Today in the garden. I was unable to tear myself away from my safe place this morning to brunch with friends. I hope they can understand and forgive me some need that I don’t fully understand myself. But I made the most of a quiet day at home — I almost wrote ‘alone’ except that I’m not alone here. Just look. Surrounded by Life.
Same tree above and below, different times of day, different angles. We spent a good hour yesterday morning wandering the woods with our infrared phone camera. I’m grateful for technology and terrified of it at the same time. I heard today from a reliable source that bots sicced on Reddit users were six times more persuasive in changing humans’ minds as other humans. This is how it is right now. So I turn back to what’s real. The forest. The garden.
Meet the Trees, the second in a series of Meditations with Nature, will be a half-day retreat here on Saturday, June 13 from 9 am through noon. Some meditation experience is helpful but not necessary. If you’re in the vicinity and the weather holds, come enjoy the garden and the forest with me. Registration closes June 9.
After that thought-provoking soul-nourishing walk communing with ancient junipers in the morning, I baked margarita cupcakes in the afternoon. In the latest installment of the Birthday Cake Challenge, I took these treats to some margarita-loving friends, an amazing couple who share the same birthday. We sat on their deck enjoying gin-and-tonics looking out across the West Elk Mountains. I didn’t tell them what flavor the cupcakes were, intending for them to guess. I was tickled pink when I saw him take the tiny lime slice and squeeze it over the frosting as though it were a cocktail, before he even knew it was one!
There was tequila in the buttercream frosting as well as lime juice, and a lot of lime zest and juice in the cakes, which I brushed with tequila as soon as they came out of the oven. Highly recommend. And lots of leftover frosting! What to put it on next?
As always, I am ever so grateful for morning coffee with a sweet treat. It’s especially sweet these days, on the patio with the fragrant jasmine on one side, and busy hummingbirds on the other, the mountain vista beyond the blooming garden. Just this past couple of days all the June flowers are starting to open. In the woods, the claret cups have been blooming for weeks. They are so early I almost missed them. Grateful I took a couple of long walks last week, before plantar fasciitis curtailed our strolls.
Last week I noticed the robin did not fly when I opened the door. Then I noticed there was no robin at the nest all day. I waited a couple of days then used a stepladder to hold my camera over the nest. I feel very sad that they abandoned their eggs. I’ve seen one of them back at the bird bath a few times, and hope they have a spare nest going somewhere else.
“When we see someone suffering, whether they are physically injured or suffering a significant loss, we instantly have compassion regardless of how we felt about them just moments before. Imagine how you would treat others if you knew, not only that they may not be here tomorrow, but also of the suffering and hardship they have had to endure in their lifetime.”
MLP Daily Guidance May 26, 2026
I wondered why this butterfly was motionless as I took its picture. I moved it with a light touch to get a better angle, and didn’t realize what was happening til I saw the picture. I couldn’t save this butterfly, nor would I have even tried: The spider deserves her hard-won meal. I did feel a rush of compassion for her.
Wren stalking a bumblebee
I saved a frog from a snake today. Not something I’d normally interfere with but I couldn’t not this time. I’d been sitting by the pond enjoying a glass of cool tap water and reading on Kindle while Wren wandered around sniffing and looking for frogs. A movement caught both our eyes and I asked her to leave it. We watched a scene under a slab rock on the rim that neither of us — well, I can’t speak for her, with her keen senses she probably knew what was going on long before I did — but I couldn’t quite see well enough through the screen of curly rush and in the dark under the rock to be sure what was happening. The motion had been sudden, and I heard a frog. As I watched, I could see the frog move incrementally toward the light, and it was calling. But not a regular call, it sounded urgent.
Not the drama scene of today, but an update on the eggs. They’ve all released their tiny tadpoles but I’m not seeing them in the water like I did last year.
I wondered if a snake had it, but I could see most of the frog. It hopped forward a couple of times incrementally. Then it seemed to retreat. Then it hopped forward and flopped over onto its back, legs splayed. Maybe its foot was caught between rocks? I stepped around the pond and reached down to take gentle hold of the frog; only then could I see the snake holding onto the frog’s foot. It was a smallish garter snake; the frog was good-sized. Yes, the snake deserves its meal also, but given the size discrepancy and starting with the foot, it would have been a long, slow, agonizing death for the frog. Holding her in my right hand, I touched a left fingertip to the back of the snake’s jaw and pried ever so gently. In a second it let go and the frog flipped out of my hand and flew two feet to plop into the water. In that moment I felt more alive than I have in weeks.
I invested in some food-producing shrubs last week, including two honeyberries, a Saskatoon serviceberry, and a Chicago hardy fig. I misheard on the radio that Lance was growing one outdoors that survived that hard freeze last month, so I planted mine in a raised bed yesterday morning, carefully relocating the tulip bulbs I displaced. Then I called into the show last night realized my mistake: around here people grow them in greenhouses. Oh well! I did read that they should be able to survive winter in this zone by wrapping in blankets after they shed their leaves in the fall. Maybe I’ll decide to dig her up and pot her to bring in. We’ll know more later! I snipped off the four little figs she had so she could send all her energy to growing roots.
I’m grateful for the feral chamomile blooming among the flagstones, and its light scent in the evening.
In further bird news, an American Robin is nesting above my back porch light. She flies fast each time I come out the door so I’m learning to open it more mindfully. After I sat awhile at the patio table I was able to catch her on the nest. I love the new life incubating amid the reminder of impermanence.
I’m grateful for fresh rhubarb from Neighbor Fred, and organic grocery strawberries, and Cousin Mel’s suggestion that I make strawberry-rhubarb jam, her favorite. I set to work this morning on another Birthday Cake Challenge, a Victoria Sandwich Cake. First, I made the jam…
Then I baked the sponges, which couldn’t have been easier. It took longer to find a recipe online for this classic British tea cake that didn’t use self-rising flour, which all sources say is impossible to correct for altitude. But I finally found one essentially the same as Paul Hollywood’s but with all-purpose flour instead, and I adjusted the baking powder for altitude. The sponge wasn’t perfect, but next time I’ll adjust flour and liquid to lighten the crumb.
The classic cake is filled with raspberry jam, but why do it the easy way? Strawberry-rhubarb was delicious between the golden sponges made with duck eggs and caster sugar. More caster sugar is sprinkled on top for a delicate crunch.
The birthday girl and friend showed up right on time as one rain squall departed and a wan sun peeked through the clouds. We enjoyed tea and cake at the pond, and a long overdue visit for the three of us.
I’m grateful to have shared this sweet, long-overdue visit with two vibrant women. We’ve talked about it for a couple of years and it finally came together at the perfect time. While they strolled the garden as I made tea inside, they spotted a Lazuli Bunting. I’ve only seen a couple in the yard in all my years, but I saw one a few days ago and it was also caught by Bird Buddy’s camera, which I was grateful to discover since the distant image on my phone was dismal.
Okay, this image isn’t great either, but I blame that on Apple Photos’ inability to retrieve a still shot from a video. At least it conveys the gorgeous colors of this delicate migratory songbird.
An aerial photo of the August 10, 2025, landslide and the aftermath from the tsunami it triggered in Tracy Arm taken during a U.S. Geological Survey field reconnaissance overflight on August 13, 2025. John Lyons/U.S. Geological Survey; lifted from Scientific American daily newsletter
I am hurting all the time. Sometimes it spills over but mostly I keep it inside. I’m learning to hold it with tenderness and compassion instead of resist it with criticism, judgement, and subjugation; to shine a gentle light on it and invite the possibility of healing. It’s possible that if I had compartmentalized this hurt (if I even could have) half my life ago and made different choices, I would have become a ‘success’ of the kind the Colonel expected, my mother hoped for, society defines, with some great career as a writer or a scientist or even a world-renowned mindfulness teacher. But there are times I think that if I hadn’t landed here, in this little patch of forest where I found the leading edge of peace, that I might have killed myself by now.
The face of the same glacier in July, 2001, shot from a Zodiac tour on a Nature Conservancy Alaska coast cruise with my mother.
Don’t worry. I never would have back then, if only for the suffering it would have caused others. And I never would now (except possibly in a case of M.A.I.D.) because I’m too curious to see what happens next. And even when I touch the depths of despair and self-loathing I’m capable of, I remain grateful for this life, for waking up alive each day in this world whose natural beauty exceeds its human depravity. And there are enough people around me who embody the basic goodness the Shambala tradition posits, and I know that some of them love me. But I do understand now why people end their lives, in a way that I never did in younger years. There but for the grace of God… I have no more judgement; I have compassion.
A large calving we were privileged to witness: the brighter section in the center is the ice breaking away, and the dark wedge in front of it is the beginning of the wave it created.
This isn’t a treatise on suicide though maybe there will be one someday; this is simply an acknowledgment that I empathize with what it is to hurt deeply inside where no one else ever sees it. And I feel how difficult it is to show it to anyone, to clamber out of the shame spiral, brave the inner critic, and admit to profound, seemingly inexplicable, existential suffering. There’s an unfortunate and unrealistic stigma to vulnerability. For the few hundred people who read this who don’t know me, it’s no risk to share my struggle. But considering the students and friends I live among daily who may read this, and the human propensity to judge, I’m sticking my neck out to reveal that sometimes I go to such dark places inside.
I’m grateful to see the apricot tree struggling back to green life. These tender leaves suffered setback from the hard freeze the other night but seem to have pulled through. A couple more leaf tips have poked through the bark since I took this yesterday.
Sometimes. Most of the time I’m functional, content, engaged, in fact now more than ever thanks to meditation and mindfulness practice. I suffer less than I used to. But just touch the right blade to my surface and the darkness wells up. Do I have mental illness? Is my brain different than “normal”? Or is this normal? Am I simply a highly sensitive person in a world that grows more confusing by the hour? I’m grateful that I’ve always had the resources, financial, familial, social, and/or internal, to find a way out of the pit when I tip into it. As Calamity Jane said, “Every day takes learnin’ all over again how to fuckin’ live.”
Life’s simple pleasures: vanilla bean ice cream sandwiched between two big fat cookies.
I wrote about this once years before there was a blog, and I was shut down by an editor whose argument seemed to be that if I wasn’t serious about killing myself it was insensitive to say that I could understand it. That response seems like part of the societal problem, to me. I’ve not written or spoken of it since, having been told by an authority figure that, essentially, I had no right to write about it. But now, in the blogosphere, mental health is no longer taboo, as exemplified in the writings of a brave new friend. Also now, for me there’s only the internal editor, and she’s given me permission to share my compassion toward myself and others.
“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” A frog nest in May! I discovered the first one yesterday, and another today. How many frogs do you see keeping watch?
“For people who practice it’s not about eradicating the darkness,” a dear friend concurred today. It’s about how you relate to it. From the venerable Thich Nhat Hahn to my beloved Catherine Ingram, all dharma teachers advocate allowing the full range of human emotions: the ten thousand sorrows along with the ten thousand joys. Skillful living is about holding them all with tenderness, loosely, not clinging to the joys and not rejecting the sorrows. It’s about opening your heart to your self as well as to others.
For whatever reasons, Americans seem particularly prone to suffer low self-esteem. The Dalai Lama famously couldn’t comprehend the question when a student asked, “Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?” It’s a vicious circle that requires steely intention to step outside of. And it requires education, exposure to opportunity to access the knowledge that there’s another way to think. Self-compassion is one reason I turned to gratitude practice five years ago, and committed wholeheartedly to mindfulness practice the year before that after dancing around it for a couple decades.
Sharon Salzburg writes, “Seeking to punish ourselves endlessly will leave us exhausted and demoralized. Caring about ourselves allows us to renew our efforts and continue on. This is the love that the Dalai Lama had tried to explain to me during our talk about self-hatred many years ago.” These are great reminders that it’s important to care about yourself, to care for yourself: your body, heart, and mind, your relationships, your own suffering. It’s said that in order to truly love another you need first to love yourself; in order to be fully compassionate with others you need first to be compassionate with yourself. I can’t argue. These are some more reasons I’ve committed to these spiritual practices, so that I can one day truly, deeply love this living being, this unique incarnation of energy I call ‘myself.’
I’m grateful for the gift of fresh duck eggs today, and for the visitor who brought them! I soft boiled one for dinner with leftover veggie soup. Five minutes was just perfect, and it was wonderful: a greater yolk to white ratio than a chicken egg.
When I let slip to a friend the other day that I, too, suffer from the kind of emotional distress she was sharing, she was surprised. “Really?!” she said, “I think of you as having it all together.” Whatever that means. Nope. I don’t have it all together but I turn my attention every day to practices which help me hold it mostly together most of the time, and that enables me to experience moments of joy, days of genuine happiness, weeks, even months at a time of contentment. I know objectively that I am fortunate in this world where billions of humans lack the animal necessities of food, water, shelter, and space; where billions of humans are unable to read, lack education, lack basic healthcare. Anger arises when I consider that more Americans than ever are falling into those lacks due to the billionaires’ takeover of our country.
Click to play. A fluke hummingbird frenzy the other day… more about that next post.
I know some people who have it all together, who seem to lack inner demons–but not very many. Getting through a day without despair must come easier for those with a higher genetic set point for happiness, for those who were raised by skillful parents, or those who’ve found the right therapy, or those with a trajectory of purely serendipitous conditions shaping their lives, or for those who just don’t think or care much beyond their own desires. But just as the leopard can’t change her spots, I can’t flip a switch and be someone I’m not. I can only learn and grow moment by moment, experience by reflection, day by day. I’m grateful that the life I inherited from my ancestors and the choices I made as I’ve muddled through it thus far have brought me to exactly where I am today.
I’m grateful for meditations at the pond, with the frog chorus building to a crescendo and then resting, the blackbirds calling, mountain bluebirds and nuthatches coming to the edge to drink, spring winds rising and falling, sun or shade as needed on one side or the other depending on the time of day.
I’m grateful for getting onion sets planted before a couple of good rains; red, yellow, and white onions from Afton’s, and a round container of shallots.
I’m grateful for golden mashed potatoes with buttermilk and chrysanthemum salt; and more potatoes the next day sautéed with oyster mushrooms and onions, half hot the first night with a soft-boiled egg, and half cold in a salad the next day.
I’m grateful for signs of life on the poor apricot tree. Though the leaves are dessicated and brown, there are tiny tender green shoots beginning below them. Fingers crossed they survive tomorrow night’s hard freeze.
I’m grateful for the simplest sandwich I’d never thought of before: peanut butter and jelly with mayo and potato chips. So delicious! I grew up on PB&J and learned young to stuff my chips inside for a fun crunch; and later the Colonel persuaded me to try peanut butter and mayo on a cracker. After my initial aversion to the idea of it, I found it delicious. But somehow I’d never tried them all together.
I’m grateful today for an opportunity to explore the Buddhist concept of no-self, which in its simplest interpretation means recognizing the influence of ego and releasing it. A miscommunication in the morning left me with hurt feelings, but once I’d expressed that in a reasonably mature way I was able to let the emotions move through pretty quickly. Instead of ruminating over it all day, I used the incident to practice letting go.
I quickly let go of attachment to outcome, and I eventually let go of the story. Emotions don’t last more than a couple of minutes, but like many I tend to repeat the story over and over thus regenerating the emotions again and again. I’m finally learning to say “Oh well!” and really mean it. It’s no big deal. I still felt the upheaval of disappointment like an echo in the background of the rest of my day, but I didn’t participate in it. Instead, I dug deeper into the dharma and nurtured my better qualities.
This is the actual Big Deal. I was able to find gratitude for the opportunity to learn and grow from an unpleasant event. I was able to use an emotional challenge to deepen my understanding of liberation through no-self; to see clearly how suffering is generated by an unruly mind; and to recognize and release some of my habitual thought patterns more quickly than ever before. I’m grateful for the teachings, the teachers, and my own dedication to the practice.
Despite the crazy spring weather, the yuccas promise to bloom this summer. These stalks grow at an amazing rate, it will be fun to watch them climb and open.
I found myself with some extra buttermilk, which I bought for maybe the second time ever, for a recipe, and used only a little. So I searched “buttermilk waffles,” and saw there was such a thing, but ended up using a different recipe with sourdough discard, but subbed buttermilk for the milk in the recipe. As usual I made the whole recipe and now have some in the freezer for later. So simple, so delicious! Dipping in cinnamon sugar seemed over the top, but I tried it anyway–and it was over the top, but what a great idea if you don’t have all the other trimmings: organic maple syrup, blueberries, and Greek yogurt.
The May Day rallies appear to have gone pretty well today, though as usual there’s not much coverage from mainstream US media. I did work, but I work from home helping people cultivate equanimity and prosocial emotions, so that was my protest action. No spending money for me! A dear friend did though (I’m not naming names!) but she had not known about the economic blackout. She promised to pay cash when I scolded her, rather than support big banks with a credit card, and she was supporting a local small business.
As I was baking these marvelous cookies I listened to Joyce Vance, Norm Eisen, and April Ryan, recorded on Substack yesterday. A lingering moment of delight, swapping out half the chocolate chips for dark chocolate M&Ms, basking in sweet color and also in the camaraderie, dedication to justice, and joie de vivre of three of our most influential resistance leaders. If you watch this you cannot help but feel uplifted by their energy, and breathe in a little of their hope.
Between morning leading meditation and afternoon editing my podcast, we took a lovely windy walk to the canyon. The milk vetch (Astragalus) is blooming, the wind was blowing, and a storm thundered over the mountains. I’m grateful for this life, for this wild place, and for meaningful conversations the past few days with old and new friends.
I’m enjoying the new NYT game Crossplay. I was never a Scrabble fan for a few reasons, which playing at my own pace with a perfectly matched computer resolves. I love playing with words, and I usually beat it on the medium level. However, I have to consider the impact of playing with AI on the environment, and that makes me sad. I’m grateful I could persuade my Connections buddy, who had a similar aversion to Scrabble, to play me online. It’s a slow game, we each make roughly one play a day, but we’re well matched, and I don’t feel aggressively competitive with her as I do with the computer.
A forgotten cheese sandwich from last week: that gift bacon, and gift calamondin jam, plus mayo, mustard, garden lettuce, Bad Dog fried egg, and havarti on the last square of homemade focaccia.
May Day! May Day! May Day has historically been a day of union and immigrant support, at least in recent US history, and this Friday will be the Mother of All May Days: ‘No school, no work, no shopping.’ We can hope an economic blackout will wake up another layer of complacent Americans to the urgent threat to our country, indeed to the entire planet. Stay home or join a community action to resist the regime, and whatever you do don’t spend any money.
I thought this was funny in the window at intake admin at the hospital when I went for a routine mammogram last week, but in this moment I can’t help but relate it to the lunatic in the White House. Whatever the motivation for the shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner, no matter; I was deeply disappointed not to get insight from the Great OZ into the mind of the madman, and I hoped that the mentalist might deliver a message that scared some iota of sense or perspective into him. “He’s tainted so much,” a friend said yesterday, but I heard “He’s taken so much.” Either way. When you look back at the relentless string of assaults on the constitution, the rule of law, the American people in general and marginalized people in particular, other sovereign nations, and the life blood of the planet, it becomes more unfathomable every day that Congress, the governors, somebody, doesn’t just MAKE IT STOP FFS! I saw that phrase on an ex-boyfriend’s Facebook post the other day, and marveled at how decades and miles apart we are of the exact same mind. We the people have got to be the ones to make it stop.
I stopped in at Afton’s on the way home from the mammogram to pick up a few more plants, and stepped into the rose tent simply to breathe the heavenly air for a few minutes, and to feast my eyes on beauty.
Afternoon at the pond, the frogs are softly singing… please play the recording below
This piñon jay braved the snow last weekend and was surely grateful for the new ‘premium’ feed with a higher proportion of sunflower seeds. In more freeze news from The Colorado Sun about that devastating night, many orchards of the famous Palisade peaches squeaked through with some damage, but it appears that “Most of Delta County had 100% crop loss on all fruits….” That’s our county, our precious organic fruit capital of Colorado.
Redwing blackbirds take flight as Wren interrupts their feeding on one of her routine patrols.
I promised a story about a black bird, but first I want to share this philosophical essay by an anthropologist friend about her own black bird story. I’ve been reading it in small bites, as it’s dense and loaded with meaningful inquiry. I’m personally fascinated with Karen’s exploration of “the self,” which touches on so much of my own mindfulness and Buddhism studies. Then came the darling and ultimately heartbreaking story of Hercules, a starling she and her family raised one summer. I cried. This is followed by a deep dive into linguistics in several more sections covering umwelt, metaphor, naming, deiectics, and a few other concepts exploring the nature of reality for humans and other living beings. Like Hercules, for example. What I love about this essay is how thoroughly it represents my fascinating friend. She and her husband have ranched in this valley their entire lives, and he’s a retired veterinarian: non-human animals have been their constant companions since they were born. If anyone can figure out how non-humans experience life, my money’s on them.
Between last weekend’s freezing weather and this weekend’s rainy chill, I met a few goals in the garden. Wren is exhausted after supervising the planting of the last six perennials in amongst irises in the Tortoise Border. These great cages move around as necessary, and here they’ll keep deer from ripping the tender new plants out of the ground, and give the transplants a chance to root well and grow strong this year before being left to their own devices next year.
Some notable lunches this week have been salads with homegrown perennial lettuce and feral arugula, dressed with chopped pecans, cheese, poison fish, and homemade honey mustard dressing.
On Thursday I’d had enough of this lingering earache so I called our local audiologist. She insisted I come in right away so she could do an impedance, measuring pressure in my middle ear to determine if there was an inner ear infection. There wasn’t, which was a relief, so investigation continues. Meanwhile, I was profoundly grateful that she rushed me in, and I thought on the beautiful drive over how grateful I am for this community treasure. She lives in a pastoral vineyard on the edge of the next town, with her office downstairs. There was a lot of traffic on the twenty-mile drive, about twenty cars altogether both directions. It’s a pleasure to drive there, and to park in the shade of an old tree, and be treated like a friend. She always takes time to explain things, and in this case recommended that I do the Valsalva maneuver each morning to make sure there was no pressure buildup in the middle ear. That, it turns out, is pinching your nose shut and blowing as you would to equalize pressure driving over a mountain or in an airplane. Turns out it can also quickly restore an abnormal heart rhythm, but not always. You probably have to blow harder for that than she showed me, and it can backfire, so don’t play around with it.
Yesterday Wren helped me plant potatoes. I’ve been moving these feral violas as I need the space in the garden beds, planting them randomly in borders or patio pots. I’m grateful they’ve self-sown so profusely, just like the lettuce. Then I sliced the end off a fresh loaf of sourdough and enjoyed a deconstructed cheese sandwich for lunch. Later we all took a nice long ramble through the woods with our imaginary infrared lens. It was Wren’s Arrival Anniversary, and we celebrated her being here at Mirador for four years!
And now, at last the black bird story. It’s short, but it cracks me up to even think about it. I told it to Ellie the other day and we both enjoyed a good long belly laugh about it, just as I did when Neighbor Fred told me, in his consummate, wry style. We have a lot of redwing blackbirds in our yards these days, a cacophony of them as Mary says. When Fred came to prune the apricot we stood and watched them at the feeder for a few minutes. “We had a friend from Australia visiting once,” he said, “who was real interested in the birds here. We were sitting outside and he said ‘What’s that black bird over there with the red wings?’” We both started laughing. The punchline says itself.
And then today, it rained off and on all day. It was glorious. There might even be mud tomorrow. I was glad I chanced to look out the window in a momentary break in the western clouds to catch a rainbow cast over the canyon.
Yesterday’s quote from the Waking Up app
While there’s plenty to worry about, I was grateful to spend a weekend immersed in home and yard maintenance, restorative relaxation and meaningful connection. Instead of pointless anxiety. Tomorrow, I’ll step up again and start taking action, while still cultivating equanimity and perspective. Wishing the same for you. We’re in this together.
We’ve several times walked past the juniper where the squirrel was hiding the other day without sight nor sound of it, but I did want to show the context. I held the camera over the hollow where the dead snag comes forward out of the twisted trunk. Amazingly, this tree, hundreds of years old, is still alive.
I’m assured by the Worms that the apricot will probably survive the freeze. It never occurred to me that it would suffer in last weekend’s cold snap, because it was thoroughly leafed out. I called in to As the Worm Turns this evening, and learned that apricot trees all over the valley suffered the same fate. All the leaves are dead. Above, I noticed they were drooping the second day AF (after freeze); below, yesterday, beyond drooping they are drying up, along with the embryonic fruits. Lance and Lulu have never seen this before either. We all moved here roughly thirty years ago plus or minus. An orchardist called in right after I did, and reported that they lost everything, peaches, grapes, you name it. Everyone is optimistic, though, that the trees themselves will survive, and we’ll know more later if they’ll leaf out again this year.
It was time to strain the lilac blossoms from the sugar on Sunday, but they did not want to sieve. They must have been too damp when I mixed them in, and they weren’t pretty so I didn’t want to keep them in with the sugar, so… I brought my science mind in and dumped the whole jar into a pot with half as much water. The blossoms floated to the top, I skimmed them off, and boiled until…
Voila! Lilac syrup! It’s as thick as honey, I could have taken it off sooner, and it is just as sweet as honey, too.
My dear friend and teacher Cindy would have turned my age tomorrow had she not died almost two years ago. She left behind one bereft daughter, some precious friends, and many grateful and grieving students. As I usually do I sublimated my grief about her illness and death until it started to surface late last year. I find myself thinking of her more often, her insights, lessons, and example informing my work and life more consciously than I acknowledged at first. Everyone has their own way of grieving, and even my own is unique to each loss, but in general I tend to close down around it for awhile and then it seeps out over time. I do a lot better with it now than I did twenty years ago during my Decade of Loss during which my mother died.
It’s been 22 years since she lived her last spring. Really, time flies whether you’re having fun or not. Even before she was sick, I cherished this picture of her. It’s an old print that suffered water damage, which I scanned and optimized. She was younger then than I am now. She and her sister and their old high school friend Lucy (with husbands tagging along) had met for a long weekend reunion at some woodsy resort in West Virginia. Here she’s reclining on the bank of a creek with her cocktail, looking as happy and relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. I thought of her as I grieved Cindy this week, and felt compassion for her daughter who was so much younger than I when she lost her mother. All these feelings swirled up as I was reading this article that came in The Atlantic email yesterday, “On Losing a Daughter,” which brought to mind a dear friend whose daughter died just over a year ago, leaving three young children. I can’t imagine a worse grief for a parent, except I can and it’s one reason I chose not to have children. Just in case. Reading of this woman’s singular grief, thinking of my friend who lost her daughter, imagining Cindy’s daughter’s emotions as her mom’s birthday approaches, my own grief for my mother surged. All the grief of mothers and daughters swelled and swirled together in me. And the recognition that this little whirlpool of these particular mothers and daughters is a drop in the bucket of global grief, mothers and daughters just one current in the vast, bottomless ocean of human griefs.
Michael and me as Carmen y Miguel, c. 2000
Anniversaries can be hard, especially birthdays and death days. The grief cascade actually started last week when John’s birthday came around and I thought about him a lot, missing him, missing Boyz Lunch, and feeling for his surviving partner. And then the anniversary of Todd’s death just a year ago came a few days later, and my heart was with his surviving partner. And then out of nowhere came a wave of grief for Michael, who died that same horrible summer of 2020 when Raven, Ojo, Diane, and Auntie also died, and everyone’s world changed with the massive Covid casualties, especially those whose loved ones died of it.
And the grief this week just keeps coming. A dear friend had to euthanize her dear old big dog last week. He had lived a good long life but that is cold comfort in the moment when the utter absence shocks and wracks and keeps on shocking for days, weeks, months. In my awareness of and compassion for her grief, the loss of Stellar the Stardog rocked me again, in gentle waves, much calmer than the tempest that accompanied his passing.
Griefs can’t be compared. But they can crack our hearts open to empathy, compassion, and more love, with time. And they have no timeline other than their own mysterious meandering path, with steep hills of struggle, long lulling valleys, and all terrains in between. I still mourn the sweetest black cat Ojo, and have come to a revised demise: as Paul suggested last fall, it’s far more likely that he was killed by a great horned owl than by a mountain lion. I was reluctant to accept that hypothesis, but given all attendant conditions it does make more sense. It doesn’t help the grief quotient, though.
I worried this morning that I might have lost his sister Topaz. We’d started out the gate for a walk and she was right behind us. I didn’t look back for awhile but it’s not unusual for her to take a shortcut and catch up so I kept walking. Then I heard a shrieking screeching that stopped abruptly. Wren took off in a beeline back toward the house, and I followed with quick steps. She was nowhere to be seen. There was no evidence of foul play, but no sign of her. I stood by the gate and called in all directions, walked back toward the woods and called, nothing. If she were out there she’d have come. It was late in the morning for an owl but not necessarily too late; and there’s that little fox that’s been passing through frequently. The sound could have been a magpie screaming at a cat, a cat screaming at a magpie, a cat screaming at a fox, or a fox simply screaming. Or any number of other options. I was gonna be late for an appointment, so I had to keep moving. Maybe something had scared her and she’d run back to the house. I checked the front door, then the back. Whew! She was lying by the back door as if I were late for her. Whatever happened, it’s one of those rare circumstances where we actually won’t know more later.
There are some animals that trigger grief in me any time I see images of them: polar bears, penguins, elephants, and gorillas among them. This is Fatou, 69, the world’s oldest gorilla in captivity, in the Berlin Zoo, who showed up in The Atlantic’s photos of the week. I can only imagine what kind of grief shemust experience. Probably solastalgia.
But really I think the grief train started while I was reading Against the Machine. It came up in conversation with a dear friend last night who was responding to my post about it. Paul Kingsnorth broke my world view, I told her. That book shattered the last of my illusions, pulled the scales from my eyes, as it were. I’ve been grieving the world I grew up in, and thought we could still maybe save. I’ve been swimming in the grief of solastalgia for weeks, months, years. Earth Day is a great occasion to mention it. Solastalgia is “the experience of chronic trauma, longing, or hopelessness due to negative or distressing changes to the home or ecosystem you are still in due to the impacts of climate change, weather events, fire, or other environmental factors…. With solastalgia, the home you are longing for can’t be returned to—it is there but not the same.” I’m grateful there’s a word for it, and grateful that this feeling is being addressed in Tricycle’s annual online Buddhism and Ecology Summit, which I’ve been participating in this week.
And, in the midst of awareness from within this sea of grief, I am bouyed by profound, uplifting gratitude for the number of people I can call my dear friends. And each day I’m noticing and savoring beauty, moments of joy and laughter, and the company of animals both wild and tame. The ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows: Can I be grateful for all of them? Next post, a story about a black bird…
The lilacs out the window on Friday morning. Note the decals on the kitchen window, iridescent through birds’ eyes, to curb or hopefully prevent window strikes. Overnight it went down to 15℉. As anticipated, this morning the cherry blossoms and nascent fruits look finished for the year. Oh well. The magnificent yellow columbine at the cherry tree base took a hard hit but will likely come back from the center. Everything else in the garden looks stressed or wounded but I’m optimistic that all will survive. I covered them again tonight.
Yesterday was a perfect day for a grilled cheese sandwich: cloudy with blowing snow all morning and bitter wind even after the snow stopped. The high was barely above freezing. Melted dill havarti on rosemary-garlic focaccia with thinly sliced red onion, lettuce, mayo, and a splash of raspberry jam offered tasty comfort at lunchtime. And it was a perfect day to finally bake the orange marmalade brownies I’d been considering for a long time.
I’ve never really liked orange marmalade, and I thought maybe this recipe would make it palatable for me. It was simple to make, and I must say, delicious. But I doubt I’ll be spreading marmalade on toast any time soon.
This day dawned sunny and crisp and then warmed up into the 50s. The brownie went beautifully with my ritual maple-vanilla latté and morning fiction. It felt good to share the bake with my neighbors, so Wren and I made a quick run up the driveway and then around the corner to make deliveries. Not only did I feel good about sharing, but I got to return home with surprise bonus bacon! Which went right into today’s cheese sandwich: lettuce, cheddar, and bacon with mayo, mustard and raspberry jam.
Of all the articles I read online this week, by far the best was this hilarious article on The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America. It provided a wonderful balance to the majority of the other headlines. I’ve been working with Discernment this month, and considering deeply what media I ingest. Why, I wonder, is 90% of the news and entertainment about horrors, when in actual fact, most humans spend most of their time–maybe as much as 90%–doing good, kind, generous things, and simply aspiring to be good, kind, happy people? Media coverage of the species is terribly skewed toward bad behavior, and by over-representing violence, betrayal, destruction, hatred, rage, etc., is invariably influencing the zeitgeist. Too bad. One more good reason to focus on gratitude and living mindfully.
