I wrote this story several years ago, and now there’s an update.

Some time ago, can’t remember the year, I was asked by Mikko Ijas, a Finnish member of the Zen Peacemaker Order, to send him a small piece of fabric that once belonged to Bernie and which Mikko could incorporate into the ordination robe that he was sewing. Zen Peacemaker priests sew these robes, called a kesa, from fragments of fabric that are important to them, associated with either a person or a situation that played a significant role in their lives.

What did I send Mikko? The last piece of fabric cut out of an old, worn-out, brown samue (Japanese peasant) jacket that Bernie wore daily, along with a card of congratulations. It never arrived. Every few weeks Mikko, now also a teacher and the head of the Zen Peacemakers sangha in Finland, would ask me about it but I couldn’t track it down, it seemed to be lost. Eventually I told him to forget it and sew his robe without the fabric, which he did, and was ordained by Roshi Frank de Waele.

Six months or even a year later, lo and behold, the package arrives back at our home. It’s taped over several times and, according to the stamps on the envelope, seems to have gone everywhere around the world except Finland. I opened up the envelope. There was Bernie’s fabric and the card I’d sent. There, too, was a small, suede turquoise jewelry bag. I reached inside and found a wedding ring.

I emailed Mikko and thanked him for the proposal, only reminded him that he’s already married to a lovely, talented woman and has a young son. Mikko replied that he didn’t know what I was talking about because he’d never received the mailing.

I looked at the strange ring. Bernie and I had worn the same wedding rings, a set of three interlocked titanium rings we found at a store in Santa Barbara, CA, for $25. We were doing circle work then and figured such wedding rings were perfect. But what arrived this time was a traditional wedding ring, nothing like the work-marriage amalgam that we had worn.

My heart lightened. Is this an augury that my love life isn’t over, I wondered. That somewhere out there was another man who’d want to love me and be loved back, with whom I could build a shorter but beautiful future? I returned the ring to its small bag, put it away, and waited.

And waited.

Several years have passed since then. About a week ago, I found myself in a phone conversation with a friend about love. For the life of me I can’t remember what we said, only that at the end, after hanging up, I realized that there was no reason to wait. Love is not conditioned on our karma, on whom we meet, what situation we find ourselves in, how big is our social circle, our age, our attractiveness.

Put yourself in the path of love, I urged myself. It’s all around, not dependent on any one person, not even dependent on you. Not a bone that a dog finds after digging up the entire yard but an openness that expands and enlivens, and it’s embodied in every creature around me if I pause to pay attention and smile in recognition.

To mark that, I put on the wedding ring that had arrived in the envelope. My hand had more lines and sunspots than in Bernie’s time, but the ring was a perfect fit.

People will think you’re married, a voice warned inside, and then they’ll think you’re not available. Phooey, I said back. I’m available bigly, as Aussie’s Man likes to say. Not like before, way bigger.

This evening, I go to an in-person meeting with immigrants and Anglo activists—not an easy thing to organize nowadays, but Jimena and I are still good partners. They’ve already asked us, on Zoom, to prevent ICE from coming to the neighborhood. We can’t, we’ll tell them, but we can make some trouble. Good trouble, as John Lewis calls it.

Tomorrow early morning I’m off to Alabama for the Zen Peacemakers’ retreat bearing witness to racism. I have the feeling that this will be my last bearing witness retreat, and while I’ve studied the events that took place in Montgomery and Selma, I never walked those streets.

The blog will be silent till mid-week next week.