Category Archives: Meditations

An Art

Art Buchwald, the inimitable newspaper columnist, is dying. A writer to the end, of course he writes a column about dying, which appeared in newspapers this week, on Tuesday, March 14….

Ordinarily, people don’t talk about death. Yet it’s very much a part of our lives. I’m in a hospice and seem to have a lot of time to talk about it. My friends and I discuss what death is and where we’re supposed to go after it happens.

People constantly ask me if there is an afterlife. It’s a good chance for me to philosophize. I tell them, “If I knew I would tell you.”

This does not mean that everyone knows more than I do on the subject, including priests (Christian and Hindu), rabbis and imams.

I haven’t made up my mind which one of these groups has the answer, but the nice thing about a hospice is we can talk about death openly. Most people are afraid that if they even mention it, they will bring bad karma on themselves….

He writes about dying with honesty and without sentiment. So maybe it isn’t art, but with his trademark wry humor, it’s worth reading the rest of this piece by Art. [Link]

Sunrise

Winter is when the memories seem to rise up unbidden, and winter is coming to an end. Even though I tend to stay up late, I keep getting awakened by the light of sunrise, now about 5:30 a.m. Springtime is overtaking memory.

But somehow, a memory of a sunrise slipped into consciousness just now….

One June, when we were living over by White Pond in Concord. Carol was away on one of her trips to Mexico; I was sleeping alone; I came wide awake before dawn. Say four o’clock. Couldn’t get to sleep, didn’t want to. Put the canoe on the car and drove down to the river.

Untied the canoe as the sky was just starting to turn light, paddled down river to Fairhaven Bay. I drifted into the bay as the sky started to turn from black to blue. Mist rising over the bay. I tried a few casts in the shallow, upstream end of the bay; nothing. In the downstream end of the bay, there’s a deeper hole, and there I hooked a big bass on light tackle and with barbless hooks; after maybe quarter of an hour I brought him to the boat, wet my hand, and held him while I released the hook then let him swim away to keep breeding. I turned around to see that the sun had just hit the top of the rising mist, about twenty feet above the river; an Osprey circled overhead in the sun, a far more efficient catcher of fish than a single human could ever be; a Great Blue Heron stalked smaller fish along the shore. I drifted in silence for a while. The sun crept up over the horizon: gold light in the mist; but as I paddled into the mist, it only appeared white.

The mist was gone by the time I reached the boat landing.

…a memory that doesn’t translate into words very well. A memory that dissipated as I tried to write it down. Something about a gut-level, direct knowledge of my place in the ecosystem, in the universe — but that’s putting it badly. It’s gone now.

Spring watch

The past few days, I’ve been awakened against my will at 5:30 in the morning, in spite of having stayed up late the night before, by the dawn light creeping past the window shades. The sky turns light at an ever earlier hour; the rate of change increasing day by day, up until the spring equinox a week away.

It rained this morning, briefly. I walked home for lunch: the rain had released the smell of spring from the earth, it had washed the pavement clean, I couldn’t help but inhale deeply and fill my lungs with that scent.

At sunset this evening, a walk down to the waterfront. My mind was busy with work, but slanting light pushed even that away for a minute or two: blue sky and fast-moving dark clouds and bright sun: spring sky.

Spring watch

Close to 70 degrees again today, with beautiful sun. Carol has been subletting one of the units in Cambridge Cohousing, and as we ate breakfast we could watch one of the residents disassembling the small ice skating rink in the yard below us: pulling up the stakes, knocking the side boards apart, rolling up the plastic sheet that held the water in. No more skating this season.

We walked over to the supermarket and I heard two Common Grackles, the first I have heard this year. Their harsh cries sounded musical to my ears: spring is coming, spring is here.

And I feel a faint tickle in the back of my throat, a little shortness of breath after I’d been walking for two hours to Central Square and back: tree pollen is out, and hay fever season has fairly begun.

Spring watch

The intermittent rain has been working on melting the last of the snow: snow piles left by shoveling and plowing, snow protected from the sun on the north side of buildings, and the snow left in the courtyard of the Whaling Museum across from our front windows.

Two days ago, a woman started working in that courtyard, pushing the snow up towards the main entrance of the museum. As I sat eating my lunch and drinking my tea, I couldn’t figure out what she was doing at first: why bother clearing away all that snow when it was going to melt in a few days anyway? But gradually she piled it up into a definite shape, and when I came back in the late afternoon the woman was gone, but she had left behind a sperm whale fashioned out of snow, with a black beady eye and a jaunty tail that, due to the limitations of the medium in which she worked, had to be a little too small.

This morning I sat at my desk, working my way through the Dhamma-kakka-ppavattana-sutta in preparation for this week’s sermon. I vaguely heard rain begin to patter on the roof and skylights. Barely conscious of it, I thought only that perhaps I’d get wet when I went for a walk today. I read on:

That this was the noble truth concerning sorrow, was not, O Bhikkus, among the doctrines handed down, but there arose within me the eye (to perceive it), there arose the knowledge (of its nature), there arose the understanding (of its cause), there arose the wisdom (to guide in the path of tranquility), there arose the light (to dispel darkness from it).

At last I had to get up and stretch. I wandered around, and looked out our front window to watch the rain coming down. The poor snow whale was being melted by the rain; its tail lay shattered on the ground behind it. Above it, tiny crimson flowers begin to open on the maple just across from our windows. The gray stone of street and courtyard reflect the gray sky. A woman walks by, clutching the hood of her blue coat so it will stay on her head.

Snow

The snow moved in late this morning. At a quarter past eleven, Carol looked out the window of our apartment and exclaimed, “Snow flurries!” I went out for a walk fifteen minutes later, and the snow flurries had settled into a heavy snow fall; I got to the waterfront and I could not see the town of Fairhaven across the harbor; I got halfway across the bridge and the ground was white, by the time I returned home, and hour later, there was an inch of snow on the ground.

The visibility was poor, but I could see the usual waterfowl on the water, and the usual gulls flying overhead. The ducks never seem bothered by rain or snow, only by high winds that force them to seek refuge on the lee side of the harbor and islands. The gulls don’t seem bothered by snow, rain, or high winds.

Not only did the birds remain unfazed by the snow, but we have gone far enough through winter that humans didn’t seem bothered by it either. The traffic rushed over the bridge and across Pope’s Island the same as usual; the only difference being that the tires made a different sound because of the snow that had been melted by road salt. And I passed half a dozen pedestrians, whereas we often see no pedestrians at all on our walks over to Fairhaven. It was almost as if the weather brought out more pedestrians, more people who wanted a chance to walk through the falling snow.

Winter walk

Carol and I went on our regular walk at lunch hour, over to Fairhaven and back. The wind was blowing out of the west-northwest, and two red pennants flew from the Wharfinger building: gale warning.

Walking over to Fairhaven wasn’t so bad, with the wind at our backs. Coming back, the wind was full in our faces. On the most exposed parts of the bridges, the gusts were strong enough to noticeably slow my forward progress.

The wind was strong, but bracing. You feel more alive somehow under a clear blue sky when the westerly winds of February are sweeping across land and water. By this point in the season, the cold isn’t nearly so bothersome; instead, it gets your blood moving.

Hours later, as I write this, I can still feel a little hotspot on my right cheek where the flesh is tightest across the bone; a day’s worth of that wind on my face, mixed with inattention on my part, could have brought frostbite. I wish I could have spent the whole day outdoors. It’s not a bad thing to have to pay attention.

Spring watch

Watching for spring:

A few green shoots in a warm protected garden: bulbs just starting to emerge.

Two pigeons engaging in courtship behaviors on the swing bridge across the harbor: twining their necks, bobbing, circling.

Daylight lengthens perceptibly over the course of a week: light remains until past five thirty now.

A sense of hope: in spite of everything that is going wrong in the world.

Spring watch

A warm winter like the one we’ve been having can give the illusion that spring is just around the corner. Swelling red buds on the maple trees in the courtyard across from our apartment don’t indicate that spring is coming, they indicate that the winter has been warm.

Yet it’s about this time of year when you first start hearing bird songs, the first really reliable indicator of spring. A couple of Northern Cardinals have been wintering over in some evergreens on the road to Fort Phoenix. All winter long, when I walk past them I hear them giving their call note: chip, chip, chip. But today when we were walking home from Fort Phoenix, I heard their song for the first time this year: cheer, cheer, cheer.