Garden days have arrived. I simply can’t help myself. As the moon creeps ever closer, as dark becomes more luminous, as morning comes sooner and daylight hours more numerous, I find myself wanting to tend the earth, to help my garden grow and bloom. I crave beauty.

This morning, I woke after strange dreams, thinking I needed to plant a lemon tree – and did,

almost before the day really began. I showered, had a cup of tea, but then left the house before eating. It was too early for the nursery to be open for business so Earnest and I went down to the shore and walked along the beach, amazed by that the waters had pulled even further from shore than I thought possible. Soon it was evident that the tide was as far out as it would go. Standing there, I could see that the waters were returning. I could hear the tide coming in.

The water was moving at such a speed across the sands that it made a brittle yet lacy sound, almost as if hundreds of fairy folk were running their fingers carefully and delicately over the rims of hundreds of tiny crystal glasses, some half-full of water, some with less water than that, some with more. As long as their fingers moved swiftly and lightly along the rim of the glass, a weeping music ran out to the stars. That swiftly disappearing music wrapped me. It anchored my feet to the rocky shore, and then the sun  settling onto the ripples of the incoming tide lifted me until I felt as of I were thin-stretched and buoyant, a soap bubble on the wind, a marsh-reed on a star-sea.  A very real feeling, maybe even an important feeling, but impossible to describe credibly or usefully.

I soon turned from that swiftly moving tide and drove to Encinal Nursery where I knew they had in stock a number of healthy Meyer lemon trees. Out of the sky, away from the shimmer,  and back to the earth. As I drove past lines of cars, through clogs of traffic, I thought again of tides and the hearing of tides,  tides that come in swiftly without warning, tides that we cannot describe.

I left the house this morning to escape one of those tides. Spit from dreams, then turning on the radio, I heard nothing except solemn voices remarking war, discussing death, a fierce tide that roared and wallowed like rust, diesel against dusk . . . a relentless uncomfortable tide. I turned  the radio off.

The tide of war grinding ceaselessly against the edges of my life is not a sound I enjoy, and so I go to the sea. I stop, I listen, and then, I sink my arms into the earth, dig a hole for a lemon tree.

May it grow and prosper.

Tides turn and so can we.

On those days when the morning talk show on NPR is host to blithering idiots, I walk, looking for another sort of order, wondering if I am going crazy or is the world. Today's Forum show featured two of the most soggy self-important "thinkers" I have had the misfortune of hearing lately; both wanted to "prove" to the rest of us dunderheads that gossip can be a force for good,  a useful means of keeping society orderly and well-organized. Nothing either said made any sort of sense. It was all so much twinkie-twaddle trash, dressed up to look like sober new directions in social thought. Ha. I know I would not want to live in a world precisely and maliciously ordered by gossip or hearsay.

Today, I found myself loving the  lacy order of the natural world, random perhaps but  resonant . .  sometimes tattered and torn, sometimes soothingly geometric, lines of geese, triangles of sky, trees in parallel, stacks of stones, and sweeping curves of sea pushed against the sand.

The sea never gossips. It just pushes its waters through deep channels, sucks away sands with currents strong enough to create graceful curves as perfect as prayer is not.

When the moon pulls the tide away from the shore,  great lines of red seaweed  trace a delicate firm beauty on the sands that stay behind.  . . .  When tides of gossip pull away, what remains are gaping holes, crashed trust, ruined lives, misery.

_What brings order to my chaotic world is never gossip. It is instead the sympathy of distance, mountains made light by a floating line of ducks and a settled row of rocks. Gossip is just flotsam and jetsam, so much plastic trash to be raked, sorted, and bagged.

When skies collapse, the earth breathes.  Storms redraw our world by erasing distance and focusing shadow, highlighting as essential those tiny details more easily missed on brighter crisper wider days when what I notice are the broader strokes – the slant of the sun and the growth it encourages, fragile leaves, unfolding flowers, green hills, and all that rolls and rattles toward unreachable horizons. On sunny days, I am electric. My skin leaps out.

It may seem strange (even improbable) but on sunny days, I feel as if the wind offers me wings cut from the furthest edges of the sky and when I slip them on, all that blue above stretches my spine until I’m sure I’m on my way to stars, pulled way past the tops of trees. On stormy days, however, when blue skies are layered deep in grey, I am compressed, rolled into the earth. I feel in danger of short circuiting, blowing necessary fuses  . . . fortunately for me, I guess, I have discovered in this new non-fuse virtual world of motherboards and cloud computing, fused circuitry is easily replaced with the imaginary.

 
So let the fuses blow. As the rain draws in the details of otherwise dusty trees, washes clean the stones beneath, I fold into my heart, restart the dream.

That doesn’t mean I use rainy days as excuses to curl up under piles of blankets. When the rain came, I was up early and out early, anxious to discover some of those focused shadows, made more visible by changed light and the close quarters of a newly shuttered world. Like Francis Bacon who wrote in Novum Organinum that knowledge is built usefully from observable detail, I seek detail, knowing those details as representative of emotional states, collective decisions, that are at first invisible or insecure to the observer, but I never enter into a day certain as to what that day will offer me. I cherish that insecurity and what it yield, and here I part from Bacon and his belief that If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. I share his interest in doubt but have little interest in certainty.

Indeed, I have never encountered it.

On this day of rain, I was hoping for surprises – spiders descending suddenly from rain-sogged pine boughs,  shiny stalks of mushrooms pushing through previously dry soil, inexplicable blooms of earth and stone that might recall those pitch black airy explosions that happen on the hot bottoms of ovens when yams burst and drip sugar-sweet orange flesh onto metal. Of course, I found none of that. What I did find was detail revealing a much larger picture. Imagine, for example, spying the spoke of the wheel belonging to a chariot so huge, so fast and powerful that it might  erase the distance between earth and sun in less than the amount of time than it takes for a poppy to unfold ts petals. I found  distant views brought close, great trees bowed down, cities compacted by roiling clouds, light collapsed by dark. That kind of detail.

Sometimes it is very necessary to see small bits of the larger picture up close – especially in these times when the world seems to have lost all reason. How can it even be possible, for example, that Newt Gingrich is even being considered as remotely presidential? Now there's a detail that troubles me.

_Who would support a sadist who wants to expand Guantanamo Bay and advocates for “enhanced interrogation procedures,” i.e. torture, and a two-tiered justice system that includes military tribunals? Who would even listen to a homophobic man who as the co-author of the Defense of Marriage Act speaks hatefully about same-sex marriage and seems to feel that it might be good idea to reinstate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”? Who would even offer to listen to a miserable misogynist who supports a ban on granting Federal funds to any organization offering abortion services? Who would pay any attention at all to such a hater of freedom and free speech who believes the Patriot Act is a good thing and wants to expand its powers to provide closer and more intense surveillance of American citizens? Why would anyone vote for a mean-spirited narrow-minded man who supports the re-establishment of orphanages to save on welfare? How can there possibly be folks who would think it a good idea to have a man in the White House who abandoned his wife because “she’s too old to be the wife of a president and besides she has cancer”? Have Americans become so heartless, so cruel, that they would consider voting for such a mean man, or are they just impossibly stupid, ignorant of the man’s words and acts?

There he sits, beefy red, a detail focused by the fog, a festering sore on the body politic, a man who declares (and believes) that he “articulates the deepest felt values” of American voters. I certainly hope not, but as someone who understands how specific detail can reveal the larger picture, how a flower speaks the spring, how a tree etched into a rain-swept sky can outline the days of drought it has endured, I tremble. I hope this  boorish man is not representative of American thought and deed.

_ And so I rest my eyes (and my heart) on details that remind me of the power of the earth. I watch waters move from the ocean into the bay, think about the great distance those waters have traveled, recall the healing power of the sea. I watch rain drip from leaves, soak the earth below, and think of the simplicity of growth. I know when I am walking uphill under trees, watching the waters of the Golden Gate, I may be engaging in a sort of escapism, experiencing a kind of foolish hope, but I cannot allow myself to drown in the putrid swamps revealed by the pockmarked detail of mean-spirited nasty folk like Gingrich.

The Devil may well be in the details, but I have to believe that an awareness of those details and the larger picture that they represent can build useful knowledge, even wisdom, something that some might call salvation. I believe that to look closely is to remember well, making bold revision possible.

_ By early morning, the Great Storm of the winter season, scheduled to arrive several days ago, has finally produced a shift of heavy clouds that trap the glow of sunrise for more than an hour after it would have ordinarily faded from the sky. I snapped this photo just after 9am;  the sun rose at 7:22am.

  By mid-afternoon, when the rain finally arrives, I sit on the porch in the grey drizzle, tasting the outside of the storm and watching the street. Across the way, a young woman wearing a bright turquoise ball cap – _the brightest spot in all this grey – slouches down in a late model sports car, parked at the bus stop, talking on her phone. When the street sweeper rumbles up behind, she swings her car around to the other side of the street and then back again. When the bus slows and pulls to the curb, she flips on her headlamps and drives away. Her rhythm (or lack thereof) is emblematic of this rainy afternoon -- few cars, fewer people, and little sound other the rattle of the trains passing on the overpass at the end of the street. The rain -- gentle, breathless, and almost invisible -- has emptied the street. My dog has gone to sleep. Maybe I will, too.

_ I watch as a woman lifts her right hand to her nose.
At first, I think she thumbs her nose at the yachts,
but when I look closely, I see she breathes, deeply
slowly through one nostril at a time, drawing the fog
into her body until her left leg lifts from the ground
and floats like a sail behind her. When she drops
her hand, her leg falls down.  A pigeon flies up.

_ At the outdoor faucet, nearest to the beach
another woman stands barefoot, her trousers rolled.
She turns the faucet until the water runs strong,
then leans into the stream, splashes water
to her face, pulls back, allows the water
to flow away, soak the sand. She stands back,
bows quickly three times to the empty faucet.
She doesn’t turn away, doesn't scrub her feet.

_ A third woman at the edge of the bay keeps her back
to the fog but leans down to fan piled bird seed
into the air. A near-by clustered fist of pigeons
expands across the green, chasing the seed.

I go home.

Finally, it is 2012, a year that promises new beginnings, great wonder, much joy, and lustrous days.

If today was an example of what we might expect in the New Year, bring it on. What a gorgeous day -- clear warm and lucid. Mustard blooming white and gold by the roadside, exuberant waves breaking down to lace, delicate sun, kissing winds, great floppy elephant seals sunning themselves on the beaches, and the happiness of dogs.

Always the happiness of dogs.

Happy New Year, one and all.

May the coming year be as marvelous as any of us might imagine. May we all find ourselves lost in blue skies, shouldered into ocean waves, ankle deep in blushing sedum, blooming yellow gold and pink.

Life is good.

May there be Peace.

_ I am happy to be at the beach, happy to be sitting amongst the washed pebbles, searching for bits of greenstone. The ocean waves are wild, rambunctious and insistent. Great walls of green water roll over and end as a shimmer of lace that settles easily on the sand. I am made happy by the erratic rhythm of the sea, the deep voiced tumble of water against sand, the reedy whistle of the wind. There are children running on the beach and happiness.

Everywhere there is happiness.

Everywhere.

Peace.

This entry was written some time ago (about a week has passed) but never posted. Sorry.
*****
For the past week, we have been experiencing an atmospheric inversion over the Bay that settles smoke and grunge close to the earth, obscuring the horizon and making breathing more difficult.

And so, I watch the birds, grateful for their resilience. If we humans complain about the increasingly foul air, the birds seem completely unconcerned. I love to watch them, and more than watch, I love to listen to their honks and trills. While geese honk overhead, hundreds of Least Sandpipers run in great drifting  c0mmas up and down the shore, tinseling the air with their chorus of tiny peepings and pipings, sounding more like baby chicks than the full-grown birds they are. And then there are the great flocks of coots, grazing on the grassy stretches near Crab Cove, relatively silent and so uninterested in flight or water, they seem more like herds of placid fairy cows than birds.

They race about on their strange coral like feet, drifting this way and that, unconcerned with the more vociferous and ever present gulls that come sliding down to land on rocks, on sand but rarely on the great lawns so preferred by the American Coots.

Many of the shorebirds seem compacted as they float about on these colder darker oh-so-grey days of mid-winter. Wings clasped closely, necks tucked low, they bob on cold waters with an enviable patience that I feel as strongly as I do the escaping sun, and I value that patience, breathe it, taste it, hold it deeply inside my lungs. I am ever grateful toe the birds for buoying my spirit, reminding me of the coming of the light, the coming soon of spring.

The great egrets are no longer as common along the shore as they were some weeks ago. I think they have perhaps flown further south, down the coast to zones where nights are warmer, days just a tad longer than here where the dark thins by 7:30am and returns before 6.

There are times when mallards, flying in groups of three, land on the water simultaneously. The water rattles, sounding almost like a stuttering bell, and laced silver trails open behind the birds as they slice into water. I love both the sound and the sight.

Watching ducks, herons, egrets, gulls, sandpipers,lifting from the ground, resting on air, bobbing on waves, I am happy, once again connected to my beloved sea, stretching out beyond the mouth of the Bay, miles away but the birds can take me there.

The violence of city streets disappears. The dark of winter is washed with the light of wings. I cannot fly; I am not a bird, but I am inside the wind. I can taste it.

On the morning following the sudden and senseless gun battle in West Oakland that left eight people, including three children, wounded by bullets, a thick grey fog rolled in, obliterating any horizon line and settling all edges. As I walked through that morning fog, all the sea disappeared into sky. I did not despair its leaving. I was grateful for  the gentle grey erasing all distance and providing an evenness that returned small things, like rocks and tiny shorebirds, to a distinct and welcomed clarity. I needed the specificity and I also wanted world to wrap me, hold me, and hoped for the sky to descend, offer new breath welcoming and close. The fog did just that.

As I walked, I looked into the strange completeness of the fog and thought about the woman and baby not yet two years old lying in critical condition in separate hospitals; the baby with a gunshot wound to his head. He may not recover, but we are all hoping he will. The helplessness of that left me breathless, gasping in great draughts of fog and sea air.  I thought about the young men acting badly, firing guns repeatedly and thoughtlessly at a peaceful crowd of men, women, and children, and the wrongness of that forced me to exhale, rapidly. I leaned down, picked up a small stone, and hurled it as far as I could into the bay. I heard it splash but I never saw it fall.

The fog ate it.

We so frequently say of those who are lost, those who have strayed to violence, that their brains are foggy, they  are lost in a fog, but I think it might be more accurate to say that their hearts and minds are polluted by decay and misery, made heavy by hate. They are overwhelmed by smog rather than fog. Fog heals; fog nurtures flowers, feeds moss and grass. Smog eats metal, soils glass, corrodes plastics, causes cancers in hearts and minds.

When seabirds swim in oily seas, their wings grow heavy and they can no longer fly. When young men live congested lives, surrounded by violence and decay, that pollution sticks to their skin as readily as crude oil clings to feathers.  That's the oily smog that collapses their hearts and steals their breath, keeps them attached to hard metal violence, loving guns rather than flesh.

I wonder, longingly and stupidly perhaps, if those gun-toting maniacs were to walk instead in blue morning fog,  feel its breath, hear the splintered cries of seabirds, could they  feel the weight and grace of innocence?  Could they give up their guns?

The earth heals in ways beyond analysis. I know this not only because I walk daily near salt water, passing under great trees and skies alive with birds, but because I have memories of other years spent in other inner cities almost as violent as Oakland.

When my sons were small, we lived in South Brooklyn, where there were many suffering from smoggy brains and collapsed hearts, where streets were littered with trash, crack vials and discarded needles, and  nights were bursting with gunfire.

Sometimes, when the surrounding violence and decay became too sharp to bear, we would leave town for a day, drive north to still wild woods of High Tor, park our car behind some bush and walk along the narrow  and overgrown path that zigged and zagged under trees to the bald granite mountaintop. Then, we could stand tall, look up to clouds, down to  freight trains, the size of toys, chugging along the riverbank below as  equally small sailboats flew across the wide belly of the Hudson river, imagine the trains with steam engines pulling carloads of pioneers and the sailboats as ocean going schooners tacking across a current, pulling them out to sea. Standing there in the wind, staring across miles, we remembered how to dream, and when we returned to the inner city, we carried with us bits of the forest -- colored leaves, flowers, rocks -- and gathered bits of our imagined dreams.

If we could imagine sailboats as schooners, turn diesel train engines into black-throated beauties billowing steam, we could  certainly  imagine worlds without war, days without guns, mornings rich with laughter, night warm with love. Those days on the mountain gave us  back our hearts, revived our faith in our own ability to imagine better worlds.

A healthy society is one that celebrates and encourages imagination, and when winter arrives, we need our imagination more than ever. When light disappears into foggy dawns and dusky afternoons, we may be left with leafless trees and shadowless shores, but if we close our eyes and dream, that dreaming can pin leaves on branches, refill the skies with light. It may sound corny but when the season is at its darkest, when life seems dismal, when unhappiness overwhelms, we can imagine  the return of the light, replace shadow with sparkle, encourage joy. If we are what we think, if we imagine our future, I want to think peace, imagine a world without guns.

BANISH  HANDGUNS.

In the Bay Area, we are fortunate to live near some of the most beautiful wild beaches in the world -- Drakes Bay in Point Reyes National Seashore is my favorite -- and as West Oakland has easy freeway access, getting out of town is a breeze. Tuesday morning, showers were still lingering from Monday's ferocious storm, but my sister and I decided that as the clouds were moving swiftly south, we would drive north through the beauty of West Marin to Drakes Bay.

I had originally thought of driving across the Golden Gate and up the coast, past Muir Woods and along the high cliffs above Stinson Beach, but I could see that the storm had trapped great banks of billowing fog just north of the Golden Gate so chose instead to drive through San Rafael to Samuel Taylor State park and then on the beach. My hope was that we could first walk in the woods by Devil's Gulch near the salmon stream where trees are lush with moss and the air rich with the aroma of bay leaves. I'm not all that fond of driving through thick fog and knew if we went overland by the time we reached the coast, passing through forests and driving over rolling hills  and past grazing cows, the fog would thin to a more gentle mist.

And it did . . . somewhat. The forest was as lovely as I had first imagined it would be -- richly green with only wisping fog, delicate on exposed skin. Due to budget cuts, the park is officially 'closed,' but hiking is till allowed. We walked easily along the still well-maintained trail, watching red-tail hawks circling above grassy slopes, and then moving again under the forest canopy, we were surprised by a young deer bounding through the ferns and across the stream. It was the second deer we saw that morning – the first had wandered across a crowded urban street in San Rafael.

When we arrived at Drake's Bay, fog still clung to the coast, making walking on the beach a glorious pleasure. I may dislike driving in fog, but walking through it on a deserted beach feeds both skin and spirit. My body felt easily and delicately connected to both sky and land, and with every step, I entered into a graceful dance with the sea.

We were alone on the beach and walked its length, stepping easily around the mounds of seaweed brought ashore by the early morning high tide. As we walked, I told Lu of the great slabs of sedimentary rock crisscrossed with fossils, sometimes visible but today buried beneath the hard packed sand. I love the radical changes of the seashore.

 
That the sea can move tons of sand onto or off a beach, sometimes overnight, opens my world. If the sea can do that, I think (perhaps irrationally) it just might be possible for equally sudden yet even more beautiful changes to happen in the human world.  The sea acts in concert with the season -- currents shifting, tides rising, as the earth tilts, but certainly we humans react as strongly to our own tidal shifts. We bury reminders of a beautiful past as suddenly as the sea conceals the fossils of another age, and just as suddenly, we can brush aside the dust, the sand, the smoke, the pain that masks the beauty, conceals the hope. I want to believe that anyway.

As Monday's storm had rushed river mud into coastal waters, the breaking waves were tinted a pinkish rust, and that color hemmed the silver shimmer of the sea with playful lace. I apologize to those who might be annoyed at such a fragile description of this reality, but I have difficulty discovering words to describe what I felt as I walked through that fog with the sea drawing away from the shore and the sky slitting back to blue. I know it will sound silly if I say my body stretched from the beach to the horizon until every cell, every molecule,  every atom mingled with those of the lifting fog, but that is the case. I was emptied, but I was full.

When the sun began to slice apart the rich silver track of fog, I was back on earth, walking past the cliffs, watching two sea lions lifting their heads above the swell, recalling a day months ago when the beach near the lighthouse was packed with mother sea lions barking to their newborns who chirped and whistled like forest birds. Then, the park rangers had to stand guard over the large male who had chosen a strip of sand just feet from the busy parking lot as the perfect place for a days-long nap. Now, that parking lot is empty, the cafe closed. Most of the sea lions have gone out to sea. No park rangers anywhere, but the land still sings.

When an almost-tropical-winter-storm roars through the Bay area before October 15, dumping sheets of rain that leave streets running like rivers and parklands sogging into swamps, I wonder if  this storm too is the result of climate change, a harbinger of things to come, or if the only climate changing is the one that settles heat sinks beneath my skin and ice crystals in my bones?

I, of course, have no answers. I know only how lovely it was to walk yesterday afternoon as the storm pushed south over the open waters of the bay, leaving the park at Lake Merritt flooded and oh-so-green beneath clearing skies. Little Earnest and I walked on sandy trails, raging torrents only moments before, now sculpted smooth. Ours were the first footprints, mine flat and evenly paced, his sharp-toed and dancing from side to side. I felt like an explorer, and with his zigs and zags, it certainly looked as if Earnest felt as if he too were prancing over new territory, looking for what had been richly redolent only yesterday, nosing about under masses of oak leaves jammed into sodden piles, poking into tangles of pine needles. Now that all familiar smells have gone away, washed in rivers down to the bay, he adds his own.

When the sky sinks and settles on the earth as it does when paths fill with puddles, my spirit soars. I suppose the doubling of dancing clouds, the reversal of the order of things, offers me some kind of ecstatic ridiculous hope that the-world-as-we-know-it -- smeared with prejudice, violence and greed, overrun with poverty and war -- can be washed clean, return to a state of grace where the operative word is love. I know such whimsy is only a foolish dream (I'm not a complete idiot), but I allow myself to entertain its sparkle for that  brief bit of time when rivers of rain run down the slopes of the land to settle as temporary lakes. My own private Fairyland.

Tomorrow, I know crowds will return, perhaps with eyes darting this way and that, women clutching bags as they walk, men with one hand thrust in a pocket, the other flat against the chest. Today, I'm standing in beauty, thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr., hearing his voice, echoing across the lake of me.

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.

Unlike King, I can't declare with conviction that I will go forward from this day on to do "God's will." I'm an atheist.  Any promised land  I have seen is this one, here and now, the rain, the puddles, the silence, the music of the wind. I know when I die, I'm not going to any promised land. My eyes will close, my heart will stop, my breath will cease, and that will be it. The only chance I have to make any kind of difference is here and now in this paradise on Earth. I don't know think  "He" led me up the mountain, and I don't think "He" will save the world now or in the future.

I used my own two two feet to tromp with my little dog up to the Kings' proverbial mountaintop. I stand there for a moment, gaze out on the vast beautiful sky sky, look over the edge, and what I see when I look down at my world where I live, I can't accept. Too many guns. Too much greed. Too many wars.  I know I can't leave solution up to some all-seeing heavenly eye. I know I can't fix it alone, and I also know the only god I understand is the vibrating space between all living things, the connecting breath. Any solution requires working together with kindness to fill that space with love instead of gumming it up with greed and war.

Earnest and I walk alone today on these paths, and, yes, tomorrow more people, more dogs, will walk beneath the trees. Perhaps, they will greet one another with a smile of a wave. Perhaps when the grass dries, some will spread out their mats, sit in company and laugh. This is our world. We create it. We can make it beautiful with our smiles. If we hope, we can dream. If we dream, we can create peace.