“under the surface

of the present

exists a sea of possibility

to reach it

a person must

wade in the muddy

rivers of change

and traverse the uncertain

without sinking.”

Who the heck wants to “traverse the uncertain?” Who has faith that they won’t sink?

I just had a brief phone conversation about a 49-day service we will do next week for a leader in the zendo, Dantika Monize, who died when I was in Israel. And, of course, there’s the absence of Henry, the Illegal Chihuahua, taken by coyotes. His absence permeates our home, especially as he was always loud and demanded attention. The house is mournfully quiet now. I pass Dantika’s house several times a week, and that house seems quiet, too.

Who wants to traverse the uncertain? Who wants to listen to a silence that reminds you of what was: joyful barking, face-to-face with a beautiful student who also wrote poetry? Do we really have to lose things before we fully grasp how vital are the little things? We’re born and live, give birth and raise children, and then we die. To live, we need food, shelter, and minimal security or protection. That’s the scaffold of our life, and I take none of it for granted.

But then there’s the color. Desires, inspirations, ideas, opinions, loves, imagination, jokes, laughter, song, religion—those are the colorful blotches we lob onto the canvas, much like artist Jackson Pollock. They’ve been needed forever. Archeologists may claim that the old Lascaux Cave paintings were tied to religion, but so is the Chartres Cathedral. Whatever functional role it played in religious ceremonies and in the town, was it not art?

Due to our heavy rains (including today), everything is in flower. I have never seen our apple tree bulge so early with so much fruit. The lilies, that are usually short-lived, seem not just to open wider than ever but also to survive longer, even through heat waves and 6-7 inches of rain that fell over just a few days. The farmstands are flush with fruit and vegetables, and my favorite summer food—corn!

It’s as if they tell me: You may have contracted after that small dog’s killing, but we haven’t. You contract; we expand. True, we may be hit by lightning in the next storm, or fall because our roots have gotten so soggy they can’t hold us up any longer. We see life and death all the time, but today, watch us show off our pink petals and green apples!

Nature is generous beyond words, and so are we. Poems, paintings, and photographs, learning a new language, riding horses, dancing to music—we, too, just add and add and add to the bare necessities, we can’t stop. And even as scientists have rational justifications for nature’s extravagances (e.g., your lily opens like that to attract bees, thus ensuring its own replication), I don’t believe them. Or rather, yes, I believe them, but do they have to do it quite this gorgeously?

The lily shown in the photo above is the well-known Stargazer Lily. More than 40 years ago I spent two months in the Berkshire Mountains. One night I walked up the hill and passed a house with a cautionary sign on the road: Blind person. I heard a sound, looked aside, and saw an elderly man in the glow of dim streetlights slowly making his way down the yard path, guided by a white stick. He stopped and looked up at the sky. It was full of stars. He gazed at them so long that finally, I moved on.

What did he see? What was he, with unseeing eyes, bearing witness to?

As I get older, life opens to more and more questions which I investigate with no expectation—no desire really—for answers. Gone is the need to resolve things, gone is the need to integrate. That will happen, or not, it doesn’t matter.

A biographer of Sr. Joan Chittister, who writes beautifully of the spiritual life, called his book: Journey from Certainty to Faith. That’s my journey, too, I thought to myself when I read the title. If not faith, then trust. And if not trust, then love. As a friend puts it: Soften the barriers to love.

My first barrier is judgmentalism. That part of my mind that weighs other people’s words and actions and finds the problem with them—too silly, too dark, too talkative, too superficial, too lazy, too eh. My strength is discernment, which then seeps over into judging people. I’m not naïve enough to think that after 76 years that will disappear, I would simply like it to soften, start yielding a little bit, let go of some of its moorings.

What do I do? Not much, just catch it in time and watch. “Do no harm,” the Buddha said. So simple, and so difficult.

And impatience. The world, with all its inhabitants and activity, is not something to get through or fend off. “Patience is respect bestowed on the present,” wrote Maria Popova, who also wrote the verse in the beginning. Have some respect for this present moment; it will unlock secrets.

Why do I feel that my time is not ending but is beginning? My friend, blogger Jon Katz, whom I hope to visit with late this month, wrote recently: “[G]etting older is not the curse of life for the damned. It’s about getting the chance for a new life.”

A small voice evokes Henry: “What if something happens to you, Senora? You could be killed by coyotes—or the equivalent—tomorrow! No, today!”

I could almost hear Aussie snort: “What does he know? He’s the Illegal Chihuahua!”

If you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed that my posts have decreased in number. I did three a week religiously for a decade. The more often you write, the more people will follow you, say blog pundits. Several weeks ago, I decided to stop listening to them.

I wish to finish the play I’m writing about what our country is going through, and there’s no time to waste. By end of Wednesday, I estimate that I’ll be done with a decent draft, got the entire story and characters, and then it needs a brutal edit, maybe even getting rid of one or two characters. If it takes too long, things grow stale; I don’t want to lose my excitement about it.

Posting twice a week rather than thrice gives me the time and space to write longer and, hopefully, deeper. Not just dive into something and disappear, but surface and then float, give myself permission to look to the sides, see what I overlooked, and do what the blind man did that night in the Berkshires: gaze at stars.