Category Archives: Meditations

Late fall

I took a long walk this afternoon, out to Fort Phoenix beach in Fairhaven. The wintering waterfowl have returned to the waters around Fort Phoenix: goldeneye, mergansers, loons, Brant, scaup, Bufflehead, grebes. I found myself crossing the bridge from Fairhaven to New Bedford just after sunset.

It had been a warm day, but as soon as the sun disappeared it started to get cold. The sky was one of those clear skies that you get in late fall or winter, and in the west it glowed orange-gold. I could see low dark clouds along the sourthern horizon, probably a bank of fog out to sea. I stopped at the Dunkin Donuts on Pope’s Island for a small decaf and a plain doughnut, and I watched it get dark while I sat there desultorily reading the newspaper. Not even five o-‘clock yet, and already dark.

Except that when I went back outside, it wasn’t completely dark. The sky was still bright from the setting sun. The moon, just a few days past new, added its own brilliance to the sky. Even though I was walking along a four-lane highway in the middle of the city, it all felt just a little bit magical.

Slow food

Because tomorrow is a holiday, I worked on my sermon today. It did not go well. The sermon remains unfinished. It was a gray, gloomy day, with spatters of rain now and then, and by the time the sun went down I was feeling pretty gray and gloomy myself. Carol got home at a quarter to seven, bringing groceries. I gave up on the sermon for today, and we began cooking for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

We had been assigned to cook squash, turnips, and pumpkin pie. I cut three butternut squash in half, took out the seeds, and put them in the oven to bake for an hour and a quarter. Then I peeled some more squash for the pumpkin pie (if you don’t tell anybody about it, squash makes a better pumpkin pie than does pumpkin). Carol cut it up and steamed it. When it was soft, I ran it through the food mill and turned the resulting mush over to Carol, who did whatever magic she does to turn it into a pumpkin custard. While she was doing that, I peeled and chopped up two huge Westport turnips, the really mild variety of turnip that’s grown around here, boiled them, and put them through the food mill. By then it was time for the squash in the oven to come out and get run through the food mill, and the pumpkin pies went into the oven. While the pumpkin pies were cooking, I cleaned up the kitchen while Carol finished writing the article that’s due in a couple of days.

We both work more than full time, so usually we cook on the run, making a quick stir fry or some pasta. It’s easy to forget how satisfying it can be to cook “slow food,” something that takes longer than fifteen minutes from preparing it to eating it. I’m not feeling at all gloomy any more. Yet by the time Friday evening comes around, after I have spent the day finishing that sermon, dinner will be another quick stir fry with some buckwheat noodles. Even though some slow food would probably help restore my soul to balance.

Late fall

At the beginning of last week, the tree in front of our apartment window was still half-covered in leaves. We could sit at the dining room table and brilliant red leaves filled our view, obscuring the scaffolding some workers had erected against one wall of the Whaling Museum across the street. But the wind and the rain of the past week and a half gradually stripped leaves from the tree; we’d see small red leaves dotting the glistening road beneath our windows; sometimes a few leaves would flutter away while we watched. The workers finished the work across the street, and took the scaffolding down. A particularly strong wind came up, stripping most of the rest of the leaves away, revealing the freshly-pointed red brick wall beyond.

A few leaves still cling tenaciously to the dun-colored tree branches. But now the view from our window is a view of late fall: wide open, hiding nothing.

The two-day Sunday evening potluck

Carol and I met Roger Jones, the Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister in Sunnyvale, California, when we lived out in Bay area. He used to come to the Sunday evening potlucks at the “Villa on Manila,” which was our group house on Manila Avenue in Oakland. “Villa” residents included Michelle, UU minister who wears purple and roots for the Red Sox; Michael, grad student at the California Institute for Integral Studies who was doing work in queer theology; Carol, freelance writer specializing in ecological wastewater issues; and me. We had great potlucks in that house:– we’d invite people from our various circles of friends, and you never knew what you would wind up talking about:– Matthew Fox, Irish music, architecture, the state of liberal religion, the Red Sox, ideas for alternative worship, where to get really good Chinese dumplings in Oakland. So that’s how we met Roger:– at one of those potlucks.

Roger has a meeting in Boston this week, and it occurred to him to call us to let us know he’d be in the area. Of course we invited him to come down and stay with us, and he said he would. I picked him up on Saturday, and he just left this morning. It was like having one of those Sunday evening potlucks (except that it was just the three of us, and except that it lasted for a couple of days): long conversations into the evening, much gossip exchanged (good gossip, catching up on news of mutual friends), plenty of food eaten. With all the talking we did, no wonder I got very little writing done.

The “Villa” only lasted for a year, and then Carol and I had to move to Illinois; a year later, both Michael and Michelle had moved in with new life partners. When you live in a place like the “Villa on Manila,” you hope it will last for a long time, but it rarely does. The next best thing is to have really good house guests like Roger visit for a weekend. But soon they, too, have to leave. The Chinese poet Tu Fu wrote:

Here we part.
You go off in the distance,
And once more the forested mountains
Are empty, unfriendly….
Last night we walked
Arm in arm in the moonlight,
Singing sentimental ballads
Along the banks of the river….
(trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

The only solution to that feeling of melancholy is to convince more house guests to come and stay in our guest room. Do you hear that, Michelle? –you’re next in line to come visit.

Late fall

I drove up to Boston today to take part in the demonstration in support of same-sex marriage. The state legislature was meeting in joint session today to consider whether to put same-sex marriage to a state-wide ballot test. Personally, I don’t want same-sex marriage on the ballot. It would be one thing if the ballot question could be fairly and honestly decided, but that wouldn’t happen. Opponents of same-sex marriage from out of the state would swoop in like vultures to try to subvert our state’s decision-making process, spending huge amounts of money. Money is not democracy. When you’re trying to decide whether or not to remove a fundamental right enshrined in your state’s constitution (in this case, the right to marriage for all persons), you don’t want to say that whoever has the most money gets to decide.

So I drove up to participate in the demonstration. I knew there would be no parking in Boston. I knew that the parking lots at the Riverside and Alewife subway stations would be full. So I decided to try a few secret parking places we have discovered in Cambridge, where you can park within a ten-minute’s walk of a subway station for several hours for free. I drove around for forty-five minutes, but our secret parking places were all full today. And by that time, it was just too late — I had to be back in New Bedford in the afternoon — so I gave up.

On the way back home, I stopped in for a quick walk in the Blue Hills Reservation. The footing was bad:– everything was still wet from last night’s rain, and the wet leaves on the rocks made for slippery walking. I had to keep my eyes on the trail pretty much the whole time: the golden-brown of white oak leaves, the rusty red oak leaves, the golden beech leaves, the wet stones all blue-gray with bright green lichen. The sun came out while I was walking, and the warmth made me remove my coat and tie it around my waist. I walked up one of the lesser hills, stopped for a minute, and I could see Mount Wachusett to the west, Mount Mondanock to the northwest, and Boston Harbor to the north east, with dark clouds moving far away to the east. By the time I got back to the car, I had forgotten everything:– my frustration with politics, problems at work, worries about a family member;– all fallen away, leaving nothing behind but the bare bones of life: earth, sky, mountains, downed leaves, putting one foot in front of the other.

Boxes

We moved into this apartment in late August, 2005 — over fourteen months ago. Last night, I was looking for a potato masher. I know we have one, or at least we had one. Maybe it had gotten lost in one of our many moves over the past few years. Then I remembered that there was at least one box of dishes that we had never unpacked.

I brought it out from the closet where we had unceremoniously dumped it, and began unpacking it. I found Carols’ old “Victory Garden” mug, another mug that says “REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE,” what’s left of the old plates and bowls that my mother made me buy for my first apartment back in 1979 (Carol says they are ugly, which is true, so they got stored in an unused cabinet), half a dozen bowls and plates that came from my grandmother’s house in Staten Island (also stored in that previously unused cabinet), a quiche dish that we never use, two of Carol’s favorite soup bowls, a pretty green plate with a raised floral design that Carol had found at a yard sale years ago, another plate from a yard sale with pink roses twined around the outer edge, the rest of the large white dinner plates.

One of the large white dinner plates, right in the middle of the pile, had shattered. None of the other plates or dishes had been broken, and I am at a loss to explain how that one plate broke while the others remained intact.

I also found some glass mixing bowls deep in the box, and three plastic travel mugs that read “Ferry Beach.” I did not find the potato masher.

Autumn watch

When I sit down at our dining table, I look right out our second floor window into the red leaves on the maple tree across the street. The north side of the maple is already bare. The other trees in the courtyard across the street lost all their leaves a week ago.

The wind is backing around into the north, and as I sit watching the wind slowly strips one red leaf at a time and sends it fluttering up the street. Red leaves dot the wet stone paving blocks in the street below.

The red maple leaves look particularly brilliant, almost glowing, on this dark, grey, wet day. It’s one of the most beautiful times of year.

happy birthday abs

Cider

Last Thursday, I bought a half gallon of apple cider at the downtown farmer’s market. I made sure it had no preservatives. On Monday, I took it out of the refrigerator, and broke the seal. By this evening, it was foaming nicely, and I just tried a glass: it’s lightly carbonated, tart, and much of the sweetness is gone. It’s still a little too sweet, though, so I’ll leave it out overnight to turn a little more. It is so nicely fermented that I suspect that our kitchen has now become well colonized by yeast that have escaped from our bread-baking.

What better way to celebrate the coming of late fall than by drinking home-fermented cider?

On reading Kenko

The colder autumn weather has finally begun. While I was on spiritual retreat in Wareham early in the week, I managed to take a couple of long walks. My morning walk on Tuesday took me through an old tennis court at the retreat center, now unused except for one small corner where someone has painted a classical, concentric labyrinth. A line of milkweed stalks had managed to grow up through a crack in the pavement during the summer. By the time I walked past them, the stalks were yellowed, and the few leaves that were left were gray, curled, and dead. I find milkweed plants to be most beautiful when they have died from frost:– the curled leaves take on fantastic shapes, the gray pimpled seed pods burst open releasing the seeds with their white downy parachutes that will enable the wind to spread the seeds far afield.

In the middle of the woods — I had gotten off the path chasing some small brown woodland bird — I came across a few ferns that still had a little green. Most of the ferns in the forest had been bitten by frost, curled and brown. Yet in this one clump, presumably more sheltered, I found one frond mostly green, another frond mostly yellow with a touch of faded green, another frond brown at the top and yellow lower down, and the rest of the fronds brown and curled and dead. A month of autumn visible in one clump of ferns.

On my way to Agawam Cemtery, a couple of miles away, I passed a cranberry bog looking reddish purple in the slanting afternoon light. The berries had already been ahrvested, but the bog had a quiet beauty nonetheless.

In 1330 in the Tsurezuregusa, the Japanese writer Kenko said:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring — these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. Are poems written on such themes as “Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered” or “On being prevented from visiting the blossoms” inferior to those on “Seeing the blossoms”? People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, “This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms. There is nothing worth seeing now.” In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting….

When I got to Agawam Cemetery, I searched out the oldest gravestones. You can tell the general age of New England gravestones from their shapes, and the type of stone from which they are cut. I found twenty or thirty slate stones that clearly dated from the last half of the 18th C., mostly from the Federal era but some earlier. Most of the 18th C. stones in Agawam Cemetery are shallowly carved and covered more or less in lichen, and in most cases the lichens completely obliterate the inscription. The inscriptions half seen, half guessed at and half covered in lichen, are just as fascinating as stones where the entire inscription is visible. On one of the most beautiful stones, the inscription was no longer visible, the inscribed surface was actually flaking away; the beauty lay in its deterioration.

Walking back from the cemetery to the retreat center, I walked through suburban houses on their tight little lots. Since this is a seaside town in which the population explodes in the summer, “No Trespassing” signs appear everywhere. I passed a new house going in, a bulldozer parked beside the house, the entire lot scraped clean, showing the poor, sandy soil. The pine and oak woods that used to cover the land here were cut down for farming, grew back up again when the farms failed, and now the woods are being cut down once again for summer houses and gated communities.

More than one sign at the beginning of a road declared: “Members and Their Guests Only.” If they didn’t have those signs, the pressure from the growing population would mean the property owners would have invaders constantly traipsing through their land, past their summer house, headed for the sea. Can we say that the suburban houses, the gated communities, the signs are any less beautiful than the pine and oak woods they replace? For how long can the houses and signs last — a century or two, at most, before they fall into rack and ruin and something else replaces them. Although with global warming, what may well replace these houses is the open ocean, raging under the influence of huge coastal storms. Kenko never anticipated global warming completely changing the normal cycle of the seasons, nor did he ever anticipate that cherry blossoms might stop blooming entirely in their ancestral range.