The many faces of the apricot tree with different skies. I sat under it for awhile the other day while someone else worked in my yard. It was a reminder of the simple joy of letting go. Feels like it’s been a long, long time since I let myself really relax. If I ever knew how, I’ve lost the skill. But I intend to practice every day and maybe I’ll be able to create a new healthy habit.
This crinkle-cutter worked really well on a narrow sweet potato, and I tried some tricks that several recipes promised would deliver the crispiest fries ever. They did not. The fries look much crispier than they actually were, but they were still tasty.
The Eureka lemon tree that I’ve had for a couple of years, and cut back to a stump last year (because, well, I can’t even remember why right this minute but it was necessary) has grown really well, and I’m thrilled that it finally has some flower buds at the tips. A houseplant success!
I’ve tried to get Topaz to walk with us the past few days and she wouldn’t. Turns out she just had a strong opinion on which direction she was willing to walk. This afternoon I cajoled and pleaded, and she lay down. Until I turned back through the east gate, walked past her and out the west gate, and she came right along. It was just before sunset and I caught both pets in the frame right before full shadow dimmed the emerald carpet. The forest floor has never looked like this. Seeing in real time how an extra wet season sets up a more serious fire season. We’ll know more later.
I’ve seen more mushrooms in the yard and woods in the past month than I’ve seen in the previous 33 years combined. Even with gloves on my hands got cold so we turned for home early. We got back to the yarden just in time for last light on the mountains, as the fall foliage radiated warmth.
There used to be a nice bird feeder hanging in this tree. I glanced at it from the patio this morning as I always do, and saw that it needed filling, but when I came down with a scoop of seeds the feeder was nowhere to be found! Obviously it hadn’t been there two minutes before: whatever I’d seen was an optical illusion or my imagination filling in a habitual expectation. Ironically, I had just gotten frustrated with it a few days ago because the handle had bent, making the lid hard to open. I thought maybe a squirrel had been worrying it. But to find the stout twig it hung from broken off and the feeder disappeared, my best guess is a bear ran off with it. Several thoughts clambered through my head. I hope he didn’t get a paw stuck in the handle, or worse a head… but no, it was too small an opening for a head… I’m sorry it was probably empty at the time so it wasn’t even worth her effort… do I buy a new one? …bears are having a rough season…
Climate chaos is affecting bears severely this year, report several sources including The Colorado Sun, and this one in The Guardian. “In Colorado, there have been more than 8,600 reports of bear sightings and incidents this year, more than twice as many as last year, according to the state parks and wildlife department. The agency has euthanized 294 bears, three times the 2025 amount.” This isn’t news to most of us living in the rural west, even in towns. A killing freeze in the spring plus extreme drought depleted their natural food supplies throughout the west, and they’ve been coming out of the woods desperate. My neighbor lost her gas grill to a bear last month. But I have not seen a bear yet this year, and I’ve never seen one in my yard. The article goes on to say that “there have been 10 confirmed bear attacks in Colorado, the highest number on record…. In August in New Mexico, which also has had more bear encounters this year, one killed a 67-year-old wildland firefighter inside his home.”
This much larger broken limb likely came down in a recent storm. The woods are so green right now. Another neighbor reported nearly an inch of rain since yesterday, starting shortly after the little ones and I took a nice long ramble. I knew we were in for a few wet days.
Verdure everywhere, mosses, grasses, weeds…
I’m grateful for the respite of the woods, and I’m keeping my eyes open for bears. I’m trying to keep up with the horrors happening and also keep things in perspective. It takes all my mindfulness skills to get through every day, and using them I’m cultivating resilience. Horrors have happened as long as there have been humans, near as anyone can tell. While I pray that they will one day cease when enough people wake up, I have no expectations. This week I read of this new film about the genocide in Gaza asking the question: How do human beings explain taking part in genocide? It was chilling and enlightening.
Then since my loins were already girded for horrors, I read this interview with Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross – not your local disaster relief Red Cross. It’s a long read, but well worth spending the time with her compassion, wisdom, and insights. “Today you get the feeling that war becomes the means to an end itself, and wars continue because people want to stay in power. They have created an environment where war becomes the condition under which they can continue ruling, and that’s very dangerous. You ask me whether we are approaching a third world war. Honestly, history will judge that. History books will tell us whether today we were already in the beginning, or maybe already in the middle of such a situation. The I.C.R.C. didn’t know that we were in the Second World War when it was happening.”
On a potentially more comfortable note, I enjoyed this article exploring the four foundations of mindfulness in the garden, especially resonating with the first foundation, mindfulness of body in being aware of one’s movements and postures while gardening, as well as the sensory experience of working in soil, and the various facets of beauty in the garden, like these Sunfired Flare tomatoes which came on very late in summer, and came off the vine with a lot of skin damage I suspect was inflicted by insects. They sat on the counter a long time ripening after I picked them while I pondered the best way to use them. Finally I just cut and roasted them the other day, and squeezed them out of the skins easily. I used some in a batch of beans for burritos, which I like to make in bulk and freeze for a quick meal. I was glad to have some homegrown onions, too, and used up the last white and yellow onions along with a red one in the beans. The rest of the reds I’ll probably pickle.
An interview I listened to while cooking was with Dr. Jeremy Faust explaining what ER doctors are actually looking for when you show up there, and why he thinks the 1-10 pain scale is pretty much useless. I know I’ll now have a better sense of how to answer questions if I ever end up in an Emergency Room again, and also the next time I see my nice new primary care provider.
Walking in the woods, puttering or working in the garden, cooking and cleaning the kitchen, these activities ground me in what is real and true, help me see reality clearly. And even with the rich reality of my grounded life, I can feel my attention being subtly sucked by the insidious tendrils of algorithms. I’m sorry to admit that I spend more time playing NYT word games and scrolling Instagram now than I did a year ago. It’s a way to escape the horrors of the distillation of power and money to the oligarchs, but the escape itself is a delusion. Christopher Armitage explains the whys and hows in his article ‘Fracking Attention and Strip-Mining Mental Health’. It’s uncomfortable but it offers some small sense of agency going forward in how I spend my attention budget. And it’s been a mindfulness tenet for millennia that where we place our attention forms our world view.
In my house growing up, the only time sour cream ever showed up was when mom made beef stroganoff. I picked up a childish aversion to sour cream because my parents seemed to avoid it, and besides it just sounded all wrong. It’s one of many foods I developed a taste for years later. It’s been many years since I’ve had any kind of stroganoff, and when I saw this recipe for mushroom stroganoff I replenished my sour cream supply and whipped up a quick batch. So simple, so delicious!
And on a differently uncomfortable note speaking of food, this article ranging through the Dark Nutrition movement offers plenty of food for a flite of thoughts. Alexandra Petri once again skewers our times with her satire on ‘humanitarian’ and other words that have lost their meaning in the Trumpscape. And in other doublespeak news, Texas senate candidate Ken Paxton appears to be guilty of voter fraud.
Prickly pear pads plump and round with recent rains…
My practice is all about balancing external influences and internal knowing in an everchanging landscape of uncertainty day by day, minute by minute, breath by breath.
Today’s post is a little different. It’s the transcript, essentially, of my final podcast, “Suffer Less with Mindfulness,” which aired last week. You can listen to all episodes for a few more weeks wherever you get your podcasts or on my website, before I cancel my subscription to the Captivate platform at which point it disappears forever from everywhere, except possibly Apple Podcasts, and maybe Insight Timer.
What’s your understanding of equanimity? Mine includes the idea that we can find balance under any conditions, and we aren’t constantly being jerked by our emotions or external circumstances or our own thoughts or other people’s actions from one extreme of joy and excitement and positivity to the other extreme of despair or rage or negativity; maintaining an even keel. It includes the idea of seeing all humans as having equal value, not judging people until we know them, and then using discernment, not snap judging. It includes the idea of not labeling, of being open to seeing, to understanding that each person is who they are, and they bring to each encounter all the causes and conditions of their life up to that moment, just like we do. It’s embodied in the idea that I’ve mentioned before, and we’ll swap out mindfulness for equanimity: “Equanimity is not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at not making things worse.” And it’s so much more than all these things.
One rich ground for equanimity practice is the fact that Death is certain, time of death uncertain. In some ways my whole life, my whole mindfulness practice since I began it 20 years ago, has been about learning to die. I’ve been afraid of death, afraid of dying, since I was a child and first learned of death. For the past year, I’ve been preparing to die. This last month, as part of that, I’ve been doing a life review, reading my old journals starting from the first one in high school. Partly so that I can burn them or send them to the dump so that they’re out of my house when I die; and partly to shift my perspective. I’m getting some resolution, some equanimity with who I was in the past. Who I am right now is not who I was even yesterday. I’m making peace with the process of growing and changing, and remembering that every moment I’m choosing ‘how do I wanna be?’ Equanimity can really help us make those choices with wisdom and compassion.
I’ve dipped into some of these journals through the years. Occasionally I’ve looked back at a certain event or a certain timeframe, and I’ve read it and been disgusted with myself, judging harshly: Same old patterns, same old complaints, same old, same old. This time I’m looking back on my life systematically with a different lens: the lens of compassion, which I’ve never used before.
‘How was it for younger Rita?’ Can I offer her kindness instead of judgment? Can I bring curiosity to reading these journals, to see what she might have been going through, get a healthier perspective on the conditions around her, and bring a sense of acceptance, equanimity, even gratitude, to the life I’ve lived so far?
I’ve found some tragically silly little love poems. I’ve read of my aspiration to be loving and kind repeatedly, yet also how I remained in vicious and constant judgement of others. I’ve recognized my tendencies of projection, labeling, exaggeration, and many more afflictions that mindfulness practice diminishes with awareness. I’ve seen myself back then from morning to night, bouncing from absolute giddiness to utter despair, from feeling really good about myself because some boy thought I was cute, to feeling worthless, to feeling high as a kite because of some fun party I went to or ice skating or a kiss, to feeling total confusion and contempt. External influences, mostly boys, swung me from one extreme to another emotionally with zero equanimity, though there were occasional insightful moments of awareness. I now recognize this as the condition of adolescence, puberty, being a hormone-addled teenager; I see my past self with tenderness instead of scorn, and see all teenagers now with compassion.
I’ve come across a few striking instances that illustrate the malleable nature of memory. I was stunned to read that I got the part of the pregnant girl in the local TV station PSA in sophomore year. All I’ve remembered for as long as I can remember was the humiliation of the audition. I sat in an empty classroom with my head on my arms pretending to cry. The scout team wanted actual tears. I went to great lengths to generate tears, pinching myself, recalling my cat’s death, even asking for a slice of raw onion from the cafeteria and breaking that up under my face. I didn’t get the part. Shame. Yet in my journal, I read that I got the part! I got my current crush to play my boyfriend, kids in the halls called me ‘movie star’ for weeks afterward, and I felt respected by the cool kids for awhile. Why did I take away, or reconstruct, a memory of failure?
I’ve been surprised also that through those years I found three instances where I describe almost verbatim a terrible pit in my stomach, a gnawing emptiness, a burning hole in my gut, clearly physical. What was that about?
One thing that helps us cultivate equanimity and also feeds equanimity is this idea of perspective, and the more we can exercise a flexible open mind, the more we gain a broader, more open-hearted perspective. Now, as I’m learning about the influences of being raised by immature parents, of growing up in a home with constant bickering, a father who was power hungry and a broken-hearted mother, and nervous system development, I have a lot more perspective. I’ve already found some closure, some resolution, some equanimity and compassion with who I was then. I just wanted to be seen and loved.
There are those whose opinions differ, but it seems painfully clear that the human species over the past 400 years or perhaps our entire evolution has set in motion the collapse of our planetary systems. Climate collapse is a no-brainer. I live in the US west where for the past decade average temperatures have been rising in all seasons, and concurrently wildfire season has grown from a few months in late summer to encompass more than half the year. There is really no time of year, where I live, that a random lightning strike couldn’t provoke a cataclysmic fire, except a few months in deep winter if there is adequate snow cover, which is no longer guaranteed.
The Gold Mountain fire 60 miles south of here that burned 38,000 acres, now they’re having flash floods as a result of the monsoon storms coming through and washing down the burnt bare hillsides, carrying rocks and mud and wiping away houses at the bottom that survived the fire. The Elk fire just a few miles east of that continues to grow, making it unhealthy or impossible to spend time outside. Spokane, Canada, Oregon, France, Spain, whoever is next… The planet is burning.
The planet is burning because of people’s choices. It’s largely been the choices of people in power in corporations and in certain countries. It’s systemic. We can’t solve this individually. They led us to believe that recycling would fix it, that solar panels would fix it. None of those things ever worked because they were intentionally deluding us all along, and we were letting ourselves be deluded. Meanwhile, they can’t quit blowing shit up.
Seeing reality clearly, can we acknowledge that this is a really hard time? The planet is burning. Cultural collapse seems imminent as evidenced in the decline in reading, the inability of younger generations to write in cursive, and measurably shorter attention spans in students. Loss of human contact is prevalent in the ascendance of AI, in the proliferation of self-checkout, in the tacit permission to be cruel in online trolling, in person now, and in our institutions. Loneliness is pandemic. Societal collapse is underway and all you need do to see it is look around you. These days I experience more and more moments where I feel compassion for the tragedy of the human condition rather than anger and resistance to the way we are as a species. What a seething mass of parasites we are on this planet, and the sad part is — we simply couldn’t help it.
Yes, it’s true that at other times in human history, in other parts of the world, there have been civilization collapses and ecological collapses, and it’s also true that there are many good people around the globe working hard in many ways to stem the tide, to improve conditions in very many ways. But this current poly-crisis planetary collapse is different in scale and in momentum.
How do we live in such a world? How do we bring equanimity, compassion, and kindness out into the world? It doesn’t hurt to start with a healthy comparison of myself with those suffering worse than I, like climate refugees, brutalized immigrants, all manner of oppressed people from BIPOC to trans and queer people to people living in poverty or without homes. This leads to a healthy appreciation of the current conditions of my life, despite its challenges. Next, remember to be kind. “It’s so easy to be nice,” said my friend Kathleen as we discussed this the other day. Why expend the energy to be hateful?
It is hard to have equanimity in this time that we find ourselves. It takes conscious effort. It takes intention, and it takes choosing where we place our attention. And this is why these four heart qualities, the Four Boundless Attitudes of Equanimity, Compassion, Kindness, and Appreciative Joy, are so important: because life on earth is just gonna get harder. The more we can find peace, equanimity, compassion, and wisdom in ourselves, the more we can be islands of strength and resilience in our lives and for the people around us. And then we can turn our strengths into actions in our groups and our communities, and make our voices heard, and vote right.
We can do all those things and more; but can we also practice equanimity in this very dicey time? Well, what are our options? We can suffer and be miserable and be scared, and every emotion is contagious. So if we are going around angry and scared, we’re gonna make other people angry and scared. If we can have even moments of peace in any situation, we can share that peace. We can calm and soothe others.
We find this capacity in ourselves through our mindfulness practice, and in whatever spiritual grounding we each have. We find equanimity not only internally, but also in the groups of people where we can share in this ‘seeing reality clearly,’ share our broken hearts, share the anger and fear, and share the commitment and the intention to keep practicing. Keep practicing.
I don’t expect to die any time soon, but … death is certain, time of death uncertain. In the past year I’ve experienced an unusual number of health challenges, some of which can be managed with medications or lifestyle adjustments, and the rest I can adapt to. These actually started piling on after I set the intention to prepare to die, and for awhile they eclipsed that aspiration. Now as I’ve tamed some of them, they serve as motivation to accelerate my preparation.
There are so many things I’ve left undone in my life, and it’s winding down. At best I’ll have another twenty or so productive years. At worst, I could go tomorrow. If I only get a few good years before my lungs are too compromised to remain at this elevation, I’d like to at least finish some of the domestic projects here at Mirador, like the series of five quilted, tropical-themed warm-window drapes begun twenty years ago to keep the sunroom warmer in winter, and now more essential to keep it cooler in climate-intensified summer heat.
That’s just one of dozens of undone creative projects. Not to mention PG&D: personal growth and development. I’m finally acknowledging that being raised by parents with narrow, rigid minds, functional alcoholics who were exemplary products of the military-industrial colonization culture, wasn’t just a mismatch for my sensitive temperament, it was a constant low-grade trauma to my nervous system. As a result, there’s a lot of healing to do before I die, so that I can live more fully in alignment with my values, bring more meaning to this fleeting existence, in the time left to me. I’m on the right track. In some ways I’ve always been on the right track. Because it’s always been the path that has opened before me, each remarkable step of the way. Now, navigating that path involves withdrawing some of my externally-oriented energies and turning inward even more deeply.
So, this is the last episode of this podcast for the foreseeable future. Mirador Eco-retreat is essentially a single-person business without much capital, and I can no longer afford to produce a podcast. The cost isn’t sustainable either financially or energetically. Thank you for listening, and I hope that you have derived some benefit from the lessons and meditations I’ve shared over the past four years. You can support my ongoing mindfulness work or join the Suffer Less with Mindfulness virtual sangha at this membership page: miradorecoretreat.org.
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.
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…
I baked a sourdough focaccia yesterday thinking I would freeze some portions for later. It was delicious even though I forgot to spread it in the pan before going to bed so it overflowed the bowl overnight. I worried that it wouldn’t rise enough in the pan to be soft. It wasn’t perfect but it was perfectly fine.
After today’s cheese sandwich I’ve got enough for three more lunches. I didn’t need to worry about freezing any.
We took a short slow walk yesterday afternoon to check out the early flowers, knowing they might freeze back in the next couple of nights. Did I mention that I thought I heard the first hummingbird a few days ago? I quick went inside to start nectar water on the stove, pulled out the box of feeders and cleaned one with dilute bleach and let it dry while the nectar cooled, and put it out a couple hours later. This morning I saw the first male black-chinned hummingbird at the feeder. Time to get the other feeders ready to go out Saturday morning. I did bring in the one feeder for tonight with the freeze forecast.
Wren checked out the numerous Townsendia scattered along the sides of the trail. I played with Hipsta Impressionist again to see what I could get with its random filter. I especially like the second one, how it smeared a petal like impasto. But I prefer the original unfiltered photo below over all the variations.
Wren had run ahead of me and Topaz and I heard the sharp alarm call of a critter, but I couldn’t find it. She was running back and forth near this tree, and it sounded like the cry came from the canopy. I listened from all angles, as Wren was doing; it sounded high, it sounded low, it sounded even as though it came from another tree. Then there was a buzz to it. We finally narrowed it down to a hollow in the base of the trunk, and Wren seemed determined to tear it apart. I barked at her to leave it, and aimed the camera in but couldn’t tell much, so set it to 5x zoom with flash. Right as I snapped the picture Topaz shot out of nowhere hissing at Wren and startling me. Thankfully Wren cowered instead of attacking. But then they were both obsessed with the trunk and I discerned it was best to hurry us off. Only after I got them both well away from the trunk did I check my hasty image:
Today’s adventure took a different turn. There’s a freeze warning for tonight, and a hard freeze warning for tomorrow night. The garden is so far along I worry I’ll lose a lot. The cherry tree! I’m grateful that I caught some of As the Worm Turns on my drive home from my annual checkup yesterday.
The gardeners were discussing ways to protect fruit trees from freezing. The valley orchards will be at high risk tomorrow night, and I feel for the fruit growers. I wish for all their orchard-warming techniques to succeed. One way they mentioned is to spray foliage with kelp spray, which strengthens cell walls among other things. I didn’t catch the details, but did drive up to the Hitchin’ Post this afternoon to pick up a bottle of FoxFarm Kelp Me Kelp You seaweed plant food. I mixed the kelp with water in my pump sprayer and saturated the cherry tree foliage and pretty much everything else I’m concerned about. If it doesn’t help protect them from the freeze at least they’ll be well fed when they come back.
I spent the entire work day preparing to freeze. It started when I decided to make lilac scones. The second round of lilacs were only half open and I expect to lost most of them tomorrow night. I brought in some more blooms for the vases, and harvested a basketful to make lilac sugar. I couldn’t find the recipe I used some years ago, when I just plucked the flowers off the stems and incorporated them into the dough, so I looked up recipes again. That’s where I learned about lilac sugar and lilac syrup. I’m not sure whose recipe I’ll use for the scones whenever I get around to baking them, but making sugar and syrup I’ll have lilacs preserved for months to come and many uses.
I decided to make the syrup first, but after rinsing, drying, and plucking petals for an hour I didn’t think I had enough for syrup, so I opted for the sugar. It calls for 1 cup lightly packed petals to 1 cup sugar. By the time my packed petals met an equal volume of sugar I realized I had packed them too tightly and probably could have pulled off the two cups for syrup, but by then it was too late. They were all shook up.
I had to add more sugar to achieve an equal ratio. Now the petals steep in the sugar for three days, and I’m supposed to sift them out, but I think I’ll just make a batch of scones including petals first. Then we’ll see what happens with the rest of it. So, the lilacs are prepared to freeze, I’ve done all I can to preserve them.
Then I set about recycling the distilled water bottles from the mechanical room, which I save for just this purpose as I fill the solar batteries through the year. I cut the bottoms off them, and in late afternoon as it clouded up and the temperature dropped, I set them over all the new perennials I’ve planted in the south border and in patio pots.
Then I fluffed old hay over all the garden beds filled with tender pea shoots, strawberry plants, nascent rhubarb, delicate carrot tops, baby kale, flower sprouts, and garlic leaves. I also covered a few areas with an old blanket and black plastic. As I moved through the day I clipped any remaining tulips, jonquils, and the flowers from the new perennials since they’ll freeze Friday night anyway, and gathered them all in a couple of vases. I am now finished preparing to freeze.
Despite a trunk full of holes from a small beetle, the crabapple is loaded with buds just starting to open…
Caged tulips and jonquils, to protect them from marauding deer…
Townsendia blooming a week earlier than last year…
Pussytoes surviving …
Maybe it’s because it’s got southern exposure instead of shade, but this Indian paintbrush is blooming almost a month early. Usually a reliable indicator of when the hummingbirds will arrive, paintbrush has historically bloomed here around April 25th.
… of a bad situation. Thich Nhat Hahn said, “The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”
After a loving, grieving walk through the dry warm woods, it was time to rest under the apricot tree again. A few buds are left, about a dozen flowers open, and the rest are all moving toward fruiting as tender new leaves emerge. I’m grateful every day that I wake up alive. Grateful for the wild world, for the little pets, for the garden that’s been growing here for thirty years; grateful that water still flows through the hoses to water trees and tulips. Grateful, and grieving, contemplating as I walked through the woods how I’ll one day die, and what will become of this land I love? Peace with Impermanence is the fundamental paradox at the heart of human aspiration. “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”
The little mustard I noticed the other day was identified by a friend as Boechera gunnisoniana, a vulnerable, rare rockcress endemic to Colorado with most specimens known from Gunnison County just east of here. I’m sure I’ve seen it before, but it didn’t catch my attention until it surprised me blooming so early. I found several more on our walk yesterday.
Neighbor Fred came yesterday to prune our apricot tree. In just the couple of days since the first buds opened, many more had popped. I’m so grateful to and for this wonderful neighbor with so much experience in entomology and in growing fruit trees.
Above, even more buds had bloomed after he pruned. Today (below) virtually every blossom had opened and honeybees were buzzing.
Yesterday, above; and today, below.
And the forsythia surprised me again, glowing golden through the mudroom window late yesterday. It had been a couple of days since I’d been on that side of the house and I swear they weren’t blooming then. This sudden warming brought out everyone.
I managed to save some of the red tulips with a cage in the nick of time, though the smaller patch to the right had already been nibbled by deer before I covered them. The roller coaster is picking up speed early this year.
I gave a friend some maple cream for her birthday, and she said the first thing she did was pour some over vanilla ice cream. So I tried that after lunch today. Yum!
Biko stayed out in his round pen overnight for the first time this year, and it got so warm that he begged to be released, so he had the run of the yard for most of the day. So much tasty green grass! Wren can’t get enough of it either. He tucked in by a tree trunk right after we found him about 5:30, but when we came inside an hour later he had moved somewhere else. We didn’t even bother looking, knowing it will be plenty warm overnight and he’ll wake up happy wherever he chooses to sleep.
I’ve been reading the amazing new book from Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, and I’m grateful for his historical and philosophical synthesis of the times we find ourselves in. It’s grueling, but he articulates so thoroughly what I have believed in my bones to be true since I was a child. But enough about humanity’s ineluctable drive toward mechanization at the cost of Nature, we see it in every facet of our lives, including this blog that I’m writing and you are reading on machines that embody so much more than the simple convenience of a keyboard, a digital camera, and the internet. We needn’t dwell on it in this moment.
I’m grateful for the gift of calamondin jam that surprised me in the mail the other day, out of the blue, from an old school friend and reader of Morning Rounds. It represents the good in this world: homegrown fruit cooked and canned, and one person thinking of another with generosity. She read about my quest to bake birthday cakes, and thought I might like to include something a little different in one. Of course I had to taste it, and it was Florida sunshine on toast. Next cake, here it comes! And the next cake is coming soon.
In contrast to The Machine that grinds up nature and humanity in its conquest of the world through concentration of power and worship of wealth, treetops have captured my attention this week. Pinyon jays have been spinning the Bird Buddy feeder around on its pole with their enthusiastic feeding, and I caught a group of them in a treetop the other day on our walk. One seems to have fluff in its bill, hopefully an indication of nest building.
Between working, walking, and baking cakes, I tried out this recipe for big fat chewy chocolate chip cookies, and they are fantastic.
Joanna Macy said “Hope is a verb,” and so I continue to hope to do all that I can to contribute to the remaking of the world as Western Civilization collapses. Some of those things include vigilant introspection to see myself clearly and live in alignment with my values, which by the way are not the values of The Machine; sharing in various ways the mindfulness skills that I rely on to ground me in a meaningful life and bolster resilience; and supporting the wild world through the ways I protect and tend the land in my care. I’m so grateful to have brought the birds back to my yarden after a decade, now that I’ve minimized the domestic cat threat. Evening grosbeaks are back at the feeder, and filling the aspen tree.
In cheese sandwich news, there continue to be many delicious options. Last week I pickled red onions and am putting them on everything including this simple cheddar, lettuce, and mayo sandwich.
Despite a few freezing cold days and nights, the weather was warm enough last week to enjoy time at the pond, including polishing off the last of the ice cream.
But the weather is too nice. This morning I discovered that the apricot blossoms are already opening. I spent a few hours in the yarden, installing a couple of bluebird nest boxes to give them options, and watering. I gave the apricot her first water of the season, and took some time to sit beneath her boughs and appreciate her. Those buds are really swelling, I thought and then I looked more closely. First I saw a few white tips on some buds, and then saw a few just breaking open. Earliest ever, I think.
Today’s cheese sandwich included tuna salad with parsley and celery, pickled red onions, and havarti. So simple, so delicious.
After lunch and a few hours desk work, I took the little animals on a leisurely ramble through the woods, remembering to look up. We rambled northwest from the house, a spontaneous and unusual direction, and then back toward the forest center. We saw treetops reaching for the clouds, and a surprising number of treetops toppled over.
Coming up a slope from an unfamiliar direction I spied an oddly glowing trunk, and when we got close I was mystified to see this young pinyon pine stripped bare, all its bark in chips at the base, its top recently deceased. Curious. And then we found ourselves near the Triangle Tree, where I paused to lean back into its curved embrace and look out toward the mountains for awhile, resting, calmly abiding, breathing.
From there we rambled back to a familiar bench, where we rested again, and noticed these tiny wildflowers in bloom, I’m thinking weeks or even months early… But then, I found flowers even in midwinter in some parts of the woods.
Back home it was happy hour time, so I took a mocktail and a bowl of poison fish down to sit in the golden light and read some more about the cyclical history of the Machine. What a juxtaposition. This week in telesangha we’re exploring paradoxes; in particular, a paradox that has come up synchronistically a couple of times in recent days: navigating the wisdom of accepting conditions exactly as they are, allowing oneself to be just as one is, and at the same time aspiring to refine or grow oneself and improve conditions in the world. Chewing on this book at the same time will add an interesting influence in this exploration.
As the sun goldly lowered I glanced up to see a pair of bluebirds atop the aspen tree. More synchronicity. I hope they find a nest site they like for this summer, in one of the boxes I put up this morning, or back in the hole in the side of my house.
I’m grateful that Topaz has learned in recent years not to hunt birds.
Wren jumped right into her job of finding Biko as soon as I started putting him out in his round pen. Tonight just before sunset she raced right to his gate and loudly announced his location. Life’s simple pleasures.
Finally finished my hat! heehee… and had leftover yarn so have knitted a few red hat resistance badges for friends who live in warmer climes.
Many days the one thing that motivates me to get out of bed in the morning is the thought that I get to drink a homemade latté. The latté is a fairly recent twist but ever since 9/11 the promise of coffee has been the prime mover in getting me up, and some days it’s the only inspiration I can muster to face the day. I don’t think I’m alone in this; I do think it’s a symptom of a huge societal problem.
On 9/11 I was visiting my parents who lived near the Pentagon. I could die here, I thought when the Pentagon was struck, without my dogs, away from home, away from all that I love…This is the beginning of World War III. I wasn’t wrong about that, it’s just been a slow burn, a ‘forever war.’
Wren and I spent some time in the garden the past few days spring cleaning, and found her a treasure.
War news has been the backdrop to my whole life. To your whole life. I grew up in the sixties watching the Vietnam War on TV during dinner. It ended. Then there was another war. And then more wars, though eventually the government learned to censor photos and video of US casualties and coffins returning home, since those unsettled Americans.
We planted a bunch of old seeds to see what comes up and what might survive whatever weather comes our way in the next six weeks before true planting season begins.
And here we are again. It makes me sick; and, it reinforces the message of the Walk for Peace: Peace begins inside each one of us. Pema Chodron says that War also begins inside each one of us, in a book she wrote twenty years ago:
“War and peace begin in the hearts of individuals,” declares Pema Chödrön at the opening of her inspiring and accessible new book. In Practicing Peace in Times of War she draws on Buddhist teachings to explore the origins of aggression and war, explaining that they lie nowhere but within our own hearts and minds. She goes on to explain that, remarkably, the way in which we as individuals respond to challenges in our everyday lives can mean the difference between perpetuating a culture of violence or creating a new culture of compassion.
With war and violence flaring all over the world, from Iraq to Darfur to London, most of us are left feeling utterly helpless. In this audiobook Pema Chödrön insists that our world will begin to change when each of us, one by one, begins to work for peace at the level of our own behavior, our own habits of thought and action. It’s never too late, she tells us, to look within and discover a new way of living.
We started unfurling hoses and laying out some soakers like this one around the little cherry tree. Wren investigates the bug bath.
It’s ingenuous to ask why it doesn’t change, why is there always war, when will we ever learn? I practice and meditate and inquire and investigate all day long every day, and I still experience anger or despair frequently.
I’m also simultaneously grateful for living off the grid and far from the madding crowd. On our walk the other day we spied some good tracks in the mud. I can’t tell if they are from a coyote or a domestic dog. They’re smaller and rounder than the usual culprits’ tracks, the big white dogs up the road who roam freely. Getting outside more again on these warming days, walking among trees, getting my hands in the dirt, grounds me in what is good and true. I find peace in Nature.
But it’s been a constant struggle to cultivate inner peace when for months I couldn’t separate who I am from the nonstop pain and festering resentment of the dentastrophe. Only in the past month has the constancy abated enough to allow moments of awareness free of mouth pain. Then I got a second opinion last week. My perceptions that the bite is wrong were validated, which lifted a burden; but, a weightier burden was added: Mercury toxicity. The US lags behind the global understanding that dental mercury amalgam is a cumulative neurotoxin implicated in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, MS and various other systemic ailments. Last summer, because I didn’t know any better, I allowed two large mercury blobs to be ground to toxic dust inside my mouth with absolutely no precautions. How does one find peace when one feels wronged? I’m seeking it through meditation and polite insistence that the offending dentist drop the remaining balance on my account.
But others choose differently. We know how the President seeks relief from feeling cornered: by escalating aggressive distractions, from domestic ICE assaults to now an illegal war in the Middle East.
“Every leader facing accountability has understood what a war provides. It is the oldest move in the history of power: when the walls close in, find an enemy abroad. A shooting war restructures the entire political landscape. Opposition becomes unpatriotic. Criticism becomes dangerous. Emergency powers that were already being stretched past recognition suddenly have the one justification that has historically silenced opposition in every democracy that ever fell: wartime necessity. And the emergency never ends, because ending it means facing consequences.
A wartime administration that was already stripping Clean Water Act protections from millions of acres of wetlands, already opening 40 million acres of national forest to logging and drilling, already letting coal plants dump toxic ash into groundwater, already withdrawing limits on forever chemicals in drinking water now does all of it behind a wall of smoke and patriotic obligation. “Support the troops” becomes the shield behind which everything else gets done. They are generating attacks on the constitutional order faster than any existing institution is processing them, and they know it. And the ten months between now and the midterms just became ten months of a wartime presidency operating without constraints, with a proven willingness to ignore the judiciary, and with every incentive to keep the emergency going as long as possible.”
(Read further in the essay and you’ll find inspiration and encouragement. We can stop this. We have to.)
Tonight’s supper snack was a mushroom paté made with baby bellas, onion, garlic, fresh sage all sautéed in of course butter, puréed with some cream cheese, with more meltedbutter poured on top, then chilled. I added a sprig of sage blossom. So simple, so delicious!
Trump is what’s called in Buddhism a hungry ghost. He dwells in a special Hell realm, as do his henchmen and women, and many of his billionaire cronies. They are so empty inside that they will never have enough of anything, and live in a state of constant grasping. Call your representatives. Demand impeachments and unredacted Epstein files. Show up for protests. Channel your anger into action.
