Tag Archives: impermanence

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ smuggle in a dinosaur

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~february 23 through march 23~

 

The day after quinn’s birthday, as soon as sleepover friends went home we set out for a visit to see/meet our new pancake w. rich had met her on the day she was born, but this would be quinn’s and my first time meeting this new little person, still very brand new at only two days old! Quinn has always liked babies, but i think he has a special even softer spot in his heart for his new niece, born the day before his birthday, and he wasted no time getting her into his arms.

triceratopses and tesseracts

There is a little pisces boy i know who just turned 3 who reminds me so much of quinn. he loves drumming and dinosaurs and is very articulate… when i see him he reminds me a lot of those days. His mom posted a video from his birthday of him opening a present. he gasped, “a triceratops!” then put his little hand out to the side how quinn used to do, “i love triceratopses!!!” studied it some more, found a slot with his finger, “it’s a triceratops so you can put pennies in it!” as his mom elaborated on that, he turned and looked up at the camera with this smile, “it’s for me!”

Quinn and i both watched it over and over. and then we did an anagram of the word “triceratopses” (plural) because, well duh. and i don’t know if it was because we had just re-watched a wrinkle in time that weekend, but one of the first words we found in “triceratopses” was “tesseract.”

he had some poetry homework to catch up on from missing several days of school one week. he was venting about how long the poetry unit had been and how he felt like it was making him hate poetry instead of like it. i told him he should reclaim poetry for his own, and whenever he was assigned to write a poem, smuggle in something he likes, regardless of the assigned topic. we got off on a tangent of smuggling dinosaurs into every poem. To test this idea, he would give me a topic such as “book” and i would say, “the small boy turned to the diplodocus page of his book,” and got him doing it too. all that week i’d ask “did you get a chance to smuggle in any dinos today?”

sand and sea lions

on a wednesday afternoon i picked up quinn from school and took him to the maritime museum. there were tibetan monks visiting, and they were creating a sand mandala all week. They had started creating the mandala on tuesday so by wednesday they had gotten a portion of the work done, and would keep working outward from the center until sunday when it would be swept… it is such a cool concept to me because of the celebration of impermanence, of putting time and effort and love into something in painstaking detail knowing it will all wash away… so much to reflect on there of course. a mystery and a paradox that is central to the human condition, really. i did not know quinn would be so captivated. when we went in, i gave him a tiny bit of background but not much. but he just instinctively knew it was a calm quiet space, he sat down and folded his hands and quietly watched. a woman came over to where we were sitting and watching and showed us where we could make a small mandala of our own and use the tools and get the feel of it… quinn loved making a sand mandala. he was so into it, saying, “we need to do more of this.” and then he was completely fine with brushing it all away at the end! that was the part i was most amazed about, i think. the metal tools for the sand sounded like such a happy sound, and reminded me of frogs. bayou frogs have been vocal the past week so it is starting to feel like spring, but when i said that both quinn and another little girl who was making a mandala thought i meant the wooden musical frogs (she apparently has some at her grandma’s house and quinn has one as well). the monks were all smiling and doing their work but when they’d take a break they were all on their smartphones and ipads. one of them came over to the table the kids were working at and played a video of the dissolution ceremony of the big mandala (another time they did it) to show them the idea of the whole thing, but it was just so funny (to me- the kids were not phased) to have him prop an ipad up and hit play.

something about the calm of those monks, the happy sounds of the metal tools they were using, the beauty and color of the sand, the sun glancing off the bay in through the windows. he didn’t want to leave.

 


on our way in he had said he wanted to visit the sea lion dock while we were on the bay front, so eventually after an hour went by i suggested a walk to the sea lions and he was ready. so we walked. he held my hand the whole walk to the sea lions, up and down the bayfront and back to the car. i know he doesn’t even really think about it but i just love that he wants to hold my hand.

at the sea lion dock we watched them for a while (there were lots, all sleeping and jockeying for sleeping positions on the floating docks) and we were commenting on their behaviors. one had a strap or collar around its neck looking like it needed to be removed and it didn’t look healthy, and quinn was moderately upset by that (“someone needs to DO something about that”). our other observations were more amusing. one huge sea lion we nicknamed grandpa was situated on the corner of the dock with his face hanging over the edge. he would lift his head enough to breathe but then let his head loll into the water. you could watch him exhaling bubbles into the water as he slept! there were other snorers above water level, whose cheeks/whiskers you could watch as they would shake or flap, and we’d point them out to each other. the way sea lions assert dominance by opening their mouth at each other… sometimes it gets much more heated with barks and bites, but a lot of times it’s, “i open my mouth in your general direction,” and that settles the dispute. we had fun doing behavioral ecology observations.

social studies homework on ancient civilizations

Also this month we played a game from christmas called tiny epic quest, that we hadn’t had a chance to play yet. It is roughly a board game d and d adventure with lots of little props and pieces and spells and quests and goblins. when he was going to school that friday morning i asked him what his best parts of the week were, and he chose making the sand mandala and playing the game.

he spent some time with his birthday present called turing tumble, a fun marble-programming gizmo with an anime workbook full of challenges that build on each otherr in story format. basically a toy made precisely for quinn.

with 2/3 of 6th grade behind him, he attended his 3rd dance (glow in the dark theme).

pie!!! lots of little blueberry pies. i dropped quinn off at the dojo on pi day (march 14th) for jump tag and pi day pie fest.

a dear friend commented on quinn’s birthday post that he might like the book navigating early by clare vanderpool so i immediately requested the audio book from our library. he loved it, finished listening to it before i had gotten to the halfway point, so continued to listen again along with me as i caught up. It’s a book that takes place in maine in 1945 about 13 year old boys, friendship, mothers and sons, and brothers. There is hiking on the appalachian trail, boat building and rowing, and fly fishing. It is also a book about pi, which coincidentally made it a wonderful book to happen to be listening to on 3/14. One of the boys in the book knows pi in colors and textures and reads the digits of pi like a story. He is not only a synesthete, but has other quirks of sensory, intellectual, and emotional intensity that remind me of someone i know who also likes numbers. sock seams and shaking water out of his face; in a metaphor for his friend’s ability to be irrationally stuck on an idea, the narrator likens his brain to a lobster in a lobster trap; literal interpretations and sureness of being right; jelly bean sorting to organize his neurons in emotionally or intellectually puzzling situations. highly recommend.

executive function skills

he remembered at 7:15am on the last day of 6 week term, after completing 2 missing assignments (for days on end) and getting up to speed on how to do his upcoming math homework, that he also had an art project to finish and hand in first period that day. doh!

one day he was getting up to speed on graphing linear equations, y= b+ mx; he knew what all the variables meant and understood what recursive functions are and how to find the ordered pairs that solve this equation and how to graph ordered pairs and find the y intercept. and yet… was getting stuck on how to do it. He did not stay stuck for long. however I spent quite a bit of energy trying to convince him that graph paper would be a good thing to use for his homework this time since it is all graphing which is what graph paper was invented for. one feels one is stating the obvious sometimes. he finally came around. again, the culprit was stuckness. having used blank paper all year for math homework he was in a groove and reluctant to change, but in the end realized it’s ok to change your way and adapt to what is happening in real time. increasing flexibility one millimeter at a time!

i distinctly recall feeling thankful for spring break on the horizon!

 

~summer shorts~ circle geometry

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The circle of life encompasses all, yet sometimes seems to have a frustratingly small diameter. Walking towards the Chelsea Rose to buy some salmon, my eyes glanced at each plaque lining the bay front, those on the many benches donated in memoriam, as well as the tiles cemented into the sidewalk, defiant attempts at permanence in the face of so much that is fleeting. Many of these engraved names, these painfully abbreviated circumferences, are now familiar to me, not just from walking these blocks, but from hearing them spoken by the voices of many friends or family members i have come to know, who loved and lost the men bearing these names to the sea.

I watched the vividly coral-colored meat parting from the bones willingly and swiftly, the recently living swimmer who would nourish our bodies that night smothered in butter and fresh herbs, and I pondered the difficult geometry of mortality. A floating rectangle beneath me swayed gently, seagulls plunged past on arcs of summer breeze, snatching scraps washed from the working fishing boats docked on this bright monday. Diesel engines and fish processing plants of the town i call home laid a familiar background scent-scape i scarcely registered.

At the beach with my parents an hour earlier, i had picked up a tiny sand dollar, mostly intact, and handed it to my mom. She took a closer look before putting it into her pocket like humans since the beginning of time have known to do, as though bringing back essential minerals within the shell to sustain life ashore. As though. A circle of a shell, remnant of a living being. Its five petals radiating from the center reminded me of the vibrant five-petaled impatiens I had planted before mom’s visit, knowing she always saw their five petals as representing our five-person nuclear family. This floral impression etched in a now-vacant vessel. It crossed my mind how a sand dollar is a little bit reminiscent of the shape of a breast. Life-giving circle. Mostly intact. Flowers, shells, breasts, all fulfill their roles in nature, and yet all are so ephemeral.

Mom recalled visits to jones beach with aunt margie and uncle george, or to oyster bay. She also remembered going to rockaway beach with her mom and dad, “because you could get there by train.” “my earliest memories….” she trailed off, reliving the beaches of New York, where she was taken from the time she was no more than a year old.

Then i was the baby in the memory. “i remember standing in the ocean holding you when you were three months old and telling you, ‘this is a very special place.’ That the water felt cold on my toes but the air was clean and lovely to breathe, that the sound of the water and the birds was so beautiful. I never imagined you would end up living here and all the ocean-related things you would end up doing.”

Then nobody was a baby anymore and we were here, now, 70 and 41, farther around the circle than it seemed like we should be, but sitting side by side on a sunny, deserted beach on a monday gazing at the pacific ocean, its horizon a circle whose extent we could never hope to measure. But we have learned to trust that its diameter is  exactly the right length.

slope stabilization

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how does one establish a relationship that is built to last, what with all the ephemerality of the world? the passing of days into memory or forgetting, the hurts and slights that have the potential to erode at what originally connected two people, the quirks and morning breath and neglected leg stubble that could garner disproportionate attention when days seem mediocre or less than magical.

impermanence could be something to fear when it comes to relationships, if we start to think about divorce statistics, the real faces of broken families who have crossed our paths, our own experiences in such families, either as children, helpless to keep their parents together, or as parents who tried everything they could think to try and still fell short of finding a way to “make it work”.

i take heart in those second marriages i’ve observed that seem to have a higher happiness quotient than the overall married demographic. of course, this will only be my first marriage, but it will be rich’s second, and having had a child with my coparent functionally bumps that into the “might as well have been married” category. rich and i talk about how we’re aiming for the kind of longevity and dedication of johnny and june, while we’re speaking of second marriages that went well… this is of course in addition to all those fabulous first marriages that are going strong!

one saturday while i was working at farmer’s market, rich pruned some trees to allow more light to reach the apple orchard. some of what he cut back was wood i could use for the terraces i am building, so i spent time the following afternoon moving some of the branches into place. this pattern has played itself out numerous times now, but i realized on that particular afternoon that stabilizing the slope and minimizing erosion is a metaphor one could apply to relationships.

the metaphor has layers…. literal and figurative. i am building my terrace garden into six levels that span the backyard slope. first, i laid cardboard as a hindrance to the ivy and morning glory that will want to make a swift return if i don’t impede them. along with this weed barrier, each level has a set of stakes pounded into the ground along a contour, and a series of limbs and brush tucked in behind the stakes, horizontally layered to hold the soil inside and provide a wall of sorts. behind the branches, more branches, twigs, brush, and mulchy bits are piled to provide bulky organic matter and generally fill out the space. next, a layer of raked leaves helps the soil not trickle down into the twiggy abyss, but stay on the surface until roots can establish and help hold it more firmly; as the leaves break down, they will provide nutrients for the roots, while the branchy twigs should hold extra moisture as they break down more slowly. finally, some top soil, in which the rainbow flower bulbs and seeds will be tucked; the icing on the cake.

before the layers could even begin to be laid down, some stuff had to be pulled out by the roots. there are things in our pasts, for example, that we have no use for. these ivy invaders and morning glory stranglers must be hauled to the dump, with no other option to keep them from getting carried away and making a nuisance of themselves. there are thought patterns and habits we all have that simply must be eradicated before forward progress can be made. while ivy can keep a slope in one place after a fashion, and toxic relationship patterns can keep people cyclically involved, there are much healthier replacements for slope stabilization.

on the other hand, the layering of cardboard and brush brings to mind the way that some waste can be gleaned and turned into useful, strengthening stuff. the pounding of discarded limb stakes into the hillside allows the hillside to remain in place, slows erosion, and provides a substrate on which a garden can flourish. while some maladaptive habits and thought patterns have to go, there are also old hurts and pieces of scar tissue from the past that can actually be turned into something useful, something that feeds the beauty of the garden, that strengthens and stitches together new connections, rather than continuing to poison. the shining example for us is oregon country fair, an event that i believed was poisoned for me beyond redemption. instead, it has become a place of trust, love and some of my happiest memories. with the right person, letting a vulnerable hurt place be loved on can result in some amazing healing.

the idea of pounding in stakes, actually piercing the ground, in the interest of stabilizing the slope, is one i’ve been mulling over in the scope of my metaphor. i think it applies in the sense that relationships involve some hard work. it shouldn’t feel like hard work all the time, nor should the work ever feel impossible, in my opinion, but there is effort in showing up for another person daily, saying yes to them with your being, pulling your weight and doing your part in the household duties whether you feel like it or not, showing gratitude that your partner is doing the same. picking up their slack when they are sick, and acknowledging when they do the same for you. it’s a conscious, enthusiastic turning towards one another in words and actions. sometimes there are conversations that don’t go well the first time. coming back and doing the hard work to get through the process and come out on the other side with a better understanding of one another’s points of view, while it can be a piercing experience, undoubtedly leads to a strengthening of the relationship, an act that prevents erosion. while the ground is frozen, it may not be time to pound in stakes; being able to discern what matters, how much it matters, what needs to be dealt with right now, and what needs to be tabled until after a thaw, all come into play in various seasons. gentleness in handling these topics, sticking to the subject, and attributing the best intentions to one another consistent with the facts helps minimize erosion as well.

layering the branches, twigs and leaf litter into the terraces reminds me of what we do for each other to feed the relationship. consciously, we both ask ourselves what we can do to support each other, and to support our friendship. i make a point to know what flavors my sweetie will savor when i cook our meals, while he makes a point to stoke up the woodstove in the middle of these chilly nights for my cold bones. i might be content to eat rice and beans, and he might be content to let the house cool off at night, but we prioritize each other’s comfort. aside from the creature comforts are the less tangible emotional needs, to be heard, seen, recognized, accepted, supported. we had an especially nice conversation after family had all departed from christmas festivities, and covered a lot of topics, talking at length about each of our kids and other family members, sharing our observations and insights that we had been having throughout the festivities but hadn’t gotten a chance to share. both of us felt a sense of what a great friendship we have, to be able to range widely in conversation and complement each other’s insights. we also make a concerted effort to make each other laugh with great frequency, and as we all know laughter is like water for the soul’s garden.

all of what we are feeding each other, these layers of friendship and comfort, must be held in place in the right kind of container for the relationship to work. building these terraces creates a wall structure behind which the layers of organic matter are safe to settle in and nurture the soil and the plant life. the sides breathe, there is no lid to stifle growth, moisture is retained but does not stagnate, instead the walls provide a richly nourishing, secure foundation in which the growth can proceed. this container finds a balanced porosity that both prevents erosion and encourages individuality. the magical blend of components woven together to form this container, such as trust, trustworthiness, unconditional positive regard, attentiveness, hugs, and refusal to indulge negative self-image on the other’s part, provides such security that the growth flourishes and positive fruit can spill over to bless the surrounding family, friends and community.

embedded in the creation of these layers is the way we share the labor. our partnership has always pleasantly surprised me with how smoothly labor divides itself to the great good fortune of all involved. i stood around the other day watching him split and stack firewood, vaguely wondering if i should help, but content to watch the show, knowing he expected nothing of me in that department, and knowing i’d be serving him a hot dinner later that i wouldn’t expect him to lift a finger for. i would never in a zillion years have thought that serving another person would bring me such joy, but when he asks me if i want to fill his water glass, i find that yes i do genuinely want to. i think an attitude of gratitude is something we both intentionally promote in ourselves. i endeavor to notice the way he wields power tools and cuts the brush and branches without complaint, and he makes a point to comment on the progress i’ve made weaving the branches into the walls of the terraces. we don’t lavish praise with the intent to procure more work or results from each other; this appreciation is simply acknowledgement of what’s done, not a subliminal manipulation to extract more.

the seed for this post was planted a few months ago, and i’ve been tending this seedling ever since. this past weekend while we worked as a team to fell trees and clear brush, then add more layers of stability to our terraces, i was reminded once again of the metaphor, and feeling gratitude for the many years ahead of growing together on this stable foundation.

ephemeral ~ word for 2017

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my word for 2017 seems to be ephemeral. it’s a little bit different, as words-of-the-year go, but it keeps popping up in my mind, and going away again, only to pop up again later. most of my thoughts are… ephemeral like that. they ebb and flow. i have a running joke about my memory with my coworker, that i intend to visit lumosity.com and play brain games to improve my memory, but that i keep forgetting.

having an ephemeral memory is arguably a good thing for a writer. rebecca mcclanahan, in her book, word painting, says, “…a bad memory can be an asset to a writer. if you have a mind like a sieve, be grateful. a sieve filters, strains and selects; though much falls through the meshwork, some remains. memory is an act of meaning-making. it collects the disparate pieces of our lives and distills them. for writers, what we forget is as important as what we recall.”

(rich wants you to know he offered to help vacuum the sand out of my table for me! what a guy! always trying to vacuum me off my feet.)

how’s that for a positive spin on memory loss, a trait that is usually considered negative? you know how i like to intentionally look at life, and even myself, through a heart-shaped lens. meaning-making! actively, the memories and thoughts we choose to emphasize and reflect upon are the ones that become infused with meaning, and the act of choosing how we construct life meaning empowers us. i suspect that those active choices influence how we passively sieve through the moments as well, perhaps by training the sieve on what to retain and what to let slip through.

(snow in our town is ephemeral: here for a very short time!)

so far this year i’ve settled on “be the rainbow” as my mantra. and what better word to describe a rainbow than ephemeral? it suggests beauty that cannot be held onto. we cannot cling to it or grasp it, or in the case of a rainbow, even reach it or touch it, but at the same time, we must let it stop us in our tracks, we must absorb all we can of the beauty of the present moment, acknowledging the fleeting gift we are receiving. the same can be said of a desert flower, a childhood, the way a tidepool is arranged on a given tide.

(flat bride would like this mojave desert five-spot; taken in 2002 or so)

it’s not just that the rainbow goes away, it was that it appeared at all in the first place. “nothing gold can stay,” and it makes the gold even more precious. it’s about holding on… it’s about letting go… it’s about showing up to create the sand painting, knowing its impermanence going into it. it’s about cherishing every night time wake-up from your nine year old, knowing each one may be the last. it’s about gasping for joy at the sunrises, sunsets, and rainbows, in spite of the way they mark the inexorable march of time.

(velociraptor, april, 2012)

the wikipedia entry for ephemerality mentions brine shrimp, the meticulous culture of which i spent a season perfecting at my day job. and, and! it mentions the ephemeral organ of gestation, the placenta. dare i admit that i still have one of those lurking in my chest freezer, living in its 6th residence to date. (time to let it go, you think? maybe we’ll plant a tree for his 10th birthday, here at the dragon house… with a little freezer-burned placenta fertilizer.)

this will be a year of celebration, and although those singular rainbow celebration days will so swiftly flutter past on fragile wings, i plan to do all i can to be present for them, as well as pin bits of them to the scrapbook of life, maybe store some bits in film canisters and cassette cases, and preserve my favorite moments in the canning jars of time with my camera and words and store them on the shelves of my blog. all the while celebrating a love that is built to outlast it all.

(post-it notes are my low-tech pinterest)

i hope your 2017 is off to a wonderful start!

with rainbows and laughter, mb

 

 

~rainbow mondays~ treasure

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i am finally setting up my shell table, the one i mentioned in previous new york posts, which was an ordeal to ship out to oregon, but finally made it out here this year. the week off after christmas always allows for random nebulous projects to progress, and i finally dove in and unpacked some of the treasures that have been boxed up for the past decade, awaiting their chance to be displayed.

you’ll be surprised to know i’ve chosen a rainbow theme for the table, shown here in work-in-progress form, and also selfie form. after the tears it brought, it’s about time it is bringing me smiles again. the table itself is really a great big selfie, full of so much history, the story of my travels and adventures, laying inside a family heirloom (my great uncle was a printer, and it is an actual drawer from his printing business). i opened up the film canisters of sand i had carefully labeled from far-flung geographic locations, and emptied them into the spaces to serve as the backdrop. the purple sand in the bottom right corner is from the far east end of long island, montauk, my favorite color sand of all. yes, film canisters. back when i still used those….

red: i think hummingbirds embody “being the rainbow.” always in the magical present moment.

red: soldier lichens at the base of our redwood tree, adding new layers of texture and color to the already groovy bark.

peachy-orange-salmon: december sunset blur

orange: if you think film canisters date my dusty collection of “treasures,” try the cassette tape cases holding butterfly wings and dragonflies. a wonderful opportunity to downsize and consolidate my nature collection at long last. some, like this one, downsized to a digital image and released for good.

yellow: or silver and gold, as in, “it’s better than silver and gold,” a photo about my sweet fiance. “we got something that’ll never grow old.”

green: i love this smile bringer. rich and i had ventured outside to check on a woodpecker who had run into the window, and quinn came to check on us. the bird survived and flew off, and the boy also fluttered away to do his thing.

green: angels in the trees

blue: i remember collecting this particular dragonfly off the deck of a schooner on which i was working, where it had landed to die. those tape cases really enabled some serious nature collecting, even in conditions that should have been impossible for such ephemeral things to survive.

purple: sea urchin and bird skull. i have been wondering what it is about the delicate ephemera that has always captivated me, and made me want to defy the elements in order to preserve? i think it’s a bit like the paradox of being the rainbow – being in the moment while also documenting and reliving and sharing the moment. i think the lesson in the tiny, breakable, fleeting artifacts is the impermanence of all of this. the butterfly wings and sea urchin shells, the printing industry and cassette tapes, all pass away. i’ll never stop trying to hold onto my favorite moments and treasures, if only to keep teaching myself how to let go of it all. to continue the neil young song, “i used to have a treasure chest, it got so heavy that i had to rest, i let it slip away from me, didn’t need it anyway, so i let it slip away…” the true treasures can’t be held onto, and yet, they can’t be taken away.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

 

grapeful weekend

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i was having a rough friday afternoon. the transitions between mama’s and dada’s have been key stress points for all of us, and i want to say that this is true mostly of quinn, but i have to admit, on average the transitions are the highest stress level of my day to day life. our coparenting schedule is set up to make transitions pretty much a twice daily event, with saturday being the exception (quinn is with me all of saturday for one reason and another.) at any rate, this particular friday i arrived with the bright idea of whisking quinn off to the beach to have some fun and skip over the transition blues, and he had been obstinately opposed and i had felt major resistance to him having these feelings…

we did end up at the beach, and after tears were shed and if things weren’t totally patched up at least we were running around in the sand. quinn felt chilly in the breeze so we wandered up to the edge of the dunes and picked a spot to sit and have a snack. we turned and saw the glass orb you see above, hiding in the bushes right next to us.

in spite of all my good intentions, the afternoon started out lousy. and in spite of it being so lousy, it was immediately perked up by this magical happening. and sometimes that’s all i need, is a reminder how i’m not in control, i’m not in charge, and i need to let go. i’m grateful for those moments.

reflecting.

on market day we were excited to find organic grapes for sale. this is new for our market, and my poor grape-loving son gets denied grapes on a regular basis because i refuse to buy conventional ones. a little more magic to be grapeful for. (ha.)

then on sunday i ran smack into yet another billboard on the path declaring “you are not in control.” my friend’s chicken flock was reduced in number by one, on a day when i was caring for them. buddleia did not wake up that day, and quinn and i got to lay her to rest out in the woods, under a blanket of leaves. i love animals, but i have to tell you that i could not keep a straight face for the most part because quinn was sure her name was “buggleia”.

“good night, buggleia.”

“mama, will her spirit go into another body?”

as much as i don’t want to let him down, thinking that i have these kinds of answers… i think it’s more important to me to let him find his own answers. even if i do feel i have an inkling, for me, of what is true about spirits and bodies… it seems it’s ultimately up to him. all i know is the more i read about spirituality surrounding death, the more i know i do not know.

“there is no east or west. the sun comes up in the east, sets in the west, but this is merely an astronomical observation. knowing that you do not understand either east or west is closer to the truth. the fact is, no one knows where the sun comes from.

among the tens of thousands of scriptures, the one to be most grateful for, is the heart sutra. according to this sutra, “the lord buddha declared, ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form. matter and the spirit are one, but all is void. man is not alive, is not dead, is unborn and undying, without old age and disease, without increase and without decrease.'”

the other day while we were cutting the rice, i said to the youths who were resting against a big pile of straw, “i was thinking that when rice is planted in the spring, the seed sends out living shoots, and now, as we are reaping, it appears to die. the fact that this ritual is repeated year after year means that life continues in this field and the yearly death is itself yearly birth. you could say that the rice we are cutting now lives continuously.

human beings usually see life and death in a rather short perspective. what meaning can the birth of spring and the death of autumn have for this grass? people think that life is joy and death is sadness, but the rice seed, lying within the earth and sending out shoots in spring, its leaves and stems withering in the fall, still holds within its tiny core the full joy of life. the joy of life does not depart in death. death is no more than a momentary passing. wouldn’t you say that this rice, because it possesses the full joyousness of life, does not know the sorrow of death?

the same thing that happens to rice and barley goes on continuously within the human body. day by day  hair and nails grow, tens of thousands of cells die, tens of thousands more are born. the blood in the body a month ago is not the same blood today. when you think that your own characteristics will be propagated in the bodies of your children and grandchildren, you could say that you are dying and being reborn each day, and yet will live on for many generations after death.

if participation in this cycle can be experienced and savored each day, nothing more is necessary. but most people are not able to enjoy life as it passes and changes from day to day. they cling to life as they have already experienced it, and this habitual attachment brings fear of death. paying attention only to the past, which has already gone, or to the future, which has yet to come, they forget that they are living on the earth here and now. struggling in confusion, they watch their lives pass as in a dream…

the world itself is a unity of matter within the flow of experience, but people’s minds divide phenomena into dualities such as life and death, yin and yang, being and emptiness. the mind comes to believe in the absolute validity of what the senses perceive and then, for the first time, matter as it is turns into objects as human beings normally perceive them.

the forms of the material world, concepts of life and death, health and disease, joy and sorrow, all originate in the human mind. in the sutra, when buddha said that all is void, he was not only denying intrinsic reality to anything which is constructed by human intellect, but he was also declaring that human emotions are illusions.”

~masanobu fukuoka, one-straw revolution

nature nurtures

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unschooling: lesson plans are not needed. what is needed is flexibility, the ability to think on the fly, the ability to add just enough dry kindling to fuel but not smother, blow just the right amount of air towards the tiny sparks that with just a little coaxing will turn into sturdy cooking flames of passionate learning… regardless of whether i strew creative ideas in quinn’s path, nature seems to do plenty of her own strewing. sunday was one of those types of days.

as mentioned, our kitty displayed her carnivorous tendencies (the bell attached to her collar prevents her from mass genocide on our local bird populations, but darn if she doesn’t sneak up on a few in spite of being jingly) and left this trophy on our steps. normally, my cat actually consumes what she hunts- a feature that i appreciate in a predator. this time, however, the specimen was scooped up by my four year old, as he clutched the stray feathers in his other hand and contemplated life’s deeper questions.

seizing the moment, mama rushed inside and grabbed the sketchbook and markers- it’s what anyone would do, right? we haven’t yet become particularly organized about nature journaling, but i know an opportunity when i see one. after we talked about the species identification of the bird, which we had tackled just days before (quinn knew by the “yellow strike on its head” that this was a yellow crowned sparrow), he settled in to draw himself a sketch of the bird. (categorize under science lesson? or art lesson?)

oh wait, maybe it was a lesson in writing…. quinn had a vision in mind of creating a bird id book entry, with a box around the picture and the bird’s name. he wrote the letters as i dictated them, and drew his outline around each word and the drawing. the color choices and drawing were all his, and the only letter he asked for help with was s.

throughout the observational drawing process, quinn processed the idea of being “dead”. he wondered aloud whether he should bring the bird to the feeder and offer it some food, and if it would help it get better. he told me his plan was to keep the dead bird, and i was reminded of earlier times when he has mulled over these big topics. i mentioned that it would become compost and start to smell after a short while, because the bird’s body will go back to the earth now that its spirit has gone. he was disappointed about not keeping it, as it was very soft and he liked the feel of it. he decided that after he was done checking it out, that composting it was ok, but he wanted it in his own compost, near his own garden. i then realized that he could, if he wanted to, let the bird’s compostable parts rot away, and come back later to check out the bird’s skeleton. he thought that was an excellent plan, so we arranged a spot where it could decompose separate from the rest of our compost, and under a brick so that no raccoons will snatch it. when your dad has a full-blown skull collection that a natural history museum would be jealous of, this sort of thing is par for the course.

sure enough, the nature journal concept made an impression, because a few hours later when a ladybug landed on a nearby calendula plant, quinn declared that he would draw a picture and then take a photograph of the ladybug. his photo is above, and his drawing is below. he chose orange and gray (rather than red and black like i might draw a ladybug cartoon) which tells me he really is drawing from observation.

somehow the most important lessons in all of this, it seems to me, are not the reading, writing, and scientific method. it’s the ones about connection, love and impermanence, and just…. life that seem to pack the most nutritional punch, in a learning sense. these coincidentally are the ones that can’t be extracted from the daily life spent in our natural surroundings and dealt with in a classroom setting. grappling with “will i die someday, mama?” came later in the evening, and the following night “i won’t like it when i die” and the holding and hugging and working through the big meaty stuff of real life (and death) seems so much more real to me, than what most people will swear are the things he’ll need to make it in the “real world”.

i love being the one to be there for him while he is making sense of this stuff. and he’s picking up the 3 r’s by hook or by crook, in spite of me.