Category Archives: Nature

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The Final Frontier

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Today was the final day of my volunteer training.  We did lesson plans about the Moon, Mars, and spent the last 20 minutes in the SkyLab.    As I lay on my back on the floor under that dome of plastic sheeting, I remembered trips to the Adler Planetarium when I was a kid.  Oh, those comfy seats!  I sometimes fell asleep as the narrator talked softly about constellations and Greek mythology, as I’m sure did many young visitors.  Today wasn’t a just a trip down memory lane, though, because science is constantly changing.  Robots are patrolling space right now and taking pictures of stuff we’ve never seen before.  I didn’t know there was a Kuiper belt before this morning.  I didn’t know that there is now a dwarf planet that isn’t named after something in Greek mythology.  It’s called Makemake, and it’s named after the god of creation in the culture of the Canary Islands.

Last night, we watched a Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of Steve’s favorite directors.  Solaris was adopted from the novel by a Polish writer, originally written in French.  We’ve also been borrowing the Cosmos series with Carl Sagan from the library.   I feel like I’m finally homeschooling myself in astro-physics because I never took Physics in high school.  Aside from trying to wrap my brain around conceptual numbers and the nature of sub-atomic particles, I’m wondering about moral and philosophical questions about what it means to be human and what part we may play in any larger community of intelligent life forms.

And then, today, we found ourselves at an estate sale in Lake Geneva where a VERY wealthy family is selling off furniture, antiques, and toys of rather astronomical proportions.  A horse-drawn sleigh and a mounted buffalo head, for instance.  Who has these things in their garage?!

So, now I feel like I’m in the synthesis stage of learning.  Pulling these bits of information and experience together, what meaning emerges?  Who are we and what are we doing here?  We live in a world that is much more vast than our consciousness can grasp, and yet we have this ability to be aware of our conscious mind and how we choose to live with it.  The Approximate Chef sent me a video clip she called “unexpected existentialism of Stephen Colbert” where he jokes about our penchant for knowing the end of the story and being comforted by that expected “happy ending”.  What is the best we can do with consciousness?  Use it to feel happy?  Use it to be compassionate?  Use it to reach toward expanding our awareness and capability?  Use it to gather the most impressive bits of this world into a collection we defend as our own?

I suppose we each have to answer that question for ourselves.  What do you want to do with your consciousness?  I do want to use it to be happy.  I want to use it to learn how to be less neurotic, anyway.  I do want to use it to be compassionate.  I do want to expand my awareness and capability, but I often wonder how much I can learn before I’ll just be forgetting most of it anyway.  I want to use it to make a positive impact in the world, but I’m not sure what that will be.  I want to use it to touch the Divine, if I can.

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.  But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.  The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perseid meteors over a castle in Hungary

Try the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” from NASA.  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

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Awareness, Appreciation, Action

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Today was Day 2 of volunteer training.  Insects and Soil were the topics.  Howard, the second staff naturalist, began the day.  We went through some background information about the Animal kingdom and where Insects fit in, targeting the 1st grade through 3rd grade audience.  Then he sort of stepped outside of the topic to comment on why we teach this stuff.  He said that he likes to keep AAA in mind: awareness, appreciation, and action.  I understand completely that there is a dearth of awareness about the natural world in our urban youngsters, especially as technology advances and funding for enrichment education is continually cut.  They spend more and more time on the computer and less time outside, then they look under a log for the first time and are amazed to find critters living there.   Ta-dah!  First step.  Then comes appreciation.  They wonder and want to know more and are fascinated by what there is to learn.  Animals, plants, rocks, the solar system, cycles, etc., all inter-dependent and inter-active, details and marvels in abundance.  I recognize that my appreciation increases every day and that I have a voracious appetite for more.  I want to spend more and more time outdoors, more and more time learning.  This is a pretty cool place to be, but it’s not the end.  The final step is action.  What do we hope for these young people who come to learn about the natural world?  What do we hope for the next generation?  Well, I raised my hand and ventured, “Responsibility?” because that’s what I hope for myself.  I want to take all this awe and love and turn it into decisions that will make a positive impact.  This is indeed the toughest part of the trilogy to grasp and embody, and it’s where Steve and I are currently stuck.  It’s fine to recycle, buy local food, and support environmental legislation, but is that really going to make a difference?  In order to reverse trends and live sustainably, we need to make more progressive and radical life decisions, and we need to implement them in community with others.  But where do we begin?   How do we find others who are committed to that progress?

How will I respond to this awesome world?

We have a lot of reading material (as you would expect), and Steve is planning to write to some of the authors he’s following: Derrick Jensen, David Orr, David Foreman, etc.  He’s looking to start or join a forum or study group of people with similar action goals.  I know that often, when I sit and think about how to solve a problem, I end up going nowhere because I’m too much in my head.  I find it useful to just get out and do something in that direction, anything, and see if that reveals the next step.  That’s why I’m happy to be meeting naturalists and educators.  It feels like I’m tracking down a clue.  When Howard began talking about action, I got excited.  That’s it!  That’s where I want to go!  I’m hoping that more clues will open up.

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Back to School

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Today was Day 1 of my three days of training as a volunteer at the Wehr Nature Center.

I had a blast!  We had story time, play time, nature hike, and best of all – the PUPPET SHOW!  I got to be the dancing woodchuck!  And the spider.  And the deer.  Okay, I’m a three year old at heart, and so I’m really looking forward to talking to 3 year olds about a subject that I really find interesting.  It has been a while since I had daily interaction with a three year old.  My oldest child was reading before she turned 3.  I wonder what these urban pre-schoolers will be like?  I wonder how much nature they actually see on a daily basis?   What questions will they ask?  What questions would I ask if I were seeing these things for the first time?

In Zen Buddhism, there’s a concept called Shoshin, which roughly means “Beginner’s Mind”.  According to Wikipedia, “It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.”  Shunryu Suzuki says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”   I am a beginner when it comes to teaching about nature.  Here’s my wild idea of a possibility:  this generations of kids might opt to live with fewer man-made or man-influenced constructs than the previous one.  They might actually choose to halt  technology and become truly progressive, moving “down and to the left”, in order to stall the destruction of species and resources.  They might keep their experience of nature in the realm of wonder and respect and not desire to manipulate, dominate or conquer the natural world.  In my beginner’s mind, environmental education might just contain those possibilities.  I do not want to grow cynical.  I can’t help thinking of my son’s reaction to his first banana slug, though.  He might have been 6 at the time?  His grandpa pointed out the bright, yellow slug crawling on the path beneath the California redwoods and told him what it was called.  “How do you kill it?” he asked.  I cringe.  Where does that come from?  He’s not like that any more.

Here’s something interesting I found in the woods today.  Steve and I nicknamed it “the eyeball plant”.  I have no idea what it is, but it kind of makes me wonder if life forms from other planets have already traveled here and are watching us….

White balls with a black dot on one side on red stalks.  Cool, huh?  It’s wild out there.  I hope we can keep it that way.

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Blissing Out

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We were having lunch today at a Mexican restaurant, and Steve asked me,”Where are you, emotionally?  You seem like you’re not all here.”  He often asks me this because I somehow got adept at hiding my feelings, for various reasons.  I ran through the list – mad, sad, glad or afraid – but nothing jumped out at me.  I thought harder.  “I feel glad, but guilty.”  Have you ever been ashamed for being happy or content?  Did you ever think that feeling happy could not possibly be genuine?  That if you were glad, you must be missing something?  The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering.  I do think there’s truth in that, but I don’t think that means you must always feel sad.  I don’t think that if you feel happy, you must be Pollyana with her head in the sand.  Yet somehow, in this world, in this economy, when people are going back to work after Labor Day and kids are getting roused out of bed to go to school, I feel a bit guilty for having a blissful day.  Steve used to say he was amazed at my capacity to “bliss out” – this was when we were dating, and my weekend with him, away from work, away from my lonely home, would be one of indulgent relaxation.  I suppose that I am reluctant to put obvious energy into this stolen pleasure; it would be like gloating.  That’s why it’s hard for me to say what I feel.  But, dammit, I am happy!  I’m having a wonderful day.  I have a wonderful life.  It’s September, and the clarity of the air without the summer humidity dazzles me.  The sunshine is crisp, the colors are bright.  I remember feeling this way out in the prairie one day about 15 years ago and writing this poem:

In September’s Ease

Prairie grasses, butterflies,

Queen Anne’s lace, Black-eyed Susans

Cacophony of winged things

A  chipmunk scurry-stops and sings

Invisible mid-distance of a spider’s web

Or inchworm’s thread

Fur-stemmed sumac’s reddened hue

Feather-wisps in sunny blue

Summer’s heat slowed by a breeze

Reclining in September’s ease

Prostrate between the Earth and Sun

The Artist and the art made one.

Am I able to feel this joy and also be aware of the suffering that is always around?  I am aware of the impermanence of everything, but I am enjoying this moment.  I don’t want to get too attached to it, so I’m not jumping up and down, but I am smiling.  Thich Nhat Hahn writes about smiling in a lovely way; I am reminded of smiling Buddhas I’ve seen.  I hope you smiled today, too.

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It worked for the cat…

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One day, while Emily’s cat, Pinkle Purr, was living with us and I was out grocery shopping, Steve heard a crash in the attic.  He thought perhaps a stack of books had toppled over, so he went to see.  The cat was curled up at the bottom of our bed, and nothing looked amiss upstairs in the attic.  A few hours later, the cat was still there; she hadn’t moved.  Curious as to whether she’d taken food or had lost her appetite for some reason, I brought her bowl upstairs from the ground floor to see if she was hungry.  She was very interested in eating, but showed great difficulty getting up.  In fact, she wouldn’t put any weight on either of her back two legs.  She ate, but did not get up.  Steve ended up sleeping on the floor of his office that night so as not to disturb her.  I fretted about whether we should call a vet and what the cost might be.  Steve suggested that we just give her time and that we ask a vet some questions about what they might do if we did seek medical care for her.   One vet was willing to make some diagnostic guesses without seeing her.  Two others refused.  Little by little, she gained movement and returned to her former self in a week.  She did not seem to be suffering or in pain, she just slowed down and slept and healed.

sleeping at the end of our bed - the miracle cure

Now, the debate about our health care beliefs begins.  What do we do when we recognize that we don’t feel entirely well?  Do we race off to the ‘experts’ to get tests done to find out what might be wrong and then entrust those experts to doing something to fix us?  Well, that’s what I used to do.  When I had insurance.  Pinkle doesn’t have insurance.  For that matter, neither do Steve or I.  So now, I think a bit about my options.  If I go to the expert, what is s/he going to be able to tell me?  Will s/he demand tests be done first?  What information can I find out on my own?  Can I live with the situation as it is without risking further danger?  Can I trust my body to heal itself if I allow it quiet time, nourishment, and rest?

Watching Pinkle heal herself over a few days was enlightening.  Could it be that much of the time, rest and recuperative care is all we need to heal ourselves?  I liked feeling that she felt comfortable in our home, that she trusted us to give her a peaceful place to heal.  My youngest daughter visited us this weekend.  She was stressed, unhappy, and despairing when she arrived.  She was peaceful, content, and happy by the time she left.  We didn’t take her to any ‘expert’, we just provided food, quiet, supportive talk, a place to be in nature, and cuddles.

taking refuge in a wildlife refuge

I remembered a time when going to the hospital was such a frequent event that I hardly thought twice about it.  I know when it is warranted to save a life.  I’ve lived through that.  I am learning to live like a healthy person, on no medications whatever.  My daughter is, too.  It feels very good.

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Follow Your Bliss

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“Do you care what’s happening around you?  Do your senses know the changes when they come? Can you see yourself reflected in the seasons?  Do you understand the need to carry on.”  I was humming this John Denver song yesterday as I walked around the neighborhood with my camera, looking for signs of autumn.

I noticed something peculiar about some of the maple trees.  I had seen this from my bedroom window a few days before.  Black spots on the leaves, as if the rain we had the other day had pelted them with something corrosive.  I took these down by the city pool.

And this is my “treehouse” tree, the one outside my bedroom window.

I wanted an answer to what made those mysterious spots, so I took my camera with me to the Wehr Nature Center where I had volunteered to sort fliers for school groups.  I went to one of the staff naturalists, who referred me to another, Mark, who knew something about plant diseases.  Mark said that it was probably a fungal disease and mentioned one, verticillium wilt, that is deadly to trees.  He told me that I should look up a plant pathologist from UW Madison, Brian Hudelson, on the internet who diagnoses plant diseases from samples, for a fee.  With visions from my childhood of elm trees felled all up and down the street for carrying Dutch Elm disease, I went to my computer looking for this tree specialist.

I found out that Dr. Brian Hudelson is the plant pathologist on the NPR show “Garden Talk”.   His website contains instructions for taking samples and a fee chart for services from the diagnostic clinic he runs.  Since these are city trees, I wondered if he’d answer my question based on just photos.  I pulled my best Nature Center Volunteer card and wrote to him as a good citizen concerned about the health of our village trees.  He responded immediately with a pdf information page on Tar Spot fungus.  Fortunately, it’s not fatal to the tree and can be treated.  I was so relieved that I sent back an immediate “thank you”.  This was his reply:

Priscilla:

Glad to help, and please don’t worry about misspelling my name.  I really didn’t notice.  I tell everyone that I respond to pretty much anything (including expletives).  Everyone really just calls me Brian.  If you want to call me Dr. something, call me Dr. Death.  That’s been a nickname and radio handle for years (and DOES tickle the evil little boy in me).

Definitely let me know if you need information in the future.  Happy to help.

Brian (:))

I am so excited to be working with people who are passionate about what they do!  Susan called me from her orientation day at UW Madison that afternoon.  She was wondering if she should have her head examined for paying for a master’s program in linguistics by working full time.  I told her that she was finally doing something about which she had always dreamed, that she was doing exactly what Joseph Campbell (author of The Power of Myth and professor at Sarah Lawrence for years) had advised all his students to do:  Follow Your Bliss.   This is the way to true happiness.  I want to see myself, my children, everybody get to fly.  What is life for, anyway, if not to live it passionately?

This morning at breakfast, Steve read me this poem.  We both had tears in our eyes afterwards.

The Writer — Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

I am thinking of my kids; Josh and Becca will be driving back to Illinois from Oregon beginning tomorrow.  I wish them a lucky passage.  I wish all of us a flight that follows our bliss.

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“Nature’s great masterpeece…the only harmlesse great thing.” – John Donne

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Elephants may well be my icon of choice for ancient grace.  I’ve felt an affinity for them since childhood.  I slept with a plush, stuffed Babar for years.  He had a tattered felt crown that was especially soft against my cheek.  I loved him until he literally fell apart, and then I bought a stuffed “lelepani” at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel when I was 10.  My wicker laundry hamper was even shaped like an elephant.  But my favorite childhood elephant was a real one, named Bobo, who lived at the Lincoln Park zoo.  I met him while he was still a baby in the zoo nursery.  I could pet him right over the little wall of his enclosure, and I visited him frequently after my Art Institute class on Saturday mornings.  When he moved into the big elephant house, I was away at Girl Scout camp, but my mother mailed me a clipping.  I looked for Bobo online and found these photos from 1974.

                                                                        

I’ve been reading about elephants more in depth lately.  I’ve always been in awe of their intelligence and social sensibility.  The way that they communicate and support each other has been documented extensively.  They mourn their dead and protect each other.  Both female groups and bulls maintain social ties with others of their sex.  The female herds accept the leadership of a matriarch, who is grandmother, aunt, or mother of the others, and she decides when and where the herd moves on a daily and seasonal basis.  These are the warm, fuzzy facts about elephants.  In a book called Elephant Destiny: Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa by Martin Meredith, I read the painful and horrid facts about their history as a species.  Their systematic decimation from Roman times to the present is a shocking example of human brutality.  In articles in National Geographic and Smithsonian you can read about the ongoing war with poachers who trespass on national park land for the opportunity to sell tusks on the black market.  Armed with semi-automatic weapons and axes to hack the ivory from the animal’s skull, they leave behind a devastating scene of carnage that the rest of the herd internalizes, exhibiting increasing fear and mournfulness.

A sketch from Jean de Brunhoff

"Trophy" from a modern hunting website

One of my dreams is to take part in a scientific research project to study elephants and to support the construction of safe corridors for their migrations through Africa.  One organization that matches up volunteers with these projects is called Earthwatch.  They have an elephant excursion slated for 2012 in which I’d love to participate, but I’m not sure I’ll be up to the “strenuous” activity level.  Basically, you have to be able to sprint and climb a tree in case of animal attack in order not to be a liability.  And you have to walk 10 miles a day over varied terrain.  (That part would not be a problem.)   There are other projects that will allow me to see elephants that have a “moderate” activity level, though.  It’s definitely on my “bucket list’.

So I have accumulated a collection of elephantalia.  Bookends, figurines, jewelry boxes, etc. adorn the bookshelf in my bedroom.  One day, I’d like to have photographs that I took myself to add to that collection.

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Cottage Industry

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The first time I set foot in Steve’s house, I stopped dead in my tracks on his enclosed porch and inhaled.  It smelled like my grandmother’s beach cottage.  I commented on that, and he said, “Oh, it’s probably all the old books.”   I had never seen so many books in one person’s house.  I thought my parents had a lot of books, but they weren’t running a book-selling business.  I have learned a lot about having a “cottage industry” in the last few months.  I like the idea of finding appreciative homes for books that someone else might have thrown onto a rubbish heap.  I like the idea of having a small, personal business that enables us to make just enough money to pay the rent, but doesn’t require us to work set hours or sign a company policy based on someone else’s values.  And I like the books.  I like flipping through each one before we mail it off.  There is so much to learn about, so much I’d like to read.  Also, I like pictures.  I like imagining the people and places the books will be going to.  This morning, there was a book going off to Switzerland, and a book about Frank Lloyd Wright going off to Japan (neat pictures in that one!).   I like my friends at the post office.  We are on a first name basis and chat about camping and sports teams and what to do on the weekend here.  I like discovering a treasure of stuff in the stacks that we plan to keep.  I feel like we are amazingly rich in what we have to explore, just between these walls.

The dining room

The business is not predictable, and it is rather a mystery why the online orders come through as they do.  The hosting website manages the postings, so we have little control of how visible our books are over the other vendors’.  So, we’ll have a dry spell and ponder the various factors.  Is it the economy or is it the website?  Not worth worrying about.  The more Steve works on posting new titles, the more orders we get, even from stuff that’s been online for years.  So, he just puts in the hours and the orders come in.  Summer is a good time for estate sales and book sales.  We have a lot of fun roaming neighborhoods for books.  We did find a real beach cottage estate sale north of Milwaukee.  This lady had some interesting antiques.  Steve goes directly to the books, but I poke around for other stuff, just for fun.  Old electric hair dryers and curling irons that were heated directly in the fire, for instance.  Hats, sheet music, Victrolas, jewelry, vintage clothing, Reader’s Digest from 1958.  I bought a pair of binoculars on Saturday, just like my dad’s.  In a book about Opera, I found a season ticket brochure for the Lyric Opera in Chicago from 1940.  Seats were only $8!   I like old wooden tools and kitchen gadgets made to last a lifetime, not these flimsy, plastic, planned-obsolescence items we have so many of today.

Home economy is a term that has gone out of fashion.  We don’t have Home Ec in schools now, we have Adult Living.  It seems like we keep getting further away from the hands-on way of life – using electronic gadgets that can’t be fixed at home instead of simple machines, for instance.  Steve hands me anything that breaks around here.  He knows I like trying to figure out how to make it work.  There’ s a simple satisfaction in that.  Ask my mom about being one of the “last Luddites”.   The value of being self-reliant is seen as old-fashioned, but I really worry about what happens when we are too reliant on mega-corporations who make large-scale decisions.  Local and specific values get plowed under.  Balance and scale and harmony with nature get ignored.  It gets to a point where we don’t think we can change…that WalMart is going up whether we want it or not, right over 4 acres of our outlying marshlands, because we need cheap goods readily available to the people in those new subdivisions, and we need those jobs.  Do we?  Are you sure there isn’t another way?

Recommended reading: anything by Wendell Berry or Harland Hubbard.

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Uncontained and immortal beauty

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Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay on Nature in 1836:

“Nature never wears a mean appearance.  Neither does the wisest man extort all her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.  Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit.  The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected all the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood…The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood….Standing on the bare ground, –my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball.  I am nothing.  I see all.  The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God…I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”

 

Nature is an ancient embodiment of grace.  The elegance of form, motion, manner, action and moral strength inherent in the natural world can be revealed and described in detail by science, but not in totality.  The mystery of this grace remains.  There is a random, chaotic element that defies analysis and inspires awe.  The morality of what is defies dogmatism.  Death is intrinsic to the grace of life, not an aberration or problem to be solved.  I have not always believed this, although I have always loved Nature.

During my child-rearing years, I frequently walked to a prairie preserve in my neighborhood for sanctuary and solace.  I began to have a very special relationship with “my prairie”.  My entire demeanor would change the minute I set foot inside the gateway.  I would feel myself relax, physically and emotionally, and whatever was simmering at the core of my being would bubble up and spill over.  Often, I would cry copiously, hoping I wouldn’t meet anyone on the paths.  Just as often, I would be exuberantly lifted by sunshine, color and fragrance and dance my way over the grass.   After settling in to the quiet, I would observe the wisdom of the place and learn something to take back with me into the suburban world.   For many years, I would visit the prairie in the middle of the day while the kids were in school and feel rather guilty and unproductive to be enjoying the grace of the place instead of “working”.  It occurred to me one day that someone should at least be doing the job of enjoying it.  It seemed a huge pity that the dazzling elegance of the sky, the land, the creatures and all that thrummed and buzzed and swished should go unnoticed.  I felt that their Creator should be thanked, and in those days, I believed that was the God of the Bible, the same Father God who rescued and redeemed us from Death.

Death is a biggie, in my life and in my culture.  When I was 16, I was in a car accident with my 20 year old sister where she died beside me.  When I was 29, I was a prayer warrior who fought off Death when my infant daughter had spinal meningitis.  When I was 45, I woke one Saturday morning and found my husband cold and lifeless beside me.  Death was The Bad Guy who sneaked into the Garden and stole our birthright.  God was The Good Guy who caught him and gave it back.   Illness is just Death sneaking around, and I have been a paranoid hypochondriac at times because of that way of thinking.  But that isn’t the only way of thinking, I found out.

Once, when I entered my prairie, I was shocked to go around the bend in the path and see the ground burnt jet black.  The vibrant green shoots of grass across the path from that section of land made a startling comparison.  This controlled burn was part of the park management program for spring.  Dry stubble and thick hanks of grass had been burned down to decaying ash in order for the new life to grow up.  I wasn’t sure what to make of the change in my sanctuary.  I felt that something bad had infiltrated the Garden.  I took it rather personally, and although I understood the scientific reasons for it, my spirit was troubled.  I wanted to know the wisdom of this observation.  I found it explained quite elegantly later, by Thich Nhat Hahn in his book No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life.  He gives many examples of how life is in a state of continuation such that there is no beginning point or end point.  We have no birth day or death day.  Paper is the forest, the logger, the clouds, the sunshine, the ash when it is burned, the heat that we feel after the smoke blows away, the soil that is enriched and the tree that grows in the soil.  “If you are a scientist and have very sophisticated instruments, you can measure the effects of that heat even in distant planets and stars.  They then become a manifestation, a continuation of the little sheet of paper.  We cannot know how far the sheet of paper will go.”

Continuation is the ancient grace of Nature.  Ancient and immortal and always new.

Yesterday was a wonderful continuation day for me.  My daughter Emily and Steve and I walked in Chicago’s oldest cemetery and found cicadas everywhere – their sound, their carapaces, their bodies.  Death is not a Bad Guy, just a concept.  I am comforted by this wisdom.

Me, when I started this blog.