Category Archives: Meditations

Mid-autumn

Today was the last day of the downtown farmer’s market. I got there at five, and the three farmers who showed up were already packing up their trucks. But Mary Merhi stayed open long enough for me to get a fedw butternut saquash to put by, and a dozen eggs. Noelle Tripp stayed around long enough for me to get some late-season cherry tomatoes, shallots, dried tomatoes, and crabapple jelly. “What will I do without the farmer’s market?” I asked them plaintively, but they could only say, “Wait until next spring.”

I walked out to Pope’s Island today. About half of the recreational boats are gone, leaving empty slip after empty slip. Maybe a few of the bigger boats, like “Two-Can,” a converted Alaska fishing trawler, have gone south to warmer ports. Doubtless some of the smaller boats got put onto trailers and towed to their owners’ driveways. As the recreational boats disappear, the fishing boats become more of a presence.

The juncoes are back, and I saw a flock of them on Pope’s Island. You don’t see many different kidns of birds around New Bedford harbor — usually just three kinds of gulls, cormorants, pigeons, starlings, and hosue sparrows; maybe a crow passing through — so it’s a big event when the juncoes come back for winter.

The trees along our end of William Street are sheltered by the buildings on either side, and they have kept their leaves green — until the past day or two, when the uppermost leaves began to turn red and orange. Soon they will lose those leaves, and our street will take on a bare, stripped-down look that it will keep all winter.

It was sunny this morning, but the clouds moved in after lunch. People walking around the downtown were shrouded in jackets and coats this afternoon. The cold weather is on its way.

Storm

At a minister’s retreat, Narragansett, Rhode Island

By three o’clock the rain had stopped, and I even saw a spot of blue sky, just for an instant, among the scudding clouds. I put on my rain coat, tied the hood under my chin, and walked down Hazard Road towards the ocean.

I started to feel rain, but realized it wasn’t rain. The wind was blowing hard enough to kick up drops of seawater and drive them a hundred yards inland. Over a fence and across a carefully manicured lawn, I caught a glimpse of gray ocean, and white waves crashing against light gray rocks.

At the end of Hazard Road, I scrambled down among the Japanese knotweed mostly stripped of leaves, and some of the stalks broken off, by the force of the wind. I came out of the knotweed down onto the rocks, and stopped there. That was close enough. Upwind, I saw a young woman with a camera crouched in the lee of an rock outcropping. The wind drove spray into my face. I quickly turned to face downwind. Bits of sea foam blew across the rocks, and now and again sheets of spray followed. There was little regularity to the waves; they came and went and boiled over the rocks and ebbed back again and bits of them blew off and hit my face, covering my glasses with tiny droplets of saltwater.

Yesterday, four of us has clambered over these same rocks, the ocean quietly moving to and fro just below our feet. Jan, the avid sport fisherman, was talking about stripers and how they’re migrating south down the coast right now. He said, They’re probably crossing over here from Cape Cod right now, and we discussed the comings and goings of the striped bass, and how sea squirts are taking over parts of the coast, and how little we understand ocean ecology. He said of himself, I should have been an oceanographer. We stood looking out over the sea for a moment, and then he added, We only understand the tiniest bit about that — pointing to the sea. Anyone who says otherwise, he said, is in for a rude awakening. We don’t understand it at all. I nodded, and thought about ships going down in Atlantic storms.

A wave crashed over the rock where yesterday I had seen someone surfcasting. The ocean beat against the rocks where yesterday we had walked in safety. Spray and seafoam and waves broke twenty feet into the air, covering that huge rock out cropping, draining down in white rivulets. I stood just watching, and then became aware of someone behind me. Imoved so the young woman could climb down the rocks.

“Quite something,” I shouted over the wind. “It’s amazing,” she shouted, pointing behind us, “I was out there taking pictures.” “I know, I saw you,” I shouted, “you won’t catch me out there.” She said something I didn’t quite catch, something about “beautiful.” “It’s beautiful,” I shouted back, and she climbed up to Hazard Road.

I walked around some, and at last I couldn’t resist; I climbed out to where the young woman had been taking photographs. It was actually quite sheltered, and she probably had been telling me how beautiful it was, that I should try sitting there. A tiny bit of sun broke through the clouds, lighting up the verge of the water down the rocks until it lit up the brilliant white of wavetops at the little point across the cove. Another bit of sun lit up a line of mysterious white wavetops far out at sea. The wind and waves and sun kept up with no discernable pattern except the randomness of power and beauty. I thought about what Jan had said: Anyone who thinks they know anything about that ocean is setting themselves up for a rude awakening.

Fall color

On the drive down from Cambridge to New Bedford this afternoon, the traffic was heavy and slow until the Route 24 exit. I had plenty of time to look at the progress of fall color.

Leaf color is at or just past peak south of Boston. The cold snap of the past two nights means that the leaves on most trees have finally reached full color. Exceptions to peak color include the oaks, with many oaks of all species still fully green — and the swamps, where most trees have already dropped their leaves.

Overall, leaf color is not spectacular this year, with fewer brilliant reds than usual, and not much in the way of true orange. The red maples tend to have mixed red and yellow leaves this year, and yellows and muted reds predominate on the sugar maples. Nevertheless, there are some real bright spots, and on a cloudy day like today, even the more colors stand out. It’s not a breathtaking year for fall color, but still quite beautiful.

The colors become even more muted farther south. From Taunton southwards, I saw mostly yellow and even brown leaves, with many trees retaining a great deal of green. Yet there are still some remarkable spots of color — for example, the northeast corner of the intersection of I-195 and Rte. 140 has a beautiful stand of maples with yellow, bright orange and crimson red. And the most spectacular tree I saw on the drive today was in Taunton along Rte. 140, a brilliant red oak with cranberry-red leaves, so red they were almost black in places.

Buttonwood Park here in New Bedford is still pretty green. I’d guess that we’ll see peak color here in New Bedford early in this coming week.

Silence

Sitting at lunch, we wound up talking about monasteries. (Don’t ask me how, the conversation went every which way.) One of us had a book showing two monks playing cards, but in silence, not talking. The question came up, What is silence?…

Silence is not talking, not just absence of sound, you understand. There’s something powerful about not talking. Silence is the strongest sound. Someone lived in the wilderness for more than 35 years, rarely seeing or talking with another person. Better to live in Thoreau’s cabin, at least then you could walk the mile into town (as he did) and talk with your family and friends.

One of us turned to another and said, You wouldn’t like silence, you like to talk. We laughed, that was true of us all, we all like talking. (Even though I’d like to try silence, for a while, just to find out.)

Tropical

It’s pouring rain right now. Ten minutes ago it was drizzling. Ten minutes from now it might stop. The air is warm and thick and humid. One of those warm intermittent rain storms you get in New England in September, after the worst heat of the summer is done and before the cool air comes in for good. Not even a tropical storm or a hurricane, like the one pounding Cape Hatteras right now and headed our way tomorrow. Just a drenching rain storm, warm and humid.

We have a drum in our apartment with a goat-skin head on it. Over the weekend, the head was taut and smooth. Today, the head hangs loosely in the rim. You can see all the places where I didn’t stretch the head evenly when I was putting it on the rim.

With the rain, not many people at the farmer’s market today. The woman from Quansett Farm had winter squash this week, pretty deep-orange hybrid squash I’ve never seen before. She said she’s got Hubbards and Butternuts, too, but she didn’t bring them. It still seems too early to bring them out, it’s still too warm. We can ignore them, but the squash and these September rain storms are telling us: Autumn creeps closer every day.

Downtown summer evening

As I walk across the street towards the art museum, three people, two men and a woman, walk across the street in the opposite direction. I can’t quite make out what they are saying, but their voices have slurred rhythm of people who are finishing up a day of drinking.

There’s a cicada singing loudly somewhere near the old Standard Times building.

A woman inside Cafe Arpeggio walks from behind the counter carrying a bucket and a rag. There is no one else inside.

Outside “Solstice Skateboards” on William Street, four people stand around a Piaggio motor scooter. They all look to be in their early twenties. One man and one woman stand smoking and watching the other two, who are bent over the scooter pumping at the kick starter.
Vrrmbp-p-p.
Vrrmbp-p-p.
Vrrmbp-p-p.
“It should be starting by now,” says the one pumping at the kick starter.
Vrrmbp-p-p.
Vrrmbp-p-p.
As I walk past, I smell gas, and I bet to myself the engine’s flooded. All the way down William Street, I never hear the scooter’s engine actually start.

Three teenagers stand by the fountain behind the Customs House, doing nothing. Talking. They look at me furtively, and lower their voices a little.

Three people stand outside the back door to Dunkin Donuts. “Look, I can’t talk right now,” says one woman. “I’m at work, so call me back, OK?” I think I see a mop in a mop bucket inside the door, and I guess they’re getting ready to clean up. One of them, a man, is sitting on the step, smoking, relaxed.

As I walk back towards the church, across Union Street outside The Main Event there’s a man sitting on some steps. He’s talking loudly, but he’s the only one there. It’s dark, so I can’t tell if he’s talking into a cell phone, or if he’s just crazy.

Up on Maple Street, a woman walks her dog, a sedate-looking Golden Retriever. I hear crickets.

Robert Pirsig says, “The Buddha resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” That’s a little too pat, and it makes me want to respond, “Yeah, but if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Don’t waste time on either explanation. Take a walk downtown on a weeknight at ten p.m.

Hot

Hot and sticky today. Not as hot as the midwest, nor as hot as it gets around here a few miles inland. At a meeting this afternoon, we all talked about the heat. Strategies varied, from cranking up a big old air conditioner, to getting cranky. I don’t like air conditioning, and prefer to get all mean and cranky. But today was mostly cloudy, the lack of sun made it bearable — for me, anyway. And I’m reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book Arabian Sands. He is travelling with five Bedu tribesmen through the Empty Quarter of Saudia Arabia, by camel and on foot. They have no more than a pint of liquid, camel’s milk mixed with brackish water, a day. The landscape: sand dunes, hundreds of feet high, almost no vegetation. Thesiger writes: There would be no food till sunset, but bin Kabina heated what was left of the coffeee…. I lay on the sand and watched an eagle circling overhead. It was hot…. Already the sun had warmed the sand so that it burnt the soft skin round the sides of my feet. No shade. Uncertain supplies of water. Whereas in New England, summer is a chance for us to bake our bones in comfort before winter sets in again.

Past Lughnasa

I happened to pick up Henry Thoreau’s journal from 1854, and read this passage from August 7, 1854:

Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you– Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness– How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed time of character?

Something to consider for this week just past Lughnasa, when we are poised in expectation, the first fruits of the harvest beginning to pour in, but we don’t yet know how bountiful the harvest will be.

Heat

Our “Pods” moving container arrives tomorrow morning, and I was going to go to sleep early, so I could get up and take a walk before it arrived. But it’s just too hot to sleep — 10:05, and 86 degrees. I’m too cheap to put on the air conditioning, which means I’ll sleep fitfully, and my sleep will be filled with dreams. We hit 100 degrees here today — at least, that was the official high temperature today at the DuPage airport five miles from here. Heat advisories all day, dew point in the seventies. It stayed above 95 from late morning until after seven tonight. Hot, humid. At 4:30, I went out and walked down to the river. It was too hot to walk fast, and I always walk fast, so it was an unusual experience for me. Island Park, amazingly, was empty. The usual Sunday afternoon crowds on the river bike trail weren’t there — only the rare bicyclist passing through, one fisherman, and me. I stayed in the shade and wandered slowly downstream on the west side, behind the county complex along Route 31. Three big white Great Egrets, and two big Great Blue Herons, in the middle of the river desultorily stalking fish. Scores of Mallards stood on rocks in the middle of the water, fast alseep; the Wood Ducks stayed in the shade along the edges of the river. A few Spotted Sandpipers, who are gradually losing their spots as their winter feathers grow in, kept to the shady shallows on my side of the river. I sat in the same place for three quarters of an hour, not really watching the birds. At one point, for a moment or two, I understood something about the river… timelessness, not not quite that… the trees have actual personalities, like in those paintings by, not that’s not quite…. And it was gone. Not quite sure what it was, but it couldn’t have been put into words in any case.