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.
heartfelt, sun-blessed
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.
Welcome, please don't remove anything
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.
Add your prayers and your dreams
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.
after hopping down the bunny trail, rest and meditate
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