.

Truth be told, it’s the only wall conservatives don’t like, the one between church and state.  Every other wall, they love, but the one between church and state: “Tear it down!  Tear it down!”

A few months ago, our pastor made a few veiled swipes at Obama, but he’s moved away from that.  I’d like to think that my vocal influence helped.

But apparently, muddying the boundaries flies in theses parts.  Given that we’re hearing so much about respect and flags as strong people of good conscience put themselves in the line of fire for the greater good, my mind was dazzled with an idea this morning:

Take the knee this Sunday, during prayers.  As I always sit in the front, and nearly opposite the flag, it would be an easy move.  If the church has the audacity (or unmitigated gall) to bring the state into its walls, than as one devoted to love’s justice, I should take the knee in solidarity with my sisters and brothers who need me, wherever I am.

It’s a small act, but certainly if we’re going to get all messy with our boundaries, then messy boundaries are to be embraced and used.

Moments of rebellion, here in rural Maine.

 

(Image copyrighted)

You like soil,

barn smells, and

making music.

 

When you put

your fingers to keys,

heart and soul

find beauty

in your skill.

 

You love God,

your faith is literal,

and your love is strong and

wise enough to feel my heart,

no matter how its faith

differs from yours.

 

This week you played piano,

we sang old Appalachian spirituals,

I danced and clapped,

and we made holy merriment

from our hearts.

 

Late Sunday afternoon,

you delivered fresh, succulent pears

to my front door, picked from your trees,

because you learned that

pears are my favorite.

 

A basket of friendship,

peace and joy given

in juicy, sweet, fresh pears,

the gift of of an overflowing heart,

where all things are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My mother called me that morning and said “Turn on the news, they are blowing up those towers!  Those towers in New York!  Turn it on now!” I then owned a television, a 13-inch in the living room.

Mom always woke early, but given the three-hour time difference between California and Cambridge, her call meant she’d not slept well, and she had too early turned on to the morning news.

It was a little before 9:00 in Cambridge.  I was in the hallway when the phone rang.

I picked up the cordless sitting in a bookcase.  With Mom on the phone, I walked to the living room and turned on CNN.

Within a few minutes, we saw the second plane go in.

Mom had talked about an impending terrorist attack for a few years, believed one was coming, and that morning she preached about what we saw together, 3,000 miles apart, and before any information was known.

Terrorism, no question. She invariably voted Democrat — and loathed Cheney in particular for being “a liar from hell” — but that morning she blamed what we watched on CNN as resulting from lax national security policies during the Clinton years. “The Democrats got lazy, they didn’t pay attention to national security. I knew this was going to happen, I knew it.”

(I later pointed out that the attack happened on Bush’s watch.  She somewhat revised her opinion, given her hatred of Cheney & Co.)

Terrorism. She knew it with the first plane, and she unconsciously knew that more than one tower would be hit, her use of “towers” when she called me was clairvoyance not simply sloppy speech habits.

After we hung up, I stayed glued to the television the rest of the day, hypnotized by the unfolding that poured through 13 inches, a reality larger than any screen could hold.

***

Classes started that week. I was numb, a stupor exacerbated by hypnotizing news scrolls, and cable television’s drama pandering.

I showed up for the first day of one class as it ended, something I’d never done.  I obsessed about my class schedules, book buying, supplies, and all the rest two months ahead of the first week.  But in that week’s daze, I showed up for this one class as it ended.  I  apologized to the professor, offering her only my lame 9/11 excuse, “I’m sorry, this has never happened before. I guess I’m shell-shocked from everything.”

When I write “I was numb” to describe my stupor, this does not mean I mourned lost American innocence.

We’ve never been innocent.  Ignorant, yes.  Innocent, no.

In those days, I held an unpopular narrative: I believed that American imperialism dictated we had this coming. Wasn’t a professor somewhere fired for saying that?

Our collective hubris, greed, and violence meant that karma waited patiently for us to change, to do better by others and the world.

Even at Harvard, or perhaps especially at Harvard, calling out American hubris meant knowing your audience well.  I rarely spoke so, because A-M-E-R-I-C-A. As socially awkward and defiant as I am, even I knew better than to speak this criticism to many, especially those in collective grief.

America, a deity unto itself, the Great God who bears consumerism’s gifts, the safe salvation of dogma, and all wrapped in the comforts of white, capitalist Christianity.  We still burn heretics in this country, but not with fire.  We oust them from universities, or diminish their right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness by ostracizing them.  At the very least.

The great God of Christian American Exceptionalism must be serviced like a Golden Bull.

I never understood, nor do I understand now, the need to fetishize the tragedies of 9/11.  I’ve never understood the need to trot out this day every year, wear our victimhood like a shiny ornament, and decorate it in crying eagles, waving flags, and Jesus memes.

I’ve noticed that many folks who rarely do politics as public service coupled to policy and governance always manage to show up to “Never Forget.”

This does not honor those who died, it validates the victim narrative of those who need their nationalism served rare with a hot side of Christian values, while stoking Islamophobia.

Victimhood, a privilege.  A source of extremism, with The Book beside.

This victimhood has nothing to do with those who actually lost partners, parents, children, friends.

Many of these folks actually started projects to create interfaith dialogues on community healing and outreach, September 11 Families For Peaceful Tomorrows being one of the most inspiring.  Their motto comes from Dr. King, who wrote, “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

9/11

I remember.  And it’s possible to recognize one’s privileges, and still be stupefied when horror and fragility bombard you through 13 inches of televised narrative. Our shared existential fragility shone clear to me that day and in the weeks following, perhaps because I owned no blanket embroidered with Exceptional Eagles or Easy Christian Morals.

I believe that life’s preciousness is not meant to breed fear or loathing.  It’s a call to deeper living, and creates a drive to carve respect and understanding from ashes.

Fear or love.

Too many chose fear; many who lost more than they believed possible chose love.

***

I no longer believe we had 9/11 coming.  But actions create ripples, and America resists looking at the many demons lurking in her closets.  In last year’s powerful essay, “The Falling Man,” Tom Junod discusses the iconic photo by Richard Drew:

 

Junod offers us another unspeakable crime:

” . . . the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead. . . . They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge, graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament. They were shown as everything is shown, for, like the lens of a camera, history is a force that does not discriminate. What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.” [bold added]

We refuse to look at what would most teach us.

The falling man could hold us in his surrender to fragility as a powerful spiritual testament.

But we refuse to look, and we refuse to see.

If the terrorists hated us, it’s not because of our freedoms, it’s because U.S policies in the Middle East dictated by Saudi oil inevitably spawned a hatred born of poverty and ignorance.  It takes little leadership to join fear and ignorance into violence, as we should rightly know.

But we refuse to look, we refuse to see.

***

Many years ago, I had a class at Harvard Divinity with James Lawson.  A Methodist minister, after receiving his Ph.D., he went to India, trained on Gandhi’s ashram, came back to the states, and then accidentally met Dr. King in a coffee shop (a too easy summary).  They talked, and King told Lawson he needed him in the movement.

Lawson ended up leading King’s civil rights nonviolent resistance training.

(It was a privilege to study with Dr. Lawson, and visit him during office hours.)

Lawson once said to us during a lecture, “America is addicted to violence.  And it will never get over that addiction until it confesses and repents its original sins of genocide and slavery.”

Perhaps that’s what we’re witnessing now with the horrifying drunk uncle sitting at America’s helm, this grotesque caricature of our worst selves televised and tweeting in our faces 24/7.  At some point the addict must admit her addiction, must look in the mirror.  Perhaps we’re dealing on deep levels with our privileged stupor, facing our collective functioning alcoholic in the drunk-uncle-in-chief’s face.

But will we look?  Will we finally see that we have arrived at our United States of The Lost Weekend?

I don’t know if we’re at a defining crossroads.  I doubt it.  Change isn’t that easy, rarely comes in tidy packages.  But the unmitigated violence of Screeching Eagles and white Christian racist misogyny cannot hold.

Will we look, will we see?  Like “Families For Peaceful Tomorrows,” will we remember better?

 

Autumn arrives too early, after a mild Maine summer.

Here and there a dead maple leaf finds its way into the still ripening tomato plants, a stray littering promising the death of all green.

I harvested parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme from the garden today.  My fingers were soaked in their fragrance, a jubilant olfactory mix testifying to my garden’s opulence — an ebullient patchwork of herbs and flowers and vegetables.

What quiet joys these marigolds and petunias and eggplants offer the world.  They ask for nothing, and give freely to bees and wasps and all kinds of critters whose worlds exist in their leaves, petals, roots.

I brought my harvest up the stairs, then chopped the herbs, added a peppery olive oil, and bottled a few oil infusions.

The scent of olive oil, thyme, and sage caressed the moment, kissed it in olfactory passion.

A singular delight in an increasingly fragile world.

I surrendered myself this afternoon to parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, affirming life as change again swallows green, as change swallows a transforming planet.

 

 

A mauna is a practice of silence.

A fast of words, no utterances, no speaking.

According to Wiki:

In Hindu philosophy, Mauna (Silence), which has a voice of its own, refers to peace of mind, inner quietude, Samadhi and the Absolute Reality. The Hindu texts insist upon proper understanding of silence by experiencing it through control of speech and practice.

I read about this practice in Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth following my nervous break down — in my case, breakdown is best understood as a necessary dissolution that allowed a new understanding to emerge.

Gandhi practiced a weekly mauna. One day every week he wouldn’t speak, and anything that he needed to communicate he wrote on a piece of paper or blackboard (as I remember from the book).

I decided to do the same, though I am not certain why.  Perhaps it had to do with the work, feeling I needed silence after listening to so much during the week.  But I vaguely remember thinking that a mauna was something I could and wanted to try, without expecting anything other than silence.

Not understanding the power or efficacy of this decision, it surprises me that I chose such an odd practice — but it seemed the thing to do.  No retreat, no getaway.  Every Friday, sometimes Thursday, I turned off the phones, changed the business voicemail to say I was out, and took a day to read and meditate and practice being with not a word spoken.

Makeshift monasticism, you might call it.

It was easy, like drinking water.  I now believe the practice facilitated a psychic healing, and managed my mood in a way that the obscene surplus of medications never could.

Those days of silence healed, but they also stabilized me while living and working in the single room of a Cambridge boarding house.

I practiced the weekly mauna for a year, maybe two, until I returned to classes, and a new life chapter began.

I’m reminded of that practice these days.

The world becomes noisier, even in technology’s soundless spaces, it’s filled with voices growing louder and louder.   “Hear me!  Look at them!  Horrible!  Guilty!”

Screaming voices that distract, and we too often give our power away when joining the chorus.

In the U.S., both political sides, and those who claim no side, fear that we have lost our way, or never had one worthy, and that fear pushes deep against love.

Radical love.  Real love.  Not love wrapped in emojis, but the love emerging from dignity, worth, and practices connecting us to our awareness.

The purpose of fear is to create more fear, and fear is an adroit creature, ever happy to keep us occupied and diverted.

In Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, there’s a scene in which a Hindu man confronts Gandhi, and he tells the Mahatma that he’s going to hell because he killed a little boy by smashing the child’s head against a wall.

Gandhi, pained, asks the man, “Why?’

The Hindu answers, “They killed my son, they killed my boy.  The Muslims killed my son!”

“I know a way out of hell,” Gandhi advises, “Find a little boy, and raise him as your own.  Only be sure that he is Muslim.  And make sure that you raise as one.”  (Paraphrased.)

The scene is stunning storytelling.  Powerful. redemptive, piercing in its human and spiritual implications.

I have no idea if it’s true, though it’s consistent with the public life and ethos of Gandhi. And its historic veracity is less important than Attenborough catching this luminous wisdom and letting it shine through Kingsley’s Gandhi.

In our fractured political atmosphere, reactivity oozes from our fears and uncertainties, and this scene gives me an important reminder: be centered in your strength and dignity and love, it’s more powerful than the “facts,” because facts don’t change people’s minds as the research constantly shows.

Imagination is more important than facts in healing and creating the world.

For this reason, the Gandhi inspired advice on how to transform hell into heaven is timeless: it’s heart wisdom.

Creative, humane, coming from our brightest, most radiant self.

In these [relatively speaking] uncertain times, there’s an ancient mystical teaching getting traction again.  Ancient truth, modern teachers.  Some might call it the next evolution of the Christ Consciousness, or the awakening of awareness, or whatever name the teacher assigns to it.  Its core remains consistent.  It teaches that our presence in Love is enough to shift the world, and that holding our inner spaciousness [Kingdom of Heaven within] and connection to the source of wisdom, understanding, and enlightenment is the world’s transformative vehicle.

Not what you say, but holding a lived experience of faith in who you are and what you do.

Beyond belief into deepening awareness.

That’s why silence matters.

The more you practice it, the more you take yourself with you, and the more fear, its stories, and its distractions fall

Although a regular meditator, I’ve only practiced a full day of mauna a few times over the years.

Now may be a good time to revisit it, a day of silence as vital and transformative as political activism, or a word’s currency in the world.

At one time, Gandhi also stayed away from all newspapers and radios for over three years, because they took him away from his inner peace.

Three years.  No information. No opinions. No commentary.

Yet he led a rebellion that overthrew British rule with a force more powerful than guns, bombs, and warfare.

Another idea worth considering.

 

 

 

 

 

The Methodist church in our rural village recently voted out a young, [celibate] lesbian, political progressive with a strong commitment to service and community.

The new pastor is an older, white Evangelical male.

It took me months to show up again, after our Brené Brown quoting, Bible is not infallible, meaning inspired, hell is a modern construction, loving all and excluding none female was ousted.

(One afternoon I visited during her office hours, we enjoyed a long talk, I told her about my work, and she empathized without flinching and said, “there must be a lot of stigma you must deal with.”)

Here’s an important back story to this entry: a childhood friend is a rabid evangelical, and her conspiracy laden, 45 loving world view is dismal to say the least.

Apocalyptic, to be precise.

Years ago, she attended a church in Manhattan, where she now lives, and she mellowed and found supportive connections, until the message included upending the status of same-sex partnerships.

She left the congregation, and her spiral into extremism and conspiracies has escalated.

She’s a victim, a persecuted Christian.

So I hold her as a great teacher: the ego loves being right, it relishes victimhood, and works hard to create stories that have little to do with anything.

I don’t want to be that person.

Love binds.  Ego separates.

I don’t want to be someone who is never wrong, for whom my opinions matter more than my Presence.

This challenges my well-developed ideas of right and wrong.  After several stubborn months, I took the situation in my local church as my invitation to re-examine where I am, what I am doing, and to excavate possibilities, instead of closing doors.

Much as I have done under the regime of 45 — an invitation to dig deeper into a more authentic identity, the Self’s limitlessness, letting Presence and awareness flow through me as the change we need.

Closing doors, usually the ego and stasis.  Opening possibilities, almost always growth and insight.

So I returned to the congregation, and I was welcomed with an overflow of “oh we missed you so much,” as well as hugs and kisses.

Last week’s sermon was palatable: I made a conscious effort to lift the myopic dogmatism into metaphor.

Yesterday’s message was egregious in most ways.  I found myself simply going within and smiling as I often do when dealing with clients carrying pretty heinous imaginative depravity.

Not all clients, but a few, and I am sparing readers the details.

Banality and ugliness: evangelical sermons and aspects of phone sex work, usually two sides of the same imaginative coin: banal and bereft of intimacy’s possibilities, a rat wheel of empty mind chatter that self-satisfies.

There’s no misnomer to say that both are masturbatory, in the word’s most pejorative sense.

(I use the word lightly, because like whore, it assumes connotations that are socially conditioned.)

As I have written before, be careful about asking for wisdom, you’ll become a sex worker, at least for a short period.

For one navigates ambiguities that few are comfortable with but are necessary if one is to break our cultural myths and find a deeper well of Being.

Similarly, be guarded in asking to serve.  Sunday morning, I’m listening to a well-meaning old white man who really seems to care, but is ignorant and short-sighted, probably a 45 supporter, spew what are essentially Jesus or hell, turn or burn theologies wrapped in faux Methodist intellectual humility.

He kept telling our small congregation that he was simplifying “very complex ideas” (thanks, that’s a problem for me), and all I can think about is the morning meditation reading I did which talked about complexity being the ego’s favorite playground.

Life is a choice between fear or love, in any given moment.

That’s pretty much it.

Life is simple — “consider the lilies of the field.”

The complexities we create are usually less about our real circumstances than the beliefs given to us, and into we’ve situated ourselves and our source of identity.

I smiled and nodded.

Because my showing up isn’t about the church or this pastor.  It’s about keeping my heart and mind supple and open as I practice awareness, love, authenticity, and Presence.

Yes, it would have been nice to have a young, progressive female with a strong, sharp mind and huge heart.

But I have already learned more about myself and my path under these less than ideal pastoral conditions.  I said “no” to being right.  Don’t know where this community relationship will lead or for how long. But I did what I needed to do, because I am a heretical mystic, breaking down the seen and discovering the Beautiful unseen.

That requires letting go of ideas of right and wrong in service to Love.

What struck me vividly and intensely as I sat in the pew and shifted my focus from the words being said to my inner light was: “You take your miracles with you.”

Indeed.

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, a client I’ve known for at least 15 years wanted to talk.

For the past couple of years, he’s been very regular, much more so than in earlier years, and financially supportive.  Polite and easy to work with.

A reformed Catholic, he’s one of the best type of clients if one’s in a business that allows one autonomy, with high social prices:  he had closeted submissive fantasies, was respectful, smart, creative.  We talked politics (“I was home sick from work during the Benghazi hearings, and I knew when I watched them that Hillary was the real deal, Presidential to the core.”) and spirituality and meditation and music.

He appreciated a smart woman, and wasn’t threatened by brains.

That morning, I received an email from him at 7:28 a.m:

 

“If you are up (Friday am) and can do a short T&D any time up until 9:00 am please call. Then hoping we can do a longer call some time 11:30 -1:30. xo”

 

I also received an email asking how much time he had left on his package.

“An hour.  You have plenty of time,” I wrote back.

I called at 8:41 for sixteen minutes, or so my iPhone history tells me.  This call was part of a long tease and denial thing we’d been doing for a few months.  Fifteen minutes here, fifteen minutes there over the course of a couple of weeks.  No release allowed.  Heighten the experience.  Draw out the tension.  It’s a discipline of heightened pleasure, especially in an age devoted to instant gratification.

We talked about the intersection spirituality, sexuality, and delaying gratification as a “practice.”

He loved it, I enjoyed the control, and it was good business.

I called him again at 11:47, 11:52, then at 12:25, leaving a message with the last call.

One of the most conscientious clients I’ve ever had, this was unusual.  In fact, he could be annoying.  Because if we had a 1 p.m. appointment, he called at precisely the time scheduled.  Always.  I can never remember a time when he didn’t call on the dot, as a courtesy to me.  Never early, never late.  Not by a minute.  Part of the submission thing, squared.

I note this, because I’ve found that part of male privilege is often calling when convenient, keeping me waiting for an appointment.

Some men are too professionally important for personal courtesy, which also tells me that they don’t have control over their lives or circumstances.  I take note.

No such thing with him.  On time.  Every tine.

His absence was an aberration.   We’d been doing the tease and denial for two weeks, and he was on the edge.  Waking up nights, not sleeping as he should, feeling like an anxious seventeen year old, again.

He never wrote an email follow-up apologizing for the no-show.

He could be email needy, always with charm, but by his own admission, needy.

No follow-up to the cancelled appointment.

I thought perhaps he’d been caught by his wife — who he was entirely protective of.  He never mentioned his reasons for doing calls, never talked about her, never said her name, and he was scrupulous about protecting her and leaving no evidence trails.   I suspect that given my control over his pleasure, they weren’t physically intimate, and hadn’t been for sometime.  Often this happens for health reasons, not just libido differences.

A friend suggested that he may have”dropped dead.”

Nah.  Didn’t think it possible.

It took time for google to catch up, but I discovered his obituary yesterday.

In reality, he didn’t have “plenty of time.”   It’s possible that our morning chat was the last conversation of a man not yet even middle age, with lots of life and adventures and success ahead of him.  There were three hours between our 8:41 talk and my next call, when he didn’t pick up.  He was working from home that day, squeezing in play time while his wife was at work.  I suspect she came home from work that night, and found him dead, from whatever took him quickly and without warning.

There’s no judgement in the above.  If I’ve learned nothing else, I know the split between personal and public is breathtaking, invisible, lost in hype and mythologies about family and popular culture.  The people you least expect are often the ones who need a secret closet the most.

Unlike many for whom this split hides personal demons in sexual sublimation, this was a man who enjoyed making people feel good, who was kind and well liked, and who needed a safe space to deal with his sexual needs.

Now he’s dead.

With most of the world in existential crisis, I count everyday that 45 hasn’t played with the nuclear codes a gift.

Now this.  The gift of death.  The much-needed splash of cold water that says, “wake up.  No time for playing.”

I was a part of his life that will forever be invisible, yet, as I have learned over and over during the years, I held an important part of his imaginative and emotional life, for whatever reasons.

I honor the space that many have entrusted to me, with its complexities and ambiguities, and I respect what those ambiguities and uncertainties have given to me.

Looking through his emails this morning, I see how much our conversations  meant to him, because he cared about the people in his life.

To have given him safe pleasure, good conversation, and a spiritual perspective that helped him, for that I’m grateful.

May we be gentle and loving.  Our days are short.

 

 

 

 

Hello Friends,

On the eve of her-story, I invite you to join me in an online February meditation program being led by Sharon Salzberg.

The program is free, open to all, those with no meditation experience, and experienced mediators.

Connect to your breath, expand your awareness, and nurture your self with a community, as we go forward together.

 

Meditation is a life changing tool, requires no religious belief, and the science supporting its benefits is overwhelming.

 

The book for this program is straightforward and sans woo woo, focusing on breathing exercises and the practice of sitting and being.

You don’t have to purchase the book to participate, but it’s a worthy, modest investment.

“Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation.  A 28 Day Program” currently sells for 1.99 as a Kindle download on Amazon.

The Kindle app for your phone or computer is also free.

If you participate, I hope you’ll email me or comment.

 

I’d love to hear about your experiences.

 

Here’s the link:  Commit To Sit In February

To purchase the book:  Real Happiness, on Amazon

 

Please note: I am not affiliated with this program or Sharon Salzberg.

Above image courtesy Salzberg’s FB feed.

 

Peace as we move forward.

 

May 2017 bring you extraordinary health, limitless happiness, and relentless good fortune.

May you find community and hope where you least expect it, and comfort when you need it most.

I am grateful for all of you.

Thank you.

Peace.

I take pleasure in looking at my garden throughout the day. Its opulence is a creation of imagination and nature, a space where my vague idea about growing Eden in the backyard, and then hauling soil, planting seeds, transplanting seedlings, hauling water up and down the stairs, has become a prolific transformation of elements under sun and sky.

The garden is an accomplishment that is mine and not mine, for its abundance comes from our only provider, and best teacher, Mother Earth, and the inescapable yet ignored truth that life is interdependent. A garden’s wisdom surpasses the little anthropomorphic understandings that we strain in and against daily. Planting, caring, working, watching usher a garden’s caretaker beyond human concerns and into immanence, for the gardener.

I doubt anyone wanting change for themselves or the world can do so until they have planted a few seeds in soil, participated in life’s effortless expansion, and observed the interplay and interconnection of the beautiful and so-called repugnant elements that make life possible. Seeds, soil, water, bugs, and sun change the one who plants, because life is resilient, persistent, and necessarily loves itself: life harbors no doubts, no expectations, no cynicism.

Life is, and there is no qualifying adjective.

And where life is, there is hope. Hope is the word we use in English, but it is an inherent quality of life that defies language and requires only attention, or awareness. It’s not a feeling, an emotion, or something that exists when we move beyond despair.

Hope is, because life is.

Distinctions break down in the zen given by a garden, as life’s particulars dissolve in moments of lucid acceptance that everything changes every moment yet life unfailingly persists. For as I meditate on my backyard garden’s glory, and the indiscernible yet profuse changes that take place daily and weekly,  I know another reality waits. In a few short months everything will die, that everything may come once more to life.  Then again. And again. This is the promise, for in the intimate coupling of life and death there are no discrete beginnings and endings, only an unbound continuum.

I planted a cucumber last year that was deliciously prolific. It died during the winter. I cleaned out its grow pot this spring, and then heavily seeded the soil with zinnias. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed odd fuzzy leaves with yellow flowers sprouting underneath the zinnias, around the pot’s edges. “Those look like cucumbers,” I thought, not remembering if this pot once held the cucumber. The zinnias crowd the grow space while reaching for the sun, but my guess was confirmed yesterday, when I saw the tiniest cucumbers growing from the fuzzy leaves under the zinnias. Less than half an inch long, and thinner than a pencil, they have found their way from the soil’s depths. In the cucumber’s roots, after the plant died, life waited.  I am happy to let them do as they will, allowing them to push themselves against the zinnias and reach for the light: they remind me of life’s quiet, unstoppable, inevitable hope —  its volatile power.