Shadows in August

The clouds slid across the hills yesterday in the form of shadows fluid and dark. I could see this dance of darkness and light changing the tree and earth surfaces in my view, yet being under the cloud shadows was a different story. The intense heat of the August sun halted and the coolness in the breeze stepped forward. Colors changed, and for a moment there were thoughts of those possible predicted thunderstorms. Fleeting, soundless and insubstantial, the clouds continued moving; tall grasses rustling in the sun. This is how we live, here in the shadow, here in the sun. We notice and we don't notice and each moment is just this.

So it is with the day lilies that open their blooms for one day. Clusters on a stalk promise blooms tomorrow or next week until the day comes when it is the last lily bud on the stalk. The bees find their way to the open blooms, the deer nibble off buds with no care for the bloom that is forever lost to sight. Lilies come and go, clouds shift, shadows come and go. Summer months that appear and beckon on the horizon from mid-winter are here and gone too.

So I am here in this moment at the computer, seeing the shadows move, watching the sun illuminate that particular clump of trees and blooming goldenrod, picking the blackberry seeds out from my back left molar. Not dead yet, no longer a child nor childbearing, seeking still a way to express the love I feel and comfort myself as a human being by sharing this moment in a blog post. Easier just to appreciate the raucous sound of the jays, and the fluttering dance of maple leaves in the sun.

Here Today, Here Now

I am puzzling over the odd illusion that I get things done, that there is an endpoint, that I do something until it is finished. There is great resistance in me over giving this idea up, yet I clearly see it as "an idea." Even in the setting of a goal there is really only the doing. I might finish a meal and wash the dishes but I am not done with eating. I may weed the garden but I am not done with gardening. I may hold headstand for a specific number of breaths but I am not done with headstand.

The lessons of the summer continue with every poppy and daylily bloom.

Living fully within the constraints of this very moment, not reaching into the future, nor grasping at the past, seems to require releasing this idea of "being done." It is not the same as leaving things unfinished, nor does it mean not accomplishing anything, but rather truly letting go of results. I think humans quite naturally construct beginnings and ends for emotional and psychological convenience and to feed the illusion of certainty that we find so comforting. It is a huge shift to loosen my grip on this way of understanding. Once I see it clearly, it seems to have pervaded everything.

Moments of being offer me great freedom from this clutching. In those moments when I can fully be in-the-being mode rather than in the doing-to-get-done mode, there is even greater happiness than from the illusory constructs. But my oh my how I do fight against this! That is where practice makes all the difference. Plodding along, moment by moment in meditation or a yoga session or in the garden, or the kitchen, or with a list, or in conversation, or contemplating my calendar, I can actively see my tendencies and practice loosening the grip.

Wild Raspberries

This deal we make to take human form does not exempt us from the cycle. Just as with the wild raspberries, some dry on the twig, some half eaten by a bird or slug, some flower and never bear fruit, some ripen and fall, some ripen and rot, some get plucked for jam, and as the canes die and the summer storms rage, there are those not yet ripe, those pink and hard, those purple and dropping, those red to perfection.

I do not care which I am, but understand these raspberries: bushes thick, brittle and thorny; berries fragrant from a good distance in the hot sun.

Just as I understand these raspberries, I find myself to be that oriole waiting in a nearby thicket for a safe moment to swoop in and feast.

Separately We Seek & Seek What Exactly?

We meditate and struggle to find awareness. In fact what is being asked or sought? Aren’t we simply asking to open the mind; making the time, taking the time, to cultivate focus in order to cultivate open mind? Perhaps not knowing anything about what that is, and that, in and of itself, doesn't matter.

I think meditation is this gift of time to watch oneself be. To experience being, to find out something about awareness and see reactive mind in action. To see our own habitual postures, attitudes, judgments. To notice and drop the frantic (and constant) grip on thinking, judging, making oneself into something. So scary, and full of judgment cycles, to drop that grip -- until it happens and the world does not collapse.

Why do it? Approach this question of cultivating awareness in order to do or gain what? For a while we imagine there is a goal or specific benefit. Do we want to target and pin down the self as someone or something? To allow for self acceptance and find peace from the constraints of judgment? And just how does that result from this gift of just sitting and observing the self, of training the mind to focus?

Perhaps the simple act of consciously sitting the self down, or walking or laying the self down, with all it's burdens and stories, is enough. This is already the success being sought. The step is the goal.

So maybe by breathing in and saying "breathing in, I am breathing in" we allow space for a subtle structure in which we discover in ourselves that we can cultivate awareness without gripping.

I am not gone, not mist either

The enormity of being present through these strange and miraculous weeks, in which both my parents died, has left me unsure of my physical shell. I feel the breath, counting on it as a reminder of what it takes to describe the line between living and not living. Its qualities have changed, and I wait for the waves of gratitude to return.

I cut the first asparagus. I weed the blueberries and untangle the mesh netting from the delicate branches budded for bloom and berry. There is celebration and grief in my every action.

It is too easy to say that I am quietly turning my attention towards the earth. More complex to draw my heart away from tending and caring for the people I love who have drifted out of this realm. My eyes soften just below the horizon, widening the view without focusing.

Memory and experience are collections of my mind, rotated at will to allow for varied levels of engagement and reaction. My heart beating has its own imperative, driving my body and leading to possibilities that calibrate a normal life.

The apple branches dip just in front of the window, buds amid leaves, blooms amid twigs. This was true last year too, and without any storytelling, the birds peck at the damp bark.

Some Words of Rabindranath Tagore

Sent (on April 29) by Ruth Waddell (my aunt) to Josh Holland (my father) in condolence for the death (on April 27)of Anabel Holland (my mother), read when received by Josh (in hospital) on May 5th by Sarah Meredith (me).

Read at his graveside by me on May 8, 2011


Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet,
Let it not be a death but completeness.
Let love melt into a memory and pain into songs.
Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.
Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.
I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.


I know that this life, missing its ripeness in love, is not altogether lost.
I know that the flowers that fade in the dawn,
the streams that strayed in the desert, are not altogether lost.
I know that whatever lags behind in this life laden with slowness is not altogether lost.
I know that my dreams that are still unfulfilled, and my melodies still unstruck,
are clinging to some lute strings of thine, and they are not altogether lost.

A Jane Hirshfield poem

from The Lives of the Heart, 1997, Harper Perennial

Late Prayer

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby --
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.