March has crept in like a lamb.
No lion here. No crunching bones.
No drooling jaws. No fierce storms.
Just fishtails in trees flicking sun
onto bareback winds, twisted flat
across the billows of night, warped
into acres of stars, armloads of bloom.
I don't believe the postman when he says
he saw the lion, greasy with spume,
crouched beneath the underpass
eating lemon grass and honey bees.
Then I hear that tree, a spreading oak,
its branches snapping,  rising on winds,
great limbs twisting like dandelion seeds
reinvented as bullets shot with unholy speed
into clouds wound as tight as springs.

I have been feeling purple blue  ever since the Occupiers went on their rampage through downtown resulting in the arrest of 400 and the "banishment" of a dozen. I was as disappointed by the arrests as by the violence; both actions resulted in expenditure of tax payer dollars that might have been better spent creating housing for the homeless, subsidies for public education, or any number of public works such as filling potholes, cleaning trash from parks, etc etc etc. In these still hard days of budget cuts, we don't need the expenses incurred by violence and mayhem, and we don't need more people behind bars. The United States is, as the ACLU correctly states, a nation behind bars. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. If we are going to find across the murky swamp of violence that has become commonplace in our cities, we need bridges, ways to communicate that work.

I don't  purport to have any concise precise answers; I know there is no magic wand to wave, but I also know that if we want generous loving lives in a compassionate world,  we need to revise old tired systems, abandon violence and war, long favored and applauded by the hierarchies of power, including most political systems and organized religion.

We're not going to save the world by maiming  and killing one another. I know what you're  thinking -- oh, goodness, how naive! Tell that to the politicians. Tell that to the corporate raiders. Tell that to every sneering mean-spirited pompous self-righteous man or woman who has blamed the poor for their poverty, the sick for their illness, the ignorant for their ignorance, the grieving for their sorrow.

Okay, do that.

Tell them, quietly and firmly, without shouting. Forgive student loans. Regulate financial systems and insurance companies. Adequately fund public education. Reduce the cost of health care and make it available to all. Help our world to bloom.

Elsewhere ice is still holding back the green, but here it is spring. Perhaps it's a spring too early, but it's spring, the season when imaginations run to dreams of peaceful days and visions of verdant summer gardens alive with fruit and flowers. True, this year rainstorms have gone missing, and that's a worry. There are more and more people crowded up against the coast, more and more water consumed daily, and the skies are brilliant blue even in the earliest morning hours.  No rain, but in all that blue, can't we find a rock near a hidden spring perhaps where we might anchor a human bridge that might take us hand over hand from old to new, here to there?

Or are we going to once again leave it up to God and/or Government?

I've always thought of God as nothing more than the space between, that which both holds us apart from one another and simultaneously provides connection,  a borderless place where we store all our knowledge, all our love.  The only God I know is love. I never could imagine 'a' God, slipped inside a body, perched upon a throne, soberly surveying the troubled paradise below. Thinking of God as that vibrant space between, human life can perhaps be imagined as the Bridge between.  We are the builders of the Bridge. We get to decide which stones we'll use, how much concrete we pour, how high our Bridge will soar, how far its reach. We can choose to eschew those flimsily manufactured pillars of violence and cruelty, choose instead to build the every day with sturdier stock, using only the willowy branches of love and hope lashed together with kindness and generosity.  As for Government.  .  .  well that would be us, wouldn't it? We the people, remaining flexible and fluid, retaining the dream.

Spring is a hopeful dreamy season, a kind Bridge built of earth spirits and sky shadows, one that allows us to slip from darkness into light. Nothing is yet ripe (except the citrus fruits, lemons everywhere) and anything rotten is being greedily consumed by the new growth of old plants. Bursting in bloom, flowering cherries and plums are redrawing horizons, coaxing winter skies to the earth below where those flowers that are the true markers of a Northern California spring -- poppies and oxalis -- are opening to the sun as exuberant and as brilliant as they are short-lived._

Life is short. Live lovingly. Do no harm. Practice random acts of Kindness. Be generous. Make art.

Why not?

Yesterday, was surprisingly warmer, no rain, and I found myself  walking about another unfamiliar neighborhood where there are more apartment buildings than there are houses. The houses nestling between the taller fatter but not necessarily sturdier apartment buildings are sometimes large, sometimes small. It is impossible to know why they are still here while other, equally venerable, I’m sure, have disappeared. It’s the sort of neighborhood where young twenty-something men toss footballs in front yards, looking every inch like well-composed ads for high-end sportswear. It's the kind of neighborhood where neatly detailed Porsches and BMWs are parked at the curb next to manicured sidewalk gardens overflowing with exotic plants that no one ever disturbs. No garden thieves here.

It’s the kind of neighborhood where dark-skinned women push red-cheeked blond babies in super-wide strollers as expensive as some cars and equipped with expansive sun shades above, shock absorbers beneath and huge shopping nets behind. Here elderly women walk small dogs so fluffy so orange so bedecked with bows and ribbons that they seem like stuffed animals on wheels. Should my scruffy terrier, ruffian that he is, try to say hello in the way dogs say hello, sniffing all parts that really matter, little Phoebe would be immediately swept up into her shocked Mama’s arms, out of harm's way. Here there are no heavy mesh security doors but plenty of discrete video cameras, recording every passer by. Windows have no metal bars  but are equipped instead with expensive tasteful shades, designed to allow light to enter yet keep anyone from seeing the domestic bliss within.

And, here, surprisingly, some houses brazenly display lawn ornaments, stubbornly (and thankfully) out of sync with  gold-leafed building numbers, marble entries, and copper gutters.

Behind this rusty dog, closer to the house, stands a tall yellow birdcage, empty except for a few sprays of always blooming plastic flowers and a hand-written sign that reads:

                                                                           Those who like to sing will always find a song.

In Northern California, spring arrives somewhat earlier than other more icy locales. It arrives in jazz step, sprinkling its glitter over winter's ineffectual attempts at showmanship. Trees just can't stand around bleak and bare-branched for long; buds break out, flowers open, before the last leaves fall. Right now, in these first days of January, expanses of once bare ground are buzzing green, and flowers expectantly greeted as harbingers of spring in northern climes are already blooming.

Paper white narcissi perfume the air and the sturdier later daffodils push both leaves and folded buds valiantly towards the sun. In my front yard, the lone fragrant hyacinth that returns year after year is already showing its  tightly wrapped stalk, and if this warm weather holds, that those packed buds will soon fall out, open ice-cream pink and sweet.

The light has returned. That's all it takes to bring winter to its knees -- a soupcon of extra sun, splashed on the edges of each day. Just yesterday, I was walking up and down the streets of Albany, waiting for my car to be serviced, and passed magnolias stripped of their leaves when the sun retreated and the days grew dark, now suddenly alive with fuzzy green toes of folded leaves and fatter fists of pink that  with the tiniest encouragement from the palest bit of sun, will soon unfold to exotic blooms.

_Even  ordinarily sedate trees, always green, never flashy, are dressing up in multiples -- thousands of tiny flowers as inconspicuous as they are exuberant bloom happily in the shade, rising up to the new light. Camouflaged by leaves, this sudden flowering,  with each bloom cupping its own drop of dew, is more beautiful to me than the white snow roses that bravely bloom even when the days are darkest, the nights too long. Oh, don't get me wrong -- I love that something as fragile as a rose will continue to bloom in spite of displaced light and too low temperatures. Such ruggedness disguised as delicacy is magnificent, but what really makes me shiver is the suddenness of unexpected spring bloom. Flowers that come and quickly go. I love those flowers that will not -- cannot -- stay.

_The last day. 2011 is whittling away, hour by hour. Last night, there were fog horns. This morning, sirens and sun, more sun than has been around in the last few weeks, so much sun that I can smell spring, feel summer rising before the New Year even arrives.

This is that time of year when we all resolve to live joyously and peaceably, and I so resolve. I list my resolutions, noting well the first that pop to mind. I shall do no harm to myself or others. I will walk daily to discover beauty, taste grace. I will write daily, read daily. I vow to eliminate sugar from my diet (is that even possible?), eat vegetables locally grown, rice and millet, only eat soy if it has been fermented. I will laugh more.

I leave my house before 9am, hoping to find flowers happy in the new sun, and I am not disappointed. I expect to find only tiny flowers, nestled in strong waxy green leaves, thus protected  from cold winds and icy night fogs, and I do. Small cheerful laurel flowers make me smile, but it's the flush of thousands of pink white bloom blanketing the ordinarily sedate jade plants that makes me laugh out loud. There is perhaps nothing more delicate, more hopeful, more joyful and ironically perhaps more robust than a jade plant blooming wildly in the dead of winter. It's a plant ready to dance.

I can imagine this great rounded bush, tossing its red-edged skirts of leaves, smoothing out the lace frock of flowers and calling out to seabirds Dance, dance dance! The great egrets I think would oblige.

Arriving home, I see that my Iceland poppy, stalled in bud stage for weeks, has sprung suddenly into spectacular bloom. I sit for a while on the steps, basking in the sun, thinking of nothing in particular, enjoying the flicker of sun as it settles into crumpled paper-like petals of the poppy, so exuberant, so brilliantly almost-fire-red. I hope the second bud unfolds tomorrow before noon; it's wonderful to have the sun so early and so close to the ground.

I think again how magnificent it is to live in a place where winter is so fragile that one morning of glorious sunshine can banish winter's sober mood, distill a damp grey morning to a fine aromatic liquor so lustrous that even the sharpest wind smiles and breathes. I am grateful for that.

If I glance to my right, I see my struggling rose, still damp with yesterday's rain and last night's fog, has also decided to bloom. A pale and perfect New Year bloom. If the poppy is the sun, this rose is my moon.

How pleasant to have day and night at my elbows.

How joyous to watch as seasons refuse the crisp divisions we humans have afforded them, instead join hands like cautious lovers, glancing shyly at one another. Spring poppies, summer roses, bare winter branches, happily at home with one another. There are even still the red leaves of autumn, made even more brilliant by empty spaces left between. Where once was green, now bare branches scratch up against blue sky. Winter cannot overcome the fall; spring is always pushing through and summer is never far behind. Our California seasons are a symphony.

_Happy New Year.

May the coming year be alive with marvels, wonder, joy, and peace.

Walking yesterday along the shore, watching helicopters buzz officiously above the UC-Berkeley campus, I stumbled on this quiet welcoming place, hidden amongst  tall seeding fennel and waving shore grasses.  I stopped there briefly and breathed, grateful for the silence, the kindness, the whimsy.

Somebody spent long hours gathering these heavy stones and bits of smashed concrete, placing them gently against one another to create a rugged terrace that might  provide a dry place to sit and dream when rains come. Even if the surrounding dirt paths turn to mud as well they might, here is a place to rest and meditate.

This quiet heart-place, near a little-used unpaved bike path that snakes along the Bay south of the Berkeley Marina, provides walkers quiet communion both with the land and with the spirit of those who created it, those who have visited, and those who have spent time sitting peaceably on the stones, listening.

Although surrounded by rugged treeless wild land, covered with the unchecked growth of weeds and grasses, this urban sanctuary remains strongly connected to the human world. The incessant whine of  the nearby freeway overwhelms the softer sounds of birds or water lapping on the nearby shore, but that is somehow okay.  The traffic noise is as raw and rangy as is the land and the tiny sanctuary that rests upon it. This is a place of active awareness, an urban wilderness, a human place for human rest.

The power walkers who march heartily and sometimes hastily around the track up at the Berkeley Marina rarely find their way down to this more hidden and less panoramic trail. A trail that ends at the water does not invite joggers or those who need to turn endlessly into their own beginnings. Instead, it offers solitude, a place to breathe and think. While walking the length of the trail, throwing a stick and then a ball for little Earnest to chase, we met only a father and son carrying binoculars, hoping to see birds amongst the tall grasses. They were interested in far distance being brought close, but not being so equipped, I was happy to see what was close by and found these signs of welcome and joy, imagined then the connective distance that such nearness creates and modifies. The threads between then and now, creator and viewer, empty and full.

Closeness feeds me. The small, the near. I am less interested in grand gestures or widespread expansion yet love to rest my eyes on far horizons. The horizon and the distance between that unreachable place  and me  open my heart to a tender love for myself and for this place, the sea, the land, the grand space that nurtures the small, the seed, the still. I am interested in growth, but growing greater or larger, greatest or largest, hold little interest for me. I prefer the boundless,  the space between, to any comparative measure. How happy I was today to discover this small place that reached out to a limitless world of consciousness and grace.

Yesterday's rain has passed, and the sky is washed clean. Air smells of damp earth and newness. The clocks are shifted, an hour gained. I enjoy that hour walking about the mostly quiet streets of West Oakland. St. Patrick's has its doors thrown open, and music  spills down the steps, voices singing words I cannot understand. It makes me happy just to hear the song.

And then, I turn the corner and discover a pile of trash dumped on the still blooming garden, the beautiful garden planted in the narrow strip of land between the sidewalk and the street.

Two things make this spillage unusual. First the trash has not been dumped at a corner (the more ordinary place for illegal dumping) and second, the objects dumped are not various. Everything dumped here belongs in the life of a small child. A child-sized mattress, wrapped in plastic, lies in the street. A deflated wading pool, neatly rolled, spills from a plastic bucket. A battery-operated motorcycle, minus its front wheel, is on its side on the dirt.

And on the other side of the blooming Scotch Broom,  a very clean white teddy bear is face down in the dirt, spilled from a laundry basket that still contains a DVD player and two soggy Disney movie DVDs. I am sobered by this sight, made sad. The dump hints at loss, unspeakable miserable sorrowful.

Who threw away these small pieces of a small life and why? That someone would heave these objects atop of blooming flowers suggests either great anger or great sorrow.

Cover the beauty with great pain.

UPDATE: One hour after taking these pictures, while church members were still inside praying, a 14-year-old was shot maybe twenty feet from the teddy bear with its face to the ground. The block where I walked this morning is now cordoned off with yellow tape, stretching from the chain-link fence outside the school to the wrought iron fence of the church.

OUTLAW HANDGUNS.

Autumn is in full swing in the East Bay, and it does swing. Roses are giving their all; flowers that do not bloom in the high sun of summer are now blooming madly. Purple sage, cosmos, chrysanthemums, marigolds, and blood red amaranth.

Early mornings stay dark and mid-morning is a time of block long shadows that swell the size of my world. The palm tree that has spent all summer stuffed behind  chain a link fence, reaching expectantly and decorously for blue sky, has now escaped to the street beyond, its trunk gone shadow grey, snaking down the sidewalk, steely fronds fanning into the intersection.

I walk, forgetting that I have slept only fitfully recently because of surveillance helicopters, hovering over the downtown Occupy encampment, making a racket. Our tax dollars wasted. Thursday night, I peered from my window, saw the three north stars of helicopter heaven, blinking and trembling, rattling the sea of the sky, and had to wonder what was birthing beneath.

A new tent city, that's what.

Today when I visited OCCUPY : OAKLAND, the lawn was once again covered by tents, not quite as closely packed as previously but as neatly organized. The paths between the various neighborhoods of tents had been marked out with silver tape and wooden sidewalks were beginning to be laid down. An efficient kitchen was up and running, and the food being served looked as tasty and more plentiful than before. The First-Aid booth had reappeared and seemed to be well stocked. A hand-washing station, complete with bottles of hand sanitizer, had been set up under the bust of Frank Ogawa, steps from lines of portable toilets, more numerous and some fancier than before.

People were crowded on the amphitheatre steps, enjoying the sun, eating lunch, and listening to a young man speaking about  Bank of America's recent shifting of trillions of dollars worth of spongy derivatives from Merrill Lynch into its retail bank coffers.

On the periphery of the still forming tent city, candles were burning around pictures of Scott Olsen, the young marine,  still recovering from a serious head injury inflicted by a 'non-lethal' police projectile.

A silk screen artist was printing up dynamic posters -- Hella Occupy Oakland, Power to the People -- and other folks were roaming about passing out bumper stickers (99%) and flyers announcing the General Strike, called for Wednesday, November 2.

After leaving the encampment, I walked on to the community garden near the lake. A friend and I had planned to speak with Saturday visitors about growing herbs and making medicinal herbal teas. I found the lake park as crowded as the Plaza at City Hall, but it was crowded with bicyclists, race walkers, joggers, and children dressed as fairies and clowns, pirates and princesses, superheroes and one bug with very very long antennae. Ordinary folk out to enjoy the weekend of Halloween . . . the very people, the life, that the determined folks of Occupy : Oakland are struggling so hard to protect.

Thank you. You have my admiration.

As the local news has been issuing dire warnings about the imminent demise of OCCUPY: OAKLAND, giving reasons of increased violence and a mounting garbage problem, Saturday morning, Day 13 of the 'occupation', I decided I would walk around the neatly organized and growing tent city and see how folks were getting along.

 As I walked about, I found myself within a peaceful and productive community that had become better organized and visibly increased in size and scope since my last visit.  A well-marked tent for first-aid sits at the north end of the camp; two cook tents at the south. Around the perimeter of the camp are tents stocked with all kinds of supplies for campers in need-- including a first-aid tent and one that offers free clothes -- 'fresh shirts socks pants shoes, different colors of fabric.' Neat wooden pathways,  wide enough to accommodate walkers strolling side by side, are swept clean and arranged as friendly paths that wend their way through the tents, which are far more numerous now than earlier in the week. Some pathways even have names. Solution Avenue. Walk here and find the way.

While I was walking about, a young man -- not a city employee -- was sweeping the surrounding terraces and another was picking up the few bits of paper that had escaped the numerous garbage cans. I must say, the encampment was cleaner than many of the surrounding city streets.

Someone (the campers?) had erected a flexible fence around the beautiful spreading tree in the plaza and someone else had placed hand-written signs against the fence, asking all to respect the life of the tree: Protect this tree, Fragile Roots, read two signs placed side-by-side. Another  propped near the first tworead:

Roots are Strong, Fragile Branches.

That second sign might be appropriated as a motto of the movement. These 'Occupy' campers do have strong roots, fixed to American soil, and the peace branches that they extend -- let's fix this -- are indeed fragile (and graceful). It's fabulous that these peace campers do believe in the truth and possibility of a hopeful joyful productive future, embracing the many not just the few. Take a walk down Solution Avenue, and see what you find sprouting there.

Since my last visit,  even more cheerful gardens have sprouted -- in planters and in containers. All the baby plants seem to be thriving, and the growth is a welcome sight on the city street, reminding passers-by that vast acreage is not necessary to grow vegetables for the table. The mini-garden pictured below is positioned conveniently close to the cook-tent. Yes, there is a cook-tent where campers can get simple or not so simple smiles and meals from volunteer cooks. This experiment in open community enriches us all.