Rebecca Solnit writes … and the messages both transcend and include nature.  They enter me as mystery.

I write while staying in one of the great forests of British Columbia [Canada], a forest in which the inextricability of life from death is gorgeously evident.  Several kinds of fern – some taller than I – spring from this soil, birds move among the branches, many kinds of berries abound.  It is lavish, almost hectic with life, and with the inseparability of life and death.

Magnificent fallen trees turn back into soil as younger trees reach downward to twine around their ancestors’ trunks and upward toward the sky.  The roots growing around and gripping these decaying logs look like veins and tentacles and fingers clutching and reaching toward an anchor in the soil.

Some of the mature cedars and conifers stand on mounds that must be fully decayed trees or rather once were trees and are further along in the process of becoming soil.  Often a great tree that’s fallen over still has at its base a tall shield that is its roots still clinging to rounded stones and soil, and from this the trunk stretches across the earth.

…

I think of what a forest without death would be, imagine trees that grew endlessly and never died, never gave their nutrients back to the soil and the next generations so wholly, never fell to create openings in the canopy younger trees could reach toward.

***

I could wax poetic about what Rebecca’s words mean, but not today.  Please look at the photo and let its majesty come to you.  See the “nurse log” flowing left to right. 

Listen to the silence of the forest

It appears that everything has a beginning and an end

But maybe that’s just a rumour

Gandalf from Lord of the Rings was on to something here.  Perhaps all does turn to silver glass after the body dissolves. 

I sense the truth of multiple lifetimes.  But speaking musically, I imagine not a series of separate lives (staccato) but rather a luxurious flow that soars, dips and dives, and keeps on going (legato).  Slow … so slow.  Feels like a dance.

And then there’s the individual human being.  It looks likely that I end at the surface of my skin but I sense no.  I waft.  So do you.  We reach around corners and worlds to touch life where it grows.  A gas, not a solid.  Even beyond a liquid.

And speaking of the universe, at what point does it become “not-universe”?  None that I can imagine.  And what would be beyond the supposed finality?  Beats me.

Woh!  The universe never ends.  That rattles my brain cells.

How about the impact of a human life?  A famous writer survives her or his physical time on Earth through their words.  But perhaps all the good that each of us does during our lifetime continues on, through generation after generation.  You saying “Hi” to a stranger today may touch someone in Japan in 2053.

Finally …

(Actually not, but it’s all I can think of in the moment)

… we’re mostly vertical beings.  Conventional wisdom says I’m 1.78 metres.  Perhaps you’re 1.58.  But maybe that too is a fiction.  There’s no end at our hair or our toes.  We fly to the stars and drop down into the very centre of our home.  The sky … the heart.

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand
    things too wonderful for me to know

(Job 42:3 in the Bible)

I’m sitting in Izy Coffee, aimlessly tapping on a small rectangular screen.

I’ve just read the words of some unknown Buddhist human being:

One’s compassion should be like that felt for the suffering of a mother who has no hands and so is powerless to help her only son who has fallen into a river.  Because she cannot help him, she becomes more and more upset, and feels more and more love for her child.  The bodhisattva needs to feel such limitless compassion for all sentient beings amidst all their different sufferings.  The bodhisattva’s motivation is a deep and heartfelt wish for beings to be free from suffering.

[Bodhisattva: a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so through compassion for suffering beings]

[Nirvana: a transcendent state in which there is no suffering, desire nor sense of self]

A life of compassion rings true within me.  And how about right now, with the people before me?

1.  A muscular man, arms crossed, talking to the barista

2.  Two young women in animated conversation

3.  A middle-aged man, also talking to the barista, nodding vigorously with a little smile

4.  A woman of perhaps 60, slumped sideways on her chair, intent on her phone

There’s nothing visible of angst, of the sorrows of life.  But I wonder … Does something dark lurk beneath the animated words of the two women?  Not consciously felt in the moment.  Perhaps only drifting up to consciousness in the minutes before sleep.

I sense that every Izy customer is carrying something heavy … be it woes of health, relationship, money or just basic self-esteem.

May I have the eyes to see

What lies beneath

And to hold in my heart

The pain

Way up high … certain death if you fall.  Why not boogie?

Far less dramatically, I smiled at the audience after I made a mess of my cello piece a few weeks ago.  And it was a real smile.

Teetering on the edge of disaster … and still seeing the beauty of the moment – that sounds good to me.

Joseph Luciani wrote …

One of my favorite Zen stories tells us of a monk who, walking along a mountain path encounters a tiger.  The monk leaps off the edge and grabs hold of a vine.  The vine begins to loosen.  Frozen in the moment before his fall and death, the monk notices a strawberry growing in the cliff face.  The last words the monk speaks before his death are “What a magnificent strawberry.  I think I’ll eat it.”

Fifty-five years ago, I too was dangling on a cliff.  Death welcomed below.  No strawberries to be seen.  Also no smile in contemplating beauty.  Just a desperation to survive.

But today and tomorrow?  May I wonder at the moments of my life … both wondrous and terrifying.

It’s time to dance

The Buddha said many marvelous things, ideas that have guided me as I travel this life.

Someone (I don’t know who) said this about him:

Lord Buddha said that he prayed to lead all sentient beings to enlightenment, with himself last.  He also prayed that in the interim he would become light where there was darkness, a bridge where there was no way across a river, a home with beautiful land and meadows for the homeless, fire to warm those who suffer from cold, and waters for those who thirst.

I don’t care about enlightenment.  I want to love, to be kind, to give each person I meet a little bit of me.

I emcounter many human beings who are weighed down with darkness, dried out, a dull brown colour.  I don’t have much to say that would be helpful.  And I can’t think of magic actions that would make the “owwie” go away, especially when the pain dives deep.

I simply want to be in the presence of the hurting one, “being with” them.  Nothing extraordinary.

Simple, quiet … enough

I sat down at a table for four at Jagger’s, my favourite breakfast place.  And I proceeded to do what I’ve done a thousand times in restaurants:  If there’s something right in front of me on the table, I move it away.  I need space.

There’s a vague underthought in my mind that I’m different from other people.  I do and say things that most people don’t.  Yes, down deep we all have the same joys and sorrows but how I express myself in life feels unusual.

I’ve hardly given a thought to my “centerpiece shifting”.  Until two women sat down at the next table.  They too had dried flowers in a tiny vase, salt and pepper jars, and a wee candle.

I was looking at the back of one of the women when suddenly a hand was pushing all the objects to the left end of the table.  Pretty ordinary, you might say.  But my eyes opened wide.

Someone else does that?

Such a simple example … but it took me away to the past years of my life.  Maybe I’m more like than unlike.  We’re all members of the human family.  We bleed.  We smile.  We have a beginning and an end, with hopefully much in between.

Us

It was time to leave our beloved Airbnb home in the Ardennes.  I said goodbye to the high stone walls and rough beams, and to the dining room table – a place of fine conversations.

I knew it wouldn’t take me long to pack up.  We’d only stayed two nights.  In my room and in the bathroom, I checked the surfaces for stray Bruce objects.  I made sure my phone cord was disconnected from the outlet.  My slippers were no longer lolling around on the floor.  My bedsheets didn’t have treasures hidden within.  All fit perfectly in my backpack and suitcase.

You’re so organized, Bruce!

And we were off … two hours plus on the highway back to Gent, as Pascal educated me about the realities of driving in Belgium.

My apartment!  Hello, home.  Happiness in the going and in the returning.

Unpacking should be a breeze.  Actually a little too much of a breeze.

Where is my reddish brown sweater?

Where is my pink “Be Kind” t-shirt?

How about my blue gym shorts?

And a pair of my long red compression stockings?

Not here!

The thoroughness of my packing was a fantasy.  I hadn’t checked the drawers where I’d placed this stuff.

Oh, Bruce

Wherefore art thy mind?

And so the recent expansion of my forgetfulness continues.  Getting old, I suppose.  A little too loose in the head.

***

Now here’s the day after … and I’m smiling about my foibles, about not being alert in the packing yesterday.  So cool!

I love my objects, especially the pink t-shirt, but letting them go feels easy.  Our Airbnb hostess may mail them back to me.  (I’ll pay whatever you want!)  Or perhaps not.  Either way, all is well.

I’m so easy in the living today

May tomorrow be the same

We roamed the woods and trails yesterday … and felt the wonders of the Christmas Market in Durbuy, a town of immense beauty – both ancient and modern.

What was important was being together (all five of us) and soon to be six.

***

Silence amid the trees

Mother, daughter and future husband

Durbuy in the Belgian Ardennes

Enjoying a drink with family and friends

The Kerstmarkt … with folks way up high on the magenta balcony

Ice skating in Belgium!  Complete with sleds and beer

The old town

And let’s end with love

Here we are in the hills of eastern Belgium … Simon, Petra, Cara, Bruce and Pascal (left to right in the first photo).  We’re renting a house that used to be a barn.

The stone walls … the hand-cut posts and beams, not at all straight.  The silence.  The home.

We sit by the fire.  We talk.  We snooze.  We eat … delightfully too much.

Actually we are not only five people.  Cara is working on the sixth.  And … Jefke is her beloved doggie:

Last night it was a lovely restaurant, tucked away in a village.  I voted for pasta carbonara.  Délicieux!  Other choices included steak and croquettes.  Menu choices didn’t matter.  The we did.

On we go now, into the natural world.  It’s time for a walk

À bientôt

… we can no longer create sentences, with their nicely organized subjects, verbs and punctuation?  What emerges is the flow of poetry, rhyming or not.

… the sounds coming out of our mouths are not longer called “talking”?  Instead melodies flow and we soar into the song.

… our lips can no longer press against each other?  The mouth slowly opens and stays there in a round “o”.

… our fingers can no longer close around an object, holding it tight?  All is open to the world, inviting a tiny bird to land.

… the ground is no longer touching the soles of our feet?  We are aloft, taken by the breeze to parts unknown.

… our arms can’t stop growing, rendering shirt sizes irrelevant?  We reach out across the world, wrapping ourselves around limitless beings, and drawing them close.

… writing posts on Facebook no longer exists?  We eight billion are connected instantly in thought and love.

***

You may say that I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

(John Lennon)