Waters & Hurricanes

Its been too long since I have written and I apologize and hope you will accept. I’ve strayed from my cardinal rule of writing, “butt in chair” cause I have been wandering a lot these last few weeks, though this is to explain not excuse, I’ve been feeling adrift and feeling foolish for feeling adrift… Wandering at a lake near by, visiting family in Germany and then getting in touch with my Hungarian roots in  Budapest and singing with my Hungarian choir there, home for a bit and now just back from Vermont which remains one of my most favorite places. When I feel the mountains on the horizon all is settled in my soul, I gear down and feel safe and am sure that any questions I have been gently haunted by, silly sinister insinuations that life is perhaps without meaning after all… dissipate in their magnificent gravity. (the mountains are magnificently gravitational) By rights there ought t0 be a photos of said friends, I mean mountains here but I don’t like taking pictures when I travel cause it takes me out of experiencing and just being there so instead I share some photos of a bathroom we finished up just before I left. Kinda art deco meets asian and delightful in it’s unpretentious drama if I may… it was fun to design and build and yet again I was and am blessed with such lovely kindred spirited flients, meaning clients who have become friends those these were actually friends who became clients and I can’t help but think our world would work so much more harmoniously if we only did business with friends, for the very nature of business is expansive thus so would be our families and our world would be richer for it. My friend Ben Falk who I bumped into in Vermont wrote it beautifully  on Facebook recently “Imagine putting effort into leaving behind an intergenerational legacy of sustenance, security, health. Imagine the development of true wealth – the accumulation of value across time, like soil building up. Imagine what can be passed down – story, memory, functional traditions. This is still possible. Requires a radical change in Timeframe.“

And, “It’s counterintuitive that adapting elegantly to flooding pressure entails holding water, embracing it, not shunting it away. Edible storm-water detention basins…” He writes later in relation to the trauma Vermont experienced with hurricane Irene. We forget that we’re all made of water and as Einstein or someone more wise than I said, for every action there is an equal reaction.  And my precious teacher has always said to just let things happening and not fight, never fight. Or judge but I don’t get that one, it’s elusive cause it’s so ingrained that I sometimes am well immersed in it before I can grasp I made a choice.

…Ben has such thoughtful insights into how to mitigate our losses with regards to climate change instead of covering our eyes with our very own hands rendering them useless and pretending it’s not happening cause we see no evil. With regards to water he advocates for  “holding all your soil. Slowing your water, keeping your nutrients. Infiltrating the first inch or two of a rain event.” I know totally out of context but perhaps we can enjoy it just for its poetry and perhaps it’s fitting after all to have a picture of a crapper even such a lovely one when I am contemplating mountains which shed a lot of water and rivers that are filled up with erosion and the sands we are using to keep our roads useable in winter to feed our addiction to cars so when there is a storm like Irene they are too full to contain the water and as Ben said when I bumped into him pumping gas on my way home while he was out assessing the damage from hurricane Irene on the river and looking kinda beat up, “so much suffering for nothing.” or something more eloquent and all encompassing but that was the gist I am pretty sure. And it feels good to know he is standing watch with Blazey and Buzzy and lots of other brilliant men and women with hearts and wisdom much like yourselves I am sure.

If we listen to the river the way that lovely Lao Tzu or some other wise Chinese mystic said we will know peace and truth though I totally made that up, I have known enough of these heros of old to know they say things like this and also that, a noble person breaths through their toes and of course, we can never step into the same river twice… Which saddens me and brings me back to where I began with my sinister suspicions of life being without meaning which have not haunted me since meeting my most precious teacher some 26 years ago and embarking on this sacred apprenticeship, for he is ill and if gold can rust what of us mere metals? And  more than this as my nephew Conrad, one of my favorite people in our world, said on our way home from Vermont,”Its sad when kind people have a hard time.” It’s a little bit breaking my heart to see him so fragile and ever remaining so very very noble and sublimely compassionate and kind in his being even whilst his body falls down.  And I hide from it  though here I can take my hands off my eyes and share a little of my suffering with you and let it be real for a time, even take a few breaths through my toes.  I am shored up by my friends with shared visions of us in harmony with this precious planet we are shitty guests of and reminded yet again of my dear Buzzy who likes to remind me what Hunterwasser said, “most people pray when they eat but I pray when I shit.” or something much of this sentiment and Buzzy says he tries to shit in water as infrequently as possible which I suggest we all entertain kinda like a koan for us city dwellers who might perhaps even be arrested for shitting in the street though like any great koan the harmony is deeper and more elusive than such.  With this I say bon nuit and thank you for walking with me and reading of the stories our mountains  shared with me this time. My teacher told me once long ago,” Ah lulu, you keep going to  the mountains when will you realize that they are inside you?” and I begin to understand he meant us, inside us whatever each of our mountains might be.  Please know it soon so you might teach me how. I promise I will keep climbing too.

With love and healing wishes for our waters of us each.