A Word Witch

The Bear

2011-10-12T00:17:00.002-04:00

If I get behind one more logging truck or big pickup and can’t see far enough ahead to pass, I think I’ll scream. The speed limit through Georgia is only 55, and I’m on a two-lane highway through pecan groves and cotton fields, rows of peanuts and planted pines, crossing bridges over rivers and creeks, headed to the writing workshop. I gun the red Prius up to 80 mph to pass the big white Ford F350 in front of me with the large black tarp slung across the bed.

As I get closer, my focus shifts and I notice what looks like a mammoth, black, hairy human foot dangling off the passenger’s side of the truck. “What the heck!” I mutter, doing a double take as my car’s speed increases and I draw even with the truck bed.

It’s not a tarp I’m seeing. It’s a huge, hairy, black body, the head—with red mouth agape—hanging off the driver’s side. A bear. Dead. With a large bullet hole open and angry, a jagged ruby wound in the creature’s huge chest.

“Oh, shit!” I exclaim to myself. “Damn!” I grip the steering wheel harder and feel the muscles in my shoulders freeze up. I suck in my breath and work to keep my focus on the road as I pass the truck and its inert cargo while a great silent wail, a tsunami of hot energy, moves up from below my belly and out the top of my head.

I remember the mantra of Chenrezig, the great pearlescent bodhisattva who, unblinking, views the sufferings of sentient beings throughout the worlds—and I begin to chant his mantra that relieves those sufferings, OM MANI PADME HUNG, OM MANI PADME HUNG.

I wonder how the bear died. Was he roaming alone through what he thought was safe forage, looking for berries or honey? Did he feel the wind through the pines, the wind ruffling his thick fur? What were his bear thoughts in the final moments of his life, before the rifle blasted that hole through his heart? Was he aware, in those last seconds, that something had gone awry in his world? Did he feel a giant stabbing pain when the bullet tore away his flesh and scattered his life force, or he did drop all of a sudden to the ground there in the middle of the forest, with the berries ripening and the bees humming and the wind making its wild music in the pines with autumn coming in? What was the last thing he saw? What strange bear image counted as his last thought?

I’m in Georgia, I remembered. Bear hunting is probably legal here.

I feel like I’ve been shot through the heart.

I wrote this piece at a workshop where we were asked to convey an emotion by describing our sense impressions. Do you know which emotion I'm describing here?

An Open Letter to Florida Governor Rick Scott

2011-10-11T22:37:00.004-04:00

October 11, 2011

Governor:

Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to address you as “dear.” I hope you’ll understand. J

I just read an article that’s attributed to The Miami Herald in which you are quoted as saying, “How many more jobs you think there is for anthropology in this state? You want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can't get jobs in anthropology?"

I sure hope you were misquoted, for a couple of reasons. To begin: Every school child learns that subjects and verbs need to agree, and your first sentence reads like an elementary school dropout is speaking. What you should have said was, “How many more jobs DO you think there ARE for anthropology in this state?” But with journalism not being what it once was, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that maybe the reporter goofed here. Stranger things have happened. You’ve probably been involved in stranger things yourself, like that time when you were running HCA Inc. and they settled the largest Medicare fraud case in history for $1.7 billion.

But yeah, I know your mama thinks you’re a good boy. She said so in all those ads you paid for when you bought…oh, sorry…when you got elected governor of Florida.

Now about anthropology. I know a little bit about anthropology because it was my undergraduate major at the University of South Florida; that’s the big school just north of Tampa off I-275, in case you don’t know, because I know you haven’t lived in Florida all that long. I’ll put a picture of something from the school at the top of this article so you can see what it looks like.

This will probably shock you, but I didn’t pick my major to qualify me for a job. I picked it because I loved the subject matter and because it expanded my knowledge about the world and other cultures, and because knowing those things made me a better person and a better citizen of the United States.

By the way, I have to tell you that I love the U.S.A. I was born here—in Texas! where that Rick Perry lives, the one you like so much. My dad served on a destroyer in WWII and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who did the cooking and the housework and baked great pies. While I was growing up, my dad worked in the defense industry and, for a while, in the Federal Aviation Administration. I registered to vote as soon as I was old enough, and I think I’ve voted in every election since then.

Anyway, back to anthropology. Anthropology has a special characteristic that sets it apart from other academic disciplines—the “holistic viewpoint.” What this means is that anthropologists don’t try to understand just one aspect of a culture. Let’s use politics as an example. If I were trying to understand the politics of Florida, I’d examine not just politics but religion, economic systems, social customs, history, languages, health care systems, maybe even the environment, to see if and how each of those things influenced politics. I guess this means I’d investigate whether our politicians were actually representing the people of Florida, or whether they were being paid off by corporate lobbyists to do the bidding of big business. But I digress. J

I loved my studies in anthropology and I graduated with honors. I went on to get a master’s degree in another subject out in California, and I spent most of my adult life working full-time in higher education institutions. No, I never had what you could call a job “in anthropology,” but I sure used what I learned in anthropology in every single job I ever had.

I never made a lot of money, though. I guess this means you will automatically think of me as a failure. But see, that was a choice I made. I wasn’t happy working at institutions where money was the be-all and end-all of existence. I was happier helping people, learning new things, and trying to be of service to the arts, literature, and the environment, because those things are really my passions.

So when you ask “You want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can't get jobs in anthropology?" I have to answer yes. I didn’t get “jobs in anthropology” but I don’t think Florida’s tax dollars were wasted on me. I don’t think those tax dollars would be wasted on students today, either.

I’ve been a productive citizen ever since I got my bachelor’s degree. I’ve always worked. My education in anthropology helped me to think critically—even creatively—to look at the “big picture,” to appreciate the value of a liberal arts education, to respect people who disagreed with me or held different opinions, to shun labels and sound bites, to think independently, to analyze things, to ask questions and not settle for easy or simplistic answers, and to take seriously my responsibilities as a citizen of my country—including voting.

Oh, wait…something is coming to me. An insight. Could it be…? No. I sure hope not. Well, I have to ask anyway.

Is the reason you don’t want people to study anthropology because you don’t want people like me out here asking questions about you when you run for re-election? And then going to the polls to vote? Now that I think about it, I’m really curious about your answers to these questions.

Looking forward to the courtesy of your reply,

A Word Witch

Old September

2011-09-29T22:52:00.002-04:00

School didn’t start, then, until after Labor Day—probably because it was so hot before then that our brains refused to work in un-air conditioned classrooms, and no teacher in his or her right mind wanted to deal with sweaty, unfocused teenagers with greasy faces who stank of sticky 6-12 gnat repellent and raging hormones.

Shopping for school was fun, though. I remember the cedary smell of new pencils, with shavings that curled happily into gray hand-cranked sharpeners that clung to the walls of our classrooms; the snappy click-click of new ballpoint pens and the careful slurping up of thick black ink from glass bottles into old-fashioned fountain pens; the hard bright snaps of shiny three-ring binders; the rustle of new lined notebook paper with holes already punched; the time spent carefully lettering plastic index tabs in bold red, green, blue, and yellow for English, math, science, civics. If I was lucky, I got to pick out a couple of new skirts and blouses, a new snuggly sweater, a pair of soft leather Capezio flats in the year’s latest color, and a fresh lipstick and bottle of nail polish chosen after careful perusal of the latest sultry Revlon ads in Glamour and Mademoiselle magazines.

Orlando in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a sleepy little cow town. The only real shopping districts were on Orange Avenue—where Ivey’s and Dickson-Ives department stores faced off on one corner—and the specialty shops in upscale Winter Park. Drive farther out of town in any direction, and what you found were used car lots, cow pastures, or orange groves as far as the eye could see. No Disney.

September meant weekdays filled with classes and evenings filled with homework, Thursday afternoon pep rallies, Friday night football games with friends, giant floodlights, Coke, and popcorn. September was languid Saturday mornings with the weekend stretching out ahead like a river and, often, Saturday night movies. Sundays were church in the morning, after-church lunch at Morrison’s cafeteria, and late afternoon drives with my parents.

“Let’s go for a drive!” my dad would cry, and clap his hands, and we’d pile into the car just for the fun of driving around, seeing what we could discover on back roads outside of town when the light took on a golden glow and began to slant in shimmery rays through oaks and Spanish moss, through tall pines and spreading orange groves, with the smell of wood smoke from bonfires and cooking fires wisping through the countryside.

Sometime in September, usually right around my birthday near the equinox, we could tell that the quality of light was changing and the weather was shifting, too. Out there on the dirt back roads between Gotha and Windermere, Clermont and Ocoee, DeLand and Cassadaga, early twilight brought a cooldown or even a chill, and we’d reach for the sweaters we’d brought in the car and start murmuring happily about the hot cocoa, marshmallows, and chocolate chip cookies that waited for us at home. On the best of these late afternoon drives, we’d watch the harvest moon come up over the groves, big and orange and brilliant in the smoky blue-dark dusk.

Back then, September was truly the beginning of fall—the month of welcome relief after the long, oppressive summer heat. I’ve never been able to decide what caused my spirits to lift more—my birthday, the new school year, or that first beautiful fall chill. I suspect the answer was “all of the above.”

The memories of those long-past autumns haunt me now, not so much because my parents are dead and buried—although that’s certainly a factor—but mainly because lately we are well into October or even November before we get the fall cooldown that was once September’s hallmark. I live two hours north of Orlando now, so I reckon from past experience we should be feeling fall sooner, not later, but that’s not the case.

Climate change, they say. Global warming, they say. And while there are naysayers, it does seem as if a great majority of the world’s climate scientists agree that something is going on that’s given the earth a fever, and we human beings may be the germs that are causing that disease.

So lately, fall has been a disappointment. My birthdays come and go, and harvest moons rise and set, with no perceptible change in the weather. My Halloween socks lie unused in their dresser drawer until almost Thanksgiving. Instead of sharpening pencils or filling fountain pens and squeezing into a rickety wooden desk chair, I take my seat on a Steelcase ergonomic marvel at my big-screen iMac. It’s not school that occupies my thoughts now, but writing, drought, and the sorry state of our rivers and freshwater springs.

I do still get a rush, though, when the back-to-school shopping flyers start to appear. I think I’ll take a Facebook friend’s advice and do some school shopping next fall and donate what I buy to Stuff the Bus, a local organization that accepts donations for needy students.

Maybe it’s because I’d given up hope, or maybe it’s just a total quirk, or maybe it’s some other reason that I can’t know, but we’ve been blessed this year with what’s felt, at least for a couple of weeks, like an old September. The first break in the heat came just before Labor Day, with another, longer, cooler break—nights down in the 50s and highs in the 80s—a couple of weeks after that. I’ve been tempted to clap my hands and holler, “Let’s go for a drive!” but with gas at $3.50 a gallon, I’ve hesitated.

But tomorrow is the last day of the month, and like a gift, we’re getting a cold front, with forecast lows in the 50s for September 30 and 40s for October 1. Maybe I should throw a party.

Or maybe I should just take a long drive out an old country road. I’ll take a sweater, and I can look forward to a big steaming mug of hot chocolate and marshmallows once I get home. Maybe the fragrant smoke from wood fires will waft like ghosts through the late afternoon sun that glows in golden shafts through big live oak branches and Spanish moss. Maybe I can spot the fingernail-thin crescent moon, just past new and beginning to wax, near the Western horizon. In a perfect world, the moon would ride there accompanied by bright Venus or shiny Jupiter, sparkling like heavenly messengers.

Yup, I think I’ll take that drive, because this might be the last old September I’ll ever have.

Thanks to Forrest Stowe for the use of his photograph, above.

Crying River

2011-08-27T20:42:00.007-04:00

fourth largest spring in the world

cave wide as a

four-lane highway

deep as a

five-story building

primeval river

home to Creatures

great and small

real and unreal

alligators in the grass

gill men in their lairs

skinny-necked anhingas dry wings

on baldcypress

yellow-legged moorhens tend babies

on the banks

heron, ibis, cormorant

egrets in young plumage

mer-manatee

cardinal flowers among

wax myrtle, islands of

clear water amid murk

algae-coated eelgrass

“Once so clear it was transparent 120 feet down”

says the ranger

now

cloudy bluegreen water

covers head spring

the ranger says

“overpopulation”

the ranger says

“nitrates”

it will be clear again someday

he says

“nature will take care of it”

we won’t see it

I hear echoes of

my geology teacher:

“If these springs ever get polluted,

it will take thousands of years for them

to get clean”

Would Tallahassee move its spray field

for this wonder?

Couldn’t we all use

less water?

How do we dissolve nitrates, phosphorus?

How do we reverse the damage?

Above the spring

I search for my reflection

See only cloudy murk

And ask myself

Why didn’t I come 20 years ago?

What took me so long?

And I cry, Wakulla

I cry

Wakulla

Bad Romance: Ponce de Leon, Bathing Beauty, and Florida’s Fountains of Youth (Part 2)

2011-07-31T12:05:00.003-04:00

Confronted with the wilderness of 16^th-century Florida, it’s understandable why the early Spanish explorers were concerned with taming the land. That taming was necessary, they thought, so that civilization—businesses, governments, towns and cities, agriculture, trade routes and roads, reliable forms of communication—could be established. For civilization to thrive, wilderness—at least a certain amount of it—had to be destroyed.

So from that spring day in 1513 when Ponce first named it and claimed it, wild Florida has been swallowed, first by the Spaniards and then by the French, English, and Americans—up to and including Bathing Beauty and her friends who, because there were more of them, did greater environmental damage than Ponce and the early Spanish explorers could ever have dreamed of.

At DeLeon Springs State Park—where I first encountered Ponce and Bathing Beauty standing arm-in-arm on a large sign outside the park entrance—I came across an old newspaper article titled “Developer Burt Pushed DeLeon Springs Growth.” There’s one sentence in this article that provides the briefest Florida history lesson ever written: “Where Ponce de Leon saw a wilderness, Fred N. Burt saw a great opportunity.” This same history, of course, is also a history of the places we have lost.

So now, in the very early part of the 21^st century, our wetlands have been drained, rivers straightened, canals cut. Golf courses, amusement parks, swimming pools, lawns, and utility companies are sucking up more and more water every day, while water-bottling companies seize opportunities to make a private profit from a public resource. Unregulated fertilizers and septic tanks are leaching nitrates that cause unbridled algae growth in our rivers and streams and, yes springs. Poor Florida has been cleared, dredged, mined, developed, fertilized, and irrigated nearly to death. Paradise has been paved over for parking lots and strip malls. This insanity continues unabated, in part because the State of Florida won’t lift a finger to help; instead, our government seems hell-bent on wrecking all that remains that is wild and beautiful.

And Florida’s world-famous fountains of youth—natural treasures worthy of being a National Park or a World Heritage Site—have begun to sicken and die.

White Springs on the Suwannee River in North Florida and Kissengen Springs in Central Florida were two of the first springs to go dry. Springs that used to be clear, sparkling gems have turned green and cloudy with algae that are choking off the eelgrass and other underwater plants. Swimmers have complained of allergic reactions, probably to toxins in the algae. Ichetucknee Springs has lost about 20 percent of its flow over the last 25 years.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that if we’re going to save our springs, we will have to do it ourselves. We’re going to have to end this bad romance of Ponce de Leon and Bathing Beauty.

I’d like to think that if she knew what was really going on—if she didn’t have eyes only for that darkly handsome Spaniard—Bathing Beauty would be shocked at what’s happened to Florida and how our springs have been hurt. I’d like to think she’d feel that shock in a visceral way, as a nauseated knot in her stomach, the same way I feel it. I’d like to think her shock would be enough for her to give up the idea that we can keep on doing what we’ve been doing for 500 years and not lose our fountains of youth forever.

And after she takes her first gasp at what’s happened, I want Bathing Beauty to drop Ponce’s arm. I want her to grab his hand instead, and lead him as fast as she can to the bank of that spring he’s got his eyes on. I want Ponce to take off his helmet and strip off his armor and his boots and his gloves and those silly striped things he’s wearing—yes, even his skivvies. I want Bathing Beauty to lose the bathing suit.

I want them to jump into the turquoise spring stark naked, to feel the cold water take their breath away, to open their eyes to the underwater world around them, to dive and dive again toward the cave where pure water gushes out from porous limestone, to marvel at whatever clarity still remains. I want them, then, to surface, to revel in the sunlight and the water on their skin, the breeze across their faces as they float, finally still, beneath the overhanging trees. And then I want them to swim, to dive, and swim and float again.

I want them to climb from the spring bone tired, but feeling like they’re teenagers who have just discovered this miraculous fountain for the very first time. I want them to make mad, passionate love on the bank of the spring and then go back into the water.

I want them to love the springs as I have loved them—madly, passionately, in the height of summer and the dead of winter and the seasons in between, in the morning and at noon, in the twilight and the darkness, under the sun and under the moon. I want them to feel how sometimes the shock of cold water is the only pure thing in the world. I want them to vow to do everything they possibly can, beginning right now, to make sure that our fountains of youth never fade.

I want them to know this love that never dies.

Bad Romance: Ponce de Leon, Bathing Beauty, and Florida’s Fountains of Youth (Part 1)

2011-07-31T11:56:00.004-04:00

They’re an unlikely couple—a hero of the Old World walking arm-in-arm with a maiden of the New—and in their bad romance we can read a story about the waters of La Florida, land of flowers, our beautiful sunshine state.

That’s Ponce de Leon stepping forward out of the 1500s—1513, to be exact—with the pursed-lipped, rigid determination worthy of a manly explorer who is eager to claim new territories for Spain. He is almost totally shielded from the elements: long sleeves and pants to ward off mosquitoes and all manner of biting and stinging insects; boots to protect him from palmettos, ants, sandspurs, and snake bites; armor to deflect native arrows; and gloves to help him hold on to tree limbs as he makes his way downslope through the thick, prickly underbrush that lines our rivers and encircles our springs—those cool turquoise fountains that sparkle like hundreds of diamonds in the sun.

Ponce is on a forward track because he is searching for a singular spring—the fountain of youth—the legendary waters of which, the natives say, revitalize the mind and body and slay the passage of time. He is so focused on his quest that he seems to be ignoring Bathing Beauty.

Clothed in her own skin and the color of the springs themselves, Bathing Beauty in her one-piece suit is a 1940s youthful foil to Ponce’s elder figure. With free-flowing hair and bare arms, legs, and feet, she has consciously surrendered to the elements and to whatever biting, stinging, prickling thing might come her way. She is exposed and vulnerable, but she is not at all worried. She has eyes only for Ponce, her protector, and her small smile hints at her deep regard and affection for him.

Ponce, the darkly handsome Spanish conqueror, could easily be the villain in this story. Certainly he represents the oppression and decimation of the native population as well as the environment. He is alienated by his attitude and attire from the surrounding elements. Perhaps he’s even a cold-hearted lout whose lust for discovery and fame means more to him than the love of this good woman.

And Bathing Beauty—young, beautiful, blonde—could easily be our heroine. She stands united with the elements, her feet firmly planted on the earth, her skin exposed to sunlight and breezes, her bathing suit proof that she will soon immerse herself in water. Her expression radiates a benevolence that makes it doubtful whether she’s ever decimated or oppressed anyone in her short life.

But Ponce and Bathing Beauty have more in common than you might think. He has, after all, given her his arm, and she has taken it. The bad romance has begun.

If you had told me when I was growing up in Orlando in the late 1950s and early 1960s that Florida would ever have water problems, I would have laughed at you. But when Bathing Beauty took Ponce de Leon’s arm, she also took on that Old World mindset that the New World and Nature were ripe for vanquishing—a mindset that has continued throughout the five centuries since Ponce first set boot on Florida sand, with heartbreaking consequences for Florida’s springs.

I know about the springs because I’ve grown up with them since I was in the fifth grade, when my family settled in Orlando. It was after that, on a school trip to a park near Apopka—a place called Rock Springs—that I had my first immersion experience. I was entranced by the transparency of this aquamarine world where fish, eelgrass, even sand and limestone at the bottom of the spring were indelibly clear. I was transported to a transparent world unlike anything I had ever seen before.

Even more enchanting, though, was the feel of this water—cool, clear, pure, clean—as it washed over my scalp, my face, my whole body. This was water like no other, water that could refresh not only the body but also the mind and the senses—surely the holy grail of water experiences. It was easy for me, on that day and on many days since, to imagine why people would think that a spring like this one might be the fountain of youth.

That day, I began my own romance with Florida’s springs—a good romance that continued through my high school and college years and even when I moved, for a while, across the country.

I can still name the springs where I was swimming as I marked the different milestones in my life. Sanlando Springs and Wekiva Springs were junior high and high school celebrations. Poe and Ginnie, where I swam in my early 20s, were where I fell completely in love with the springs, doing laps on languid late afternoons with the sun slanting down in gentle beams through the trees, my soul in welcome retreat from the pressures of college and my first real job.

The little hill above Ichetucknee Springs was where a veil once lifted for me, ever so slightly—where I heard the whispers of an ancient, forgotten language carried on the breeze one autumn afternoon, as the shafting sun lit vivid red and gold leaves all around me. Were these the whispers of the Timucuans who would have come here before the arrival of Ponce and his countrymen? I still don’t know.

Even when I lived 2700 miles away, I’d dream about the springs. In my dreams, I’d be swimming like a fish, able to breathe underwater, with clear views of the water around me, the sky above, the eelgrass and limestone below. And I’d wake from those dreams with tears in my eyes.

The legend that Ponce de Leon discovered Florida while searching for the fountain of youth has been around for so long that we accept it as true, even though it’s a myth. But myths—especially founding myths that relate to the origins of peoples, cultures, and nations—have a way of seeping into the collective consciousness and pooling there until eventually they begin to flow, unquestioned, into the storylines of history and out of the collective imagination of our artists, writers, and musicians. And the fact that Florida has the largest number of freshwater springs in the world, as well as the largest number of first-magnitude springs, has reinforced the fountain of youth myth for the last 500 years.

For close to 450 of those years, our springs remained primordial, pristine, and pure; they were some of Florida’s first tourist attractions. And if our springs aren’t literal fountains of youth, they are metaphorical ones; the depth and clarity of their cool waters are wellsprings for creativity and for the renewal of body, mind, and spirit.

People still describe their experiences in the springs as “rejuvenating,” “invigorating,” “refreshing,” “fun”—all connotations of youthful vibrancy. But the springs now are not the springs I first encountered some 50 years ago, and the people who are taking their first plunges into springs today do not even know what we have lost.

(to be continued)

Outside the Splendid Dharma Tent and Down the Hill: Karmapa, America, Environment, and Politics

2011-07-27T16:00:00.004-04:00

One thing I forgot to say in my previous blog entries was that Karmapa mentioned what he said might be a special relationship that he has with America—how this was the first country he had been able to visit since fleeing Tibet for India, and how it is again the destination of his second foreign trip (a planned trip to Europe fell through in between his visits to the United States). He mentioned that with the uncertainties that surround his ability to travel, he couldn’t say for sure if America would also be the destination of his third trip, and suggested that maybe he should chant a new mantra: OM AMERICA HUM.

I have not been able to shake a kind of eerie feeling I got, along with a thrill, of seeing a photo of His Holiness Karmapa and His Holiness the Dalai Lama in front of the United States Capitol Building during the week-long Kalachakra events just prior to Karmapa’s arrival at KTD. While I rejoiced that these two representatives of Tibetan Buddhism were conferring blessings on many people there in Washington, D.C., I also wondered if they weren’t there to spread those blessings to avert…something (I know not what).

Just today, I heard one of the news analysts on CNN refer to the current debt ceiling/budget crisis not as that, but as “a political crisis.” Two nights ago in his speech to the nation, President Obama stated that although Americans elected a divided government, he didn’t believe we wanted a dysfunctional government. I think about my parents’ generation—my dad served on a destroyer in the Pacific in World War II—and wonder what they would think about a Congress that was so divided that it couldn’t put the best interests of the American people above politics. I think my folks would be horrified, and I am, too. This current divisive climate honors no one—especially not the many, many people who have died so that we could have freedom—and benefits only a very, very few people. Is this really what we want for America? Is this what being a force for goodness and peace looks like?

And it seems that every time I sit down at my computer, I learn about more assaults on our environment—on the elements that Karmapa has made clear support human life—in the forms of attempted rollbacks of environmental protection, increasing pollution, severe consequences of global warming such as the melting of the Himalayan ice caps, and dangerous old and new resource extraction methods such as deep ocean oil drilling, mountaintop removal, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for oil and natural gas, and exploitation of the Canadian tar sands.

By virtue of his refugee status and his need to travel in order to fulfill his role as leader of the Karma Kagyu Buddhist lineage, Karmapa has to be very careful with the phrasing of his messages; he can’t be overtly political, because that would probably get him banned in some places and severely restrict his ability to travel. But it does seem to me—and I want to make it clear that this is my interpretation only—that when Karmapa said to us at KTD that America has a responsibility to be a powerful force for peace, that he is placing his hopes in us, and that he has the great hope to help us and support us in everything, he was sending us a message: Don’t let the forces of ignorance, aggression, and greed become the dominant forces in the United States of America.

From what I hear from friends who have attended other events with Karmapa since his appearance at KTD, he is continuing to reinforce this message, but in different ways. Friends who were at Kunzang Palchen Ling (KPL), Bardor Tulku Rinpoche’s center across the Hudson River from KTD, reported that Karmapa said that compassion is not just intention—it’s also action.

A friend who was at KPL and at Kagyu Thubten Choling, Lama Norlha’s center in Wappingers Falls, sent me text messages that read, in part: “At KPL…he talked about how interconnected we all are, as everything that reaches our hands is the product of many people. His Holiness (HH) then explained that we should show gratitude to Mother Earth and all beings for their kindness. And he emphasized how Mother Earth provides for us all. At Lama Norlha’s center…he emphasized how so many disasters these days are man made and preventable. In explaining that an empowerment is meant to transform our minds, he said we need to change the way we use our technology and our advancements because of the damage to the environment which, he warned, is almost irreversible. In transforming our mind, HH emphasized that we need to ask ourselves what we can do for the environment. At the conclusion, there was a downpour and a rainbow.” (Italics are mine.)

Compassion is not just intention—it’s also action. We need to ask ourselves what we can do for the environment. These are powerful subjects to consider.

I am left with memories that will last a lifetime, with the knowledge that Karmapa lives in my heart as surely as all of us live in his, and with a renewed vow to do everything I can here in my little corner of the world to make sure that what is sacred and special about Florida’s environment is not destroyed forever.

Video recordings of His Holiness Karmapa’s talks are now available via the KTD web site.

May these blog entries bring benefit to the sentient beings who encounter them and to the environment that supports us all. I take full responsibility for any mistakes in the transcription and reporting of Karmapa’s remarks. If you find errors while reading this, please let me know so that I can correct them! Thank you.

In the Splendid Dharma Tent: His Holiness Karmapa’s Second Visit to KTD (Part 6)

2011-07-26T22:28:00.003-04:00

Note from A Word Witch: I paraphrase Karmapa’s speech, except in sections marked with quotes. Any errors in meaning or transcription are, of course, mine and mine alone.

Karmapa took his seat on the morning of Day 2 with a large paper fan in hand, and continued to make very expressive faces. We had been told to expect an empowerment of the 1000 Buddhas, but once again, Karmapa changed course.

Empowerments are given too frequently these days, Karmapa said, and this has caused empowerments to lose some of their value or to depreciate. He announced that today, he would give an empowerment into the blessings of the Buddha Shakyamuni—a meditation transmission, not a full empowerment. And first, he would explain the vow of refuge.

From what do we seek refuge? Who protects us? Who gives us refuge?

While The Buddha protects us by showing the path away from suffering, and the Buddha and Sangha are sources of refuge because they facilitate the path to liberation, in terms of direct protection, “One must become one’s own protector.” Responsibility rests with each of us. The Holy Dharma is the method or means of protection.

We have the ability to make moral choices; this is the basis of spiritual practice. “It is because we have this ability that we hope for liberation.”

We are fortunate to be able to learn dharma from an experienced teacher: Buddha Shakyamuni, who actually appeared in this world “and is our good teacher.” We have the intelligence we need to learn dharma, or what was taught by the Buddha. And this dharma has a provenance; it’s not “like a sound heard from the sky.” Buddhahood is experiential wisdom, a “great understanding of the nature of human experience…understanding the origin of dharma is really important.”

From the Buddha comes the dharma. From the dharma comes the sangha. We need friends and partners to bear the burden of our lives; providing this friendship is the role of the sangha.

In the Sutra tradition, we view our teacher as a friend or advisor who is totally trustworthy and reliable. In the Vajrayana tradition, we’re taught to view our teacher as Buddha; however, we might not be able to do this at first.

Why imagine our guru as Buddha? Karmapa suggested one reason I’d never thought of: Because of how much we fantasize about the Buddha, “to close the gap” between fantasy and our human experience because Shakyamuni Buddha was a person, after all, much like us—not a superhuman.

Karmapa mentioned that it’s easy to assume buddhahood is something unattainable when we learn, for example, about the special marks a buddha carries, such as the webbing between fingers and toes. Karmapa said he had thought about this, and how strange it might be for a person to have webbed fingers and toes, but then he said, “I think these were webs of light”…otherwise Buddha couldn’t have worn flip-flops, as everyone did in India! I gasped when he said “webs of light” because I realized, Of course! Why wouldn’t these be webs of light? I can’t explain why or how, but there was a most definite ring of truth to this statement, something I had never considered before.

And while the remark about flip-flops was amusing, I wrote in my notebook for a friend to read: “He is helping everyone here see him as a buddha” without the fantastic overlay we usually put on such beings.

The method of our protection is to properly practice the genuine dharma. We protect ourselves through practice, but we need a spiritual teacher as “a matter of practical necessity.” This is our “outer spiritual friend,” the individual who teaches us. We also have an “inner spiritual friend” (I’ve heard another teacher, Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen Rinpoche, refer to this as our “inner lama”) who is the one within us who practices correctly.

“In the end,” Karmapa said, “all fingers are pointing at us…It sounds heavy, but no pressure.”

Karmapa then answered some of the questions that had been submitted in writing. In response to a question about whether our thoughts could affect the behavior of others or harm others, he explained that acts of body and speech harm others, while unvirtuous mental states harm ourselves. He said that he had recently learned of studies that seemed to indicate that changes in body chemistry due to anger can cause changes in the chemical composition of saliva, so that otherwise “healthy” saliva can be chemically transformed to the point that it will “kill small beings.”

Someone asked if emptiness and compassion were contradictory. Karmapa explained that emptiness is the relativity of all things, possibility or opportunity. Other than relative comparison, there are no inherent attributes. In this way, everything is interdependent. “I arise dependent on others,” he explained. Understanding of this interdependence leads to a recollection of the kindness of our mothers and all beings, and a good recognition of emptiness leads to an understanding of our ignorance—we realize beings are ignorant of the causes of happiness and suffering, which leads to more compassion.

The afternoon of Day 2 began with the empowerment and ended with the answers to some additional questions. In response to a question about whether the new, shortened ngondro carries the same benefits as the longer form, Karmapa said he developed the short form for the benefit of busy people who don’t have a lot of time to practice; however, you can’t assess the benefit of a practice based on the liturgy alone. Much depends on how people practice.

In terms of balancing family life with compassion, Karmapa made reference to the Six Perfections. He also said, “Don’t leave dharma in the shrine room.” Formal practice needs to spread into our daily life. “Dharma practice is not supposed to be fun.” It’s exertive, like physical exercise. (Note from A Word Witch: Even the pitiful amount of practice that I do, which is mainly involved with bringing dharma into daily life, is the hardest work I’ve ever done.)

“Dharma is mental exercise,” Karmapa said. We need formal practice to “recharge our batteries.” We can tell how well trained we are by how well we get along with others.

Karmapa’s closing remarks were, for me, very powerful and very, very moving. In addition to developing technology and understanding the brain, we need to pay attention to the heart, mind, and spirit. America is a country that has a responsibility and can be a powerful force for peace. Karmapa said he is placing his hopes in us, as a force for good in the world.

He then thanked Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, Bardor Tulku Rinpoche, and everyone who has worked to build the structure and organization that is Karma Triyana Dharmachakra.

“I see everything you do,” Karmapa said. “I have the great hope to help you and support you in every way.”

And, finally: “Thank you, Yeshe Gyamtso.”

In the Splendid Dharma Tent: His Holiness Karmapa’s Second Visit to KTD (Part 5)

2011-07-26T17:17:00.003-04:00

Note from A Word Witch: I paraphrase Karmapa’s speech, except in sections marked with quotes. Any errors in meaning or transcription are, of course, mine and mine alone.

One thing Karmapa did that was interesting and different from other teachings I’ve attended was jump from subject to subject; this happened frequently throughout his talk, and was sometimes preceded with a statement such as, “Now I am going to jump,” and sometimes not.

So we jumped from meeting the challenges of body, speech, and mind to Karmapa’s next point: “So, what do we need?”

Karmapa explained that we identify strongly with the material circumstances of existence and construct our lives based largely on this identification. “We identify too much with these externals”—things like our professions—so that when we lose our jobs, we lose our identities. If our identities involve love and compassion, however, this is “conducive to healthy self-esteem” and we will be okay.

Here I wrote in my notes, “! mentions: ‘social construction of reality’!!!” I was shocked (in a good way) to hear this phrase coming from Karmapa, since I had a two-semester course in graduate school that dealt with “The Social Reality of Human Organizations.” This was my favorite course and the reason I stuck with the program, which I was negotiating on top of a full-time job, because it was all about how we human beings are largely the creators—not helpless victims—of the kinds of social structures in which we live during the eight or 10 hours we’re at work.

The course looked at all the models that have been used to explain how organizations function, from ecosystems to families to machines and just about everything in between, leading to a point that is very similar to the Buddhist idea of interdependence: We are each responsible for creating both the positive and the negative atmospheres we experience at work. My instructor had a vivid grasp of the kinds of things that can and do go wrong in organizations, and when he said—at the first class meeting—that “Issues of power and authority in organizations are never issues of power and authority, they are issues of fear and insecurity,” I wanted to stand up and cheer because this was a situation I had witnessed many times, yet I had never had the words for it, or a context in which to place it.

So I wanted to stand up and cheer again—this time for Karmapa, when he mentioned the social construction of reality—because here was a strong connection between the dharma teachings, which can sometimes seem ethereal and otherworldly, and what my mother always referred to as “the real world.”

Our technological resources are increasing our pressures and stress, Karmapa said, and we are being seduced by this increasing self-fixation that is pushed on us by technological messages; we need to talk about this learned self-fixation that is making our lives so heavy and filled with pressure. While we have access to almost limitless information, we are moving farther and farther from the truth. We are like people who are “dying from thirst on the shore of the ocean” (Karmapa explained that whoever coined this phrase evidently didn’t know that you can’t drink ocean water).

We need to think about our relationship with everything and everyone else. We are part of a net or web that connects everyone.

Karmapa then explained that when his personal hopes are not fulfilled, this does not mean life is meaningless because “perhaps I am fulfilling the hopes of others.” We need to “assess our own lives through the lives of others.” I surmised that doing this might well be an antidote to the increasing technological pressures and self-fixation that Karmapa had mentioned earlier.

Referring to the Karma Kagyu lineage prayer, Karmapa explained that “revulsion” with this life does not mean “life has no meaning” and that nonattachment/revulsion is not the same as detachment, which can lead to dull neutrality or dullness. Rather, nonattachment/revulsion means we must separate ourselves from our conventional view of life as primarily concerned with material prosperity, affluence, and possessions. As long as we identify happiness with possessions, we will never be happy; Karmapa specifically mentioned “iPhone, iPad, iAnything.”

“I know this,” Karmapa said. “People give me these things all the time. They don’t make me happy; they cause a storage problem.”

Rather than constantly acquiring new things, it is contentment that makes us happy. If we do not transcend the idea that we must constantly be acquiring “stuff” in order to be happy, then we risk applying that same fixation on acquisition to our dharma practice. We become “someone who has given up barley but is attached to rice.” To illustrate his point, Karmapa told of reading a news story about someone who sold a kidney for an iPad! In order to deepen our lives beyond the search for material acquisitions, we need to let go of this craving for “stuff.”

The innate aspect of our fixation is the idea of “I” or “me.” When I use this word, I think I am speaking about an independent entity, but this is a mistaken notion because “I” exist only in relationship with others. Yet I continue to think “I” and “my” out of habit: “my iPad, my iPhone, my documents, my computer.” (I wonder if Karmapa uses a Mac or a PC? Anybody know?)

This “I” thought process is like being in prison—solitary confinement. We get only a few visitors, such as “my parents.” But since our happiness really depends on others—not “stuff”—we should be concerned with others. This concern is the starting point for love, compassion, benevolence—the idea of being helpful to others and to ourselves. “The most efficient selfishness is concern for others.”

New jump: “This brings us to emptiness, which is very, very practical…emptiness is possibility.” The idea of emptiness widens our view and outlook; it’s interdependence, interconnectedness, vast openness, mutual love, compassion, affection, with “great practical implications for our lives.”

Here, at the end of the first day’s teaching, Karmapa said he would take written questions, so people hurried to write them down and turn them in.

Karmapa also said that KTD is “not a second home, but my home, and you are my family—except Yeshe Gyamtso.”

I love a teacher with a sense of humor!

In the Splendid Dharma Tent: His Holiness Karmapa's Second Visit to KTD (Part 4)

2011-07-24T19:45:00.004-04:00

Note from A Word Witch: I paraphrase Karmapa’s speech, except in sections marked with quotes. Any errors in meaning or transcription are, of course, mine and mine alone.

Karmapa then asked, “What do we mean by ‘peace’?” Is it a state of ease or relaxation? If so, these are difficult states to maintain and so, they are not our goal. What we are aiming for is something a little more than “eating ice cream on a hot day.” (He could not have picked a better metaphor for this Floridian!)

True peace requires effort to actively and intentionally renounce violence in all its forms. To achieve true peace, we must eradicate the mental unvirtuous actions—covetousness, malice, and wrong views—because these are the “seeds” of further unvirtue committed by body and speech.

“We cannot create peace through force or violence.”

In terms of renouncing the three unvirtuous mental seeds mentioned above, Karmapa made a distinction between eradication and suppression. Suppression, he said, can create mental illness, is unhealthy, and is different from the correct application of remedies that leads to eradication of unhealthy mental states. In addition, you need to understand the reasons for the remedies, or the remedies will not work. “Using my own experience,” Karmapa said, the more we are aware of the harm our kleshas do, the easier it is to apply the remedies.

“We may notice love is not constantly present, but anger happens by itself.” Yet because our minds have the capacity for the alternating emotions of anger and love, we need to realize that experiencing either of these emotions is a choice or decision we can make.

Do no wrong whatsoever.

Engage in abundant virtue.

Utterly tame your own mind.

This is the Buddhist teaching.

This saying describes “a gradual process of learning and development.”

“Do no wrong whatsoever” is the guiding principle for the Shravakas and Pratyekabuddhas. “Engage in abundant virtue” guides those on the Mahayana path, while “Utterly tame your own mind” guides the Vajrayana practitioner. All these guidelines are stages of taming the mind and represent different “levels of responsibility,” or what individuals of different capacities are able to bear—like different grades of school. “The way we practice here,” Karmapa said—meaning at KTD—“is an integration of all three vehicles.”

To “utterly tame your own mind” is the correct understanding of Vajrayana or Secret Mantra. “Mantra” means “the protection of mind,” and when we practice Vajrayana correctly, we protect our minds from ordinary craving and perception, transforming our perception into the pure appearances of the mandala deities—a transformation that is unique to Vajrayana. This is a mental transformation that is not achieved through the accumulation of ritual implements; progressive practice is not “the accumulation of stuff.”

Here, we broke for lunch, with the rain shower still falling. I don’t know who the people were who served the delicious vegetarian lunch, but they had their act totally together, moving large numbers of us through a lunch line reminiscent of a school cafeteria so that everyone was well fed and even had extra time before the afternoon session began.

Karmapa began the afternoon session with more spontaneity. I wrote in my journal, “~frequent faces and exhibits of a wicked sense of humor~.” At one point Karmapa looked at his translator and said, “Understand?” Yeshe’s response: “Things are warming up.”

Karmapa explained that it is the ability or strength of the individual that lends the vehicle that person practices its power. If a person at the Shravaka or Pratyekabuddha grade level tries to practice Mahayana, they will still end up practicing on the Shravaka/Pratyekabuddha grade level; if a person in the Mahayana grade tries to practice Vajrayana, they will still end up practicing Mahayana.

Karmapa then addressed how we practice with body, speech, and mind. Whether or not we actually enter into the Buddha’s teachings depends on whether our body, speech, and mind “enter that space.” Mind is of foremost importance; it must be purified. “We cannot fake it or be hypocritical.”

The challenges we experience must be met with the corresponding faculty. If we are confronted with physical danger, our response will need to be a physical, bodily response, as in running away or otherwise removing ourselves from the situation. If we are confronted with harsh speech, “Can you feel compassion on the spot? It’s possible, but quite difficult.” Most of the harm that comes to us through body and speech is external harm.

Ill will that comes toward us from the minds of others does not hurt us—I was reminded, though of course Karmapa did not say it, of the old children’s teaching tool, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

Harm that comes to us through our own minds, however, is internal harm. What hurts us is our own malice and ill will that we develop, often in response to the malice or ill will that we sense is directed toward us from others. “Our anger only harms ourselves,” and this is the worst suffering we can experience because we cannot run away from it.

Karmapa explained one way to deal with what is frequently our knee-jerk reaction of developing malicious thoughts in response to criticism leveled at us from other people. He explained that when someone criticizes him (and I really have to wonder who has done this), instead of immediately jumping to his own defense, he thinks of himself as a friend of the critic, and this enables him to assess whether the criticism is valid or not.

In the Splendid Dharma Tent: His Holiness Karmapa’s Second Visit to KTD (Part 3)

2011-07-22T22:27:00.003-04:00

Note from A Word Witch: I paraphrase Karmapa’s speech, except in sections marked with quotes. Any errors in meaning or transcription are, of course, mine and mine alone.

His Holiness Karmapa began his speech by saying that there are many different spiritual traditions in America—he used “America” frequently to refer to the United States—and that we have the freedom to choose which of these we will follow; we may also choose to follow no tradition at all. From one point of view, this makes things easy; from another point of view, choosing a tradition becomes difficult when confronted with so many different choices.

Sprinkling English words and phrases throughout his Tibetan, Karmapa explained that “religion” is different from “spirituality.” Spirituality is the cultivation “of the fundamental goodness or virtue of which we are all capable,” and does not need to follow any specific tradition.

Adherence to a spiritual tradition or religion is a choice that we have. The evolution of the spirit includes benevolence, an understanding of interdependence, and a sincere wish to help others along with the development of the means and insight to do so. “The basic idea is to be a good person.” These remarks reminded me of things that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said over and over again, many many times.

I wrote “-RAIN!-” in my journal here, and was thankful for the breeze and the lower temperatures that followed the shower.

Although religious practice is a personal choice, what must underlie this is recognition of the self, meaning: We have all been born as humans, so we have unique, innate abilities. Something that is very special about humans is that we have the capacity for ethical choice (italics mine). We know the difference between right and wrong, and between what is helpful and what is not—not only for ourselves, but also for others. “This is the first step,” Karmapa explained.

At this point I wrote again in my journal, “~He seems more animated now that rain has cooled things down considerably.~”

When someone has faith in the dharma and becomes a practitioner, they are supposed to become a better person—but sometimes they become worse! This is a problem. Karmapa cautioned us about falling into “too much fantasy” because we are so inspired by the dharma. “We must never allow the practice of dharma to ignore our innate human abilities.” Instead, faith in the dharma must be based on practicalities—as in the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind and “contemplation of what it means to be a human being.”

With regard to the foundation of Vajrayana practice, “We can’t start by imagining ourselves as gods…we must become good, decent people before we can realize Mahamudra” or the Great Perfection.

“We must not allow ourselves as human beings to become isolated from the dharma we practice.” (Again, italics are mine.)

We need a stable foundation for dharma practice: “This is important.” Karmapa suggested that maybe it is more important for beginners to become a good person than to cultivate faith in the sources of refuge.

Every time Karmapa spoke about “being a good person,” I was reminded of my mother and how, growing up in the American South, I was taught from the time I was very young to consider the wishes and needs of others before my own, and to cultivate good manners. It was the traditional Southern woman’s blessing or curse (take your pick) to learn to put others first, to anticipate the wants and needs of guests especially, and—at all costs!—to avoid being rude.

Like most children, I chafed under this code of conduct when I was very young, but later I began to notice how practical and helpful the code proved to be in different social situations. Over time, I developed what I think is a fairly good ability to assess the states of mind and needs of other people around me—an ability that has proved useful in any number of work-related situations. I’m not always a shining example of politeness—I’m too impatient and I tend to interrupt conversations, which I know is a bad habit, for one thing (and there are more)—but I do think my traditional Southern upbringing had a lot to do with why, when I first started studying Buddhism with a teacher, the dharma resonated with me so strongly. Of course it didn’t hurt that my first dharma teacher was a Southern woman who had been raised with the same code of manners!

Karmapa went on to explain that the term for “spirituality” in Buddhism is “dharma” (Sanskrit) or “cho” (Tibetan). While there are 10 different definitions of dharma, what is important is how we understand the term: Dharma refers to “fixing” or “transforming” our minds. The essence of dharma is ahimsa or nonviolence, which refers to a state of mental nonaggression or peace.

The principal result of dharma practice is to develop peace of mind.

Here, Karmapa held up a large teacup with a lid and said, “This is American size,” eliciting laughter from the audience. I thought his remark was simply an aside, but as I look back on my notes now, I realize it was actually a part of his teaching—what in literature we would call a foreshadowing of points yet to be made.

In the Splendid Dharma Tent: His Holiness Karmapa’s Second Visit to KTD (Part 2)

2011-07-22T11:09:00.008-04:00

One of the things I bought on this trip is an absolutely beautiful book, Karmapa: 900 Years, published this year by the 2010 Karmapa 900 Organizing Committee. The book has a two-page spread (pp. 78-79) about “Life in the Great Encampment of the Karmapas” which explains that:

For 300 years, the Gyalwang Karmapas moved freely across the wide open spaces of Tibet, accompanied by a vast mobile practice community known as the ‘Great Encampment of the Karmapas’ or Karme Garchen. While they did visit major Karma Kagyu monastic seats along the way, the Fourth through the Ninth Karmapas spent the majority of their adult lives on the move, traveling to wherever they saw opportunities to be of benefit.

This unique institution of the Great Encampment allowed the Karmapas to move or stay put at will, setting up camp when conditions were right and continuing on when they were not. Yet unlike an ordinary camp, the determining factor was not what the location offered to those camping. Rather, it was what the camp could offer to the location, for the Great Encampment was effectively a vast means of reaching out to offer the Dharma in whatever place was then most receptive to it.

I was struck by this last sentence, especially when I remembered the photo I had seen earlier in the week of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) and His Holiness Karmapa (HHK) in front of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Hopefully at least a few of our elected officials were receptive to the blessings that I am fairly certain HHDL and HHK were beaming in their direction.

It felt like an encampment at KTD, with close to 1000 people from all over the United States and, most likely, all over the world—all crowded under one huge tent that was set up in the courtyard.

I was thrilled to be able to meet and chat for just a couple of minutes with Lama Tsultrim Allione, whose book Women of Wisdom helped fan my early interest in Machik Labdron; within just the past few years, Lama Tsultrim has been recognized as an emanation of Machik. Since Lama Tsultrim’s refuge lama was the 16^th Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, I sensed that she was delighted to be reunited with Karmapa’s stream of blessings. She indicated she may be collaborating with Karmapa on projects involving Machik’s severance practice, and on women’s issues. Wonderful!

This particular encampment did not take place in an ornate, embellished Tibetan tent, however, but in a stark white temporary structure supported by huge metal poles that stretched to the sky and was buttressed by many canvas supports. Large-screen television monitors placed at intervals throughout the tent gave those of us who were sitting toward the back a clear view of Karmapa’s very expressive face and gestures.

We all stood, as is customary, to watch Karmapa leave the brightly embellished main shrine building, descend the red stairs into the courtyard, and enter the tent. His entrance was marked with the fragrance of incense, a procession that included dark-suited security people and high-ranking lamas clad in robes of maroon and gold, and the distinctive sound of Tibetan gyaling trumpets.

As high as the tent was, when Karmapa ascended the short flight of steps to his throne, it looked like his head almost bumped the top of the tent! And while his stature is imposing, it wasn’t only his height that made it seem as though his presence filled the tent.

Returning to KTD after three years “seems like a dream,” Karmapa said, but “despite difficulties, we are now reunited and I am really delighted”—at which point the whole tent full of people, all of whom shared his delight, erupted into thunderous applause.

During the first few minutes of his remarks on this first day of the teachings, I was struck by what seemed to me to be the unusual quality of Karmapa’s voice. Whether he is speaking sternly or gently—or even, as he did fairly frequently, engaging in animated debates with his translator, the brilliant Lama Yeshe Gyamtso—Karmapa’s voice has a magnificent musical quality; “~melodious voice~” was what I wrote in my notebook.

And at some point during these early remarks, the phrase “sitting in the splendid tent of dharma” flashed through my mind.

Karmapa thanked everyone for building KTD—the new building is now complete after decades of work toward that goal—and said that those who have helped with this effort should now “rejoice in what you have done.”

Early in his talk, Karmapa remarked about the heat; the day had started out being very warm. A little while later, we heard the first raindrops hit the top of the tent, and Karmapa looked up and looked around. As the rain shower went on, the temperature dropped noticeably and became much more comfortable for all of us. I filed this occurrence away mentally as “one of those things that makes you go ‘hmmmm…'."

After he greeted us, Karmapa took some time to gather his thoughts, looking out at the audience or down at the table in front of him, sometimes rubbing the top of his head. This thought gathering was repeated several more times over the course of his two days at KTD.

Karmapa prefaced his talk by saying that he does not think of what he does as “lecturing or teaching,” but rather prefers the idea of “giving a speech…a forum for me to voice my thoughts, which I do without preparation.” And while I am certain that he knew we were all expecting a teaching about The 1000 Buddhas—because that was what had been publicized before the event—Karmapa showed no qualms about completely shattering our expectations. Instead, he expressed his wish to speak spontaneously, to express his thoughts of the moment, and to speak from personal experience, because it would be “more beneficial for me to speak to you directly and personally.”

So we were forewarned, right from the get-go, to expect the unexpected.

In the Splendid Dharma Tent: His Holiness Karmapa’s Second Visit to KTD (Part 1)

2011-07-20T11:02:00.005-04:00

Orgyen Trinley Dorje, His Holiness the 17^th Gyalwa Karmapa, visited America for only the second time this month. While those of us who had heard rumors that he might be coming waited eagerly for news, the staff at Karmapa’s North American seat—Karma Triyana Dharmachakra (KTD) in Woodstock, New York—were faced with the challenge of preparing for the visit on terrifically short notice and without officially being able to tell people that Karmapa was coming, given that India (where His Holiness is living now after having escaped from Tibet over New Year’s 1999-2000) issued his visa at the very last minute.

Karmapa’s first stop was Washington, D.C., where His Holiness the Dalai Lama was giving teachings and the Kalachakra empowerment. There were a lot of Tibetan Buddhist dignitaries on hand for that event, but Karmapa’s arrival caused something of a stir—“collective gasps” was one description that I read—when he walked on stage for his first day at the teachings. Word had not yet spread widely that he was even in the United States.

Karmapa’s second stop was at KTD and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. I’ve always heard that when one plans to attend a major teaching or empowerment, any obstacles that arise beforehand are the result of previous bad karma that is somehow being cleared; if this is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), I cleared some serious karma through a series of miscommunications about registration for the event that cropped up just before I left home and continued through the first morning of the event itself.

Was my payment due before the event or at the event? If before, was there a deadline I had to meet for payment and could I meet it on very short notice? Who at KTD had the authority to give me the correct answer to my questions? (Many thanks to Lama Kathy Wesley for routing my frequent pesky questions to the right people.) Would my luggage and I make it onto our scheduled plane at the very busy, crowded Orlando airport? Would I have to arrange for a taxi up to KTD, or would there be shuttle buses? Could I make it through Security and over to the registration tent at the KTD gate without having the requisite badge? With a long history of motion sickness when I’m not driving, would I throw up on the bus ride along the twisting road up and down the hill to KTD? (The answer to this last question was “Almost.”)

Throughout all of these obstacles, the mantra “practice patience” kept repeating in my thoughts—a vivid reminder that the Buddhist teachings on the Six Perfections are real challenges to old, ingrained mental habits. So easy to get petulant; so hard to be patient!

But with obstacles finally overcome and patience thankfully preserved, I found myself once again entering the Gate of Dharma.

There have been many changes at KTD since the last time I was there. The new building is complete, and occupied. The old Meads Mountain House, the stagecoach inn that has housed KTD’s offices and staff for several decades, is deserted and barricaded, slated to be demolished later this summer. (Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche presided over a closing ceremony for the house just recently.) The funky old bookstore space with its nooks and crannies and unexpected traffic patterns…my favorite patio table where I admired the surrounding mountains and enjoyed many meals outside…the steep stairs with the narrow steps…the slanting bathroom floors…the cracked walls…the cramped showers…the ancient windows and rickety furniture…never again will KTD’s guests have the opportunity to experience these things!

The new bookstore spaces—with books and gifts on one floor and statues and thangkas on another—are a vast improvement and a great delight; Namse Bangdzo may well be the best Buddhist bookstore in North America.

Since I’m not staying at KTD this trip, I’ll have to wait to report on what it’s like to spend time in the new building—though I did have a chance to eat in the new dining hall on one of my last trips, and it is a big, beautiful space with spectacular views of the surrounding trees—a place worthy of Karmapa.

And so I journeyed up the hill past “Welcome Home” banners and prayer flags, through the Dharma Gate to the registration tent, past a long row of purple porta-potties, around the shell of Meads Mountain House, and through the bright new Gampopa Gateway—now dedicated to my refuge lama, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche—and into the splendid dharma tent, erected over the central courtyard of the monastery to protect the hundreds of us in attendance from rain and sun.

And once again, I was reminded of the great gatherings that assembled around notable teachers in old Tibet, where people traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles to hear the dharma from masters in an unbroken lineage and to receive heart-to-heart blessings that are, so often, life changing.

The Nagas and the Elements (Part 2)

2011-07-10T13:27:00.004-04:00

When I went swimming at the spring near my house one day last week, I met a beautiful young woman of Indian (Indian/Asian, not Native American) descent as I was bringing some small pieces of trash out of the spring. We fell into conversation about the health of the springs, and practically the first thing she said was, “These places are sacred.”

Even—or perhaps, especially—my neighbors, who are part of a large extended family that has lived in this area for generations, are upset about the pollution and water withdrawals that are harming the health of our springs. I don’t know if my neighbors would agree that the springs are sacred; most Western cultures have moved far away from attributing any kind of sanctity to the natural world, even at places that most everyone recognizes as having intrinsic power. My neighbors might, however, agree that “The springs shouldn’t be messed with.”

So if we humans are concerned, I wonder what the nagas must be feeling, since the big algae blooms and reduced spring flows must be hurting them even more?

Here is how Machik Labdron describes the appearance of nagas, the watery inhabitants of the underworld.

“Black spiders and scorpions, or ants, beetles, otters or fishlike female dogs fall like rain and cover the ground and stick to your body. They are as big as puppies that have just opened their eyes, and extremely cold and wet. Just seeing them is unpleasant and frightening. Also frogs, scorpions, fish, tadpoles, large pir fish, makaras (crocodiles), or lizards the size of young bulls with their mouths open as if ready to eat. Whether on dry or wet land, they all gather together, yelping or quarrelling. They are single or in pairs, their bodies sheathed in fog with slightly formed water droplets. Just looking at them upsets and confuses you and makes your flesh crawl. Or else snakes: black, red, yellow, green, multi-colored, white, variegated red, variegated yellow, or variegated blue, like great trees in full foliage. They are as long as fifty bow lengths…The toxic vapors of some of them boil over onto your body as it lies in bed. They have great manes (hoods) that blaze with fire. Various diseases exude from their mouths and eyes in the form of various colors, like oozing fog spreading out as far as a hundred bow lengths… Just seeing them terrifies you. Your hairs stand on end, your senses become paralyzed, and your body goes out of control from their contamination.

Alternatively, [you experience] small children just eight years old with serpentine bodies below the breast and many blazing snake-hoods on their heads exuding bluish-red disease. Toxic vapors and fog boil up from their tails. Their torsos are generally covered in mist. They are seen in various colors in wetlands larger than the eye can see. Sometimes their torsos are exposed and sometimes their tails show above the water.” (From Machik’s Complete Explanation, pp. 239-240; the italics in the first paragraph of the quote are mine.)

Now, whether you believe in the existence of nagas or not—and I cannot either prove or disprove their existence—the idea of disease-causing nagas is a powerful metaphor for the dangers of pollution.

Just this week, I learned of a 2004 study on “Cyanobacteria: Lyngbya Toxin Monitoring and Evaluation” that was conducted in Florida’s springs under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control. Lyngbya is just one of the species of algae that is blooming now in our rivers and springs, and is suspected as a cause of allergic reactions that some swimmers have experienced. According to the study, “Elevated groundwater nitrate and other nutrients may be responsible for the proliferation and expansion of toxic Lyngbya species (spp.)…Limited reports of acute dermatitis, blisters, desquamation, and respiratory distress may be related to Lyngbya exposure.”

Our nagas, it seems, are not pleased.

And my Buddhist teachers are sounding warnings.

His Holiness Orgyen Trinley Dorje, the 17^th Gyalwa Karmapa, has some very interesting passages on the web site that describes his design of the Monlam pin:

“…Ever since the human race first appeared on this earth, we have used this earth heavily. It is said that ninety-nine percent of the resources and so on in this world come from the natural environment. We are using the earth until she is used up. The earth has given us immeasurable benefit, but what have we done for the earth in return? We always ask for something from the earth, but never give her anything back. We never have loving or protective thoughts for the earth. Whenever trees or anything else emerge from the ground, we cut them down. If there is a bit of level earth, we fight over it. To this day we perpetuate a continuous cycle of war and conflict over it. In fact, we have not done much of anything for the earth.

Now the time has come when the earth is scowling at us; the time has come when the earth is giving up on us. The earth is about to treat us badly and give up on us. If she gives up on us, where can we live? There is talk of going to other planets that could support life, but only a few rich people could go. What would happen to all of us sentient beings who could not go? What should we do now that the situation has become so critical? The sentient beings living on the earth and the elements of the natural world need to join their hands together—the earth must not give up on sentient beings, and sentient beings must not give up on the earth. Each needs to grasp the other’s hand.”

Thrangu Rinpoche, who is Karmapa’s tutor, has also spoken about our environment and the elements:

“If the external world we live in does not thrive, how can that be good for the ‘internal’ beings who live in that world, its inhabitants? In the external world there are clearly problems…Those of us who are humankind have the responsibility to take care of this world we are in. We might say that it is the responsibility of governments. But whether governments will do anything or not is another question. It is something we all individually need to do something about…When we call this the degenerate age or the age of dregs, we mean this is a time when sentient beings are not easily satiated. They are not modest in their wishes. So they do a lot of business in order to benefit themselves. They make a lot of pollution to do business and gather wealth. They do not gather that wealth for the benefit of the whole of society, but for their own individual benefit. In doing so, they pollute the ground, the water and the air. It creates a problem for the whole world. It is all really due to our greed…We need to know what is happening to our world, what scientists have elucidated. When we know this, we can infer what we need to do, and what we actually can do….

What is happening today is that there is chaos in the elements. There are the four different elements of earth, water, fire and air, and these have now become unbalanced. Due to this imbalance, sometimes there is destruction because of floods and water, sometimes due to wind. Sometimes there is destruction through earthquakes and now there is also destruction happening through global warming. The temperatures are unbalanced—sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold. Because of this, what is happening now is that grand, resplendent snow mountains are melting. Hard, firm, beautiful glaciers are melting. When they melt and disappear, the rivers and lakes will become scarce, parched and dried out. We can actually see this happening. Disturbance in the four elements, snow mountains and glaciers all melting, the water all drying up – what harm do these lead to? Then all the forests of the ancients and trees of beauty will near their deaths. Forests are drying out, trees are dying. Beautiful, wonderful forests that you could explore are drying out, and coming to their deaths. There is now the danger that the whole world’s reaches will become a great wasteland without water supplies. In the entire world, we will not have anything beautiful or good, nor any way of supporting ourselves. There is a frightful, terrifying danger that this will happen. It is a basic truth that if something bad happens to the environment we live in, the inhabitants that live within it will also suffer great harm.” (Again, the italics are mine.)

Karmapa has also said, in a recent message to young people:

“…it is not impossible that in the future, we might face great and unbearable mental burdens and a sense of chaos…”.

Yes, we are being warned—and at the same time, encouraged to take action.

I went back to the spring near my house very early yesterday morning to make an offering to the naga. On the short drive to the spring, I saw a skunk scuttle across the road into an overgrown field. As I waded into the spring, the great heron that had been standing silently in the shallows flapped her large wings and flew off upriver. Something—a raccoon? an otter? a squirrel?—chattered away at me from the bank. As I drove away, I saw a doe move silently away from the road and into the woods.

For those moments, the environment and the elements seemed in balance. And while I’d love to bask in that feeling, I know that to do so—to turn away from what I know is happening around me—would simply be giving in to illusion, making believe all is right with the world when clearly, it is not.

There are many good articles about living in a world in which the elements are out of whack, and encouragement about what we can do, at the Ecobuddhism web site. Karmapa, who is in the United States visiting as I write this, has his own environmental web site as well.

OM AH HUNG BENZA GURU PEMA SIDDHI HUNG!

The Nagas and the Elements (Part 1)

2011-06-26T22:08:00.003-04:00

Today was a naga day—a day in which those snakelike “unseen beings associated with water and fluid energy” are said to be especially active and receptive to offerings—so I rose with the sun to make the short drive to my local spring to make an offering to the naga who may live there. The springs are busy all day long in the summer, especially on weekends once the local schools are no longer in session, and I’ve come to value whatever privacy I can get on those rare days—usually only a couple of times a month—when the calendar says the naga might accept my offering. So it’s best for me to go very early in the day, even though I’m not normally an early riser.

It was the Buddhist teacher Khenpo Ugyen Tenzin who first hinted there might be a naga at my neighborhood spring. Khenpo was staying at our house on his first visit to our area, and at dinner one night at a Thai restaurant, one of the folks visiting for Khenpo’s teaching mentioned to me that Khenpo “worked with the nagas.” I was immediately fascinated; the ideas of unseen worlds, magical and mysterious beings, psychic phenomena, and occult goings-on have always strongly magnetized me. So I asked Khenpo about the nagas, but I either asked at a bad time or we were hampered by his beginner’s skills in English and my total lack of skill in Tibetan.

But driving Khenpo into town for Sunday’s teaching on that weekend several years ago, I made a spontaneous decision to show him our local spring. Poor Khenpo! I imagine he must have felt as if he were being kidnapped, but luckily the spring isn’t that far off the main road and I calculated that we had just enough time to visit it without being late to the teaching.

We got out of the car and walked the short length of sidewalk along the river up to the spring, which wasn’t visible until we got right next to it. It was early on a spring morning, and we were lucky. There were a couple of people taking pictures, walking around the horseshoe-shaped limestone shelf that embraced the spring, but there was no one in the water so the spring boil was clearly visible as it bubbled up from the turquoise depths.

Khenpo and I stood in silence and watched the sparkling water until I realized our time was up. “We’d better go,” I said, and we turned back toward the car.

“This is a really unusual place,” Khenpo said after we had turned away from the spring. “Thank you for bringing me to see it.”

“Do you think there might be a naga here?” I asked him.

A tiny proto-smile formed at the corners of his mouth. “Yes, I think maybe so,” was all he said.

Some miles down the road, after we’d left the spring far behind, Khenpo looked at me and again said, “That was a very unusual place. Thank you for taking me to see it.”

I had an interview with Khenpo later that day, in the afternoon. “Khenpo,” I began, “this morning I took you to see the spring near where I live. Our springs are threatened now by so many things—they’re being polluted, and people want to pump water out of our rivers and put it in bottles and take it away to be sold. Would you please pray that our springs and rivers will be protected?”

Khenpo thought for a minute. “Don’t you think,” he asked, “that other people may have need of that water?”

Then it was my turn to think for a minute, and of course I remembered how we all needed bottled water, even here where water was plentiful, when the tropical storms came through and knocked out our power so the pumps on our wells wouldn’t work.

“Yes,” I answered, “I understand that. But I also know that if all our water gets taken away, there will be nothing left to support the people and animals and fish who depend on the water we have now.”

“I will pray, then,” Khenpo said, “for an auspicious balance.” I understood his answer to mean that yes, there would come a time when we would have to surrender some of our water for a greater good—the benefit of other sentient beings. With global warming now melting the glaciers and ice caps in Khenpo’s Himalayan homeland, that time may not be far off. Himalayan ice is the source of many of Asia’s great rivers, and when the ice is gone, there will be millions of people left in a region with practically no fresh water.

Khenpo’s visit inspired me to do some reading about nagas, which are really fascinating creatures. Often depicted in Asian art as part snake, part human, they are sometimes the guardians of the treasure texts hidden by the 8th-century Tibetan sages Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava) and his consort and principal disciple, Yeshe Tsogyal, for discovery in later eras when those texts will be especially beneficial. And nagas are strongly associated with bodies of water, especially springs, as well as great and magical trees.

It turns out that Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists all share the idea of nagas. As my friend Khandro relates on her web site, “In the language of Kashmir, the word for ‘a spring’ is naga…A large number of temples were built near springs and were dedicated to the worship of nagas…Most probably, treating springs and rivers with great reverence wittingly or unwittingly resulted in the ecological balance necessary for a healthy and natural interaction between the environment and man."

I love this idea of temples being built near springs, and treating springs and rivers with great reverence. I’d love it if every spring in Florida had its own temple, even a small one, because the temple would reinforce the sacredness of those spots where pure, cleansing water rises, unbidden, from the unseen depths. Our springs are magical, numinous places, and little temples might make people stop and think before they vandalize the areas around the springs, dump things like tires and railroad ties into the water, or forget to pack out their trash when they leave after a day of swimming.

I wonder how much our whole world would change if we treated all of our great natural features with reverence—and if we wouldn’t be better off for doing so.

(to be continued)

The picture above was taken at Ichetucknee Springs. Can you see the face of the naga? J

Adventures in Academia: High Weirdness With Computers and a Letter

2011-06-24T19:02:00.003-04:00

The spring sunlight brightened the world outside my office window with a promise of even warmer days to come. Here, from the third-floor aerie of the college’s graphic design teaching program, I could see the bright neon glow of new green leaves and the ebb and flow of human tides as classes began and ended and began again.

Like the seasons, the activities of the college followed a regular pattern, and the arrival of springtime meant that we were nearing the end of our annual budget cycle. That cycle had begun last July, when we got word of how much money our department would have for the next 12 months. When that money actually reached us in August, we started buying things we needed for fall and spring semesters—office supplies, new planning books for the faculty, printer paper, markers and chalk and erasers for our classrooms, which were prominently featured in our marketing materials: “You will learn the newest techniques of graphic design working with state-of-the-art computers and the latest software.”

What we couldn’t afford, though, were those state-of-the-art computers and latest software. Money for those items had been held hostage for several years by our legislators, who refused to believe that any form of stable funding for education—especially for community colleges—could possibly benefit our state’s citizens.

But that spring, we had actually received some encouragement. After several years of ongoing discussions, the college’s administrators had agreed to let us use the lab fees they charged for classroom materials to purchase brand-new computers and software for our classrooms! And though we all thought this sounded like a no-brainer, the decision had taken three years; such was the pace of decision making in academia.

With frustration now replaced by boundless delight, we decided to share this good news with our students and Kitty, my boss, asked me to draft a letter to them. The letter would be especially important for students coming back in fall term, since the college was planning to raise lab fees considerably. We didn’t want a student revolution on our hands as Kitty surrendered steerage of our department to its new coordinator, Cabana Boy.

So I sat at my computer, drafting the letter and looking out over campus as the landscape began to flower and youthful hormones began to surge. I had been reading a lot in my spare time about earth religions, the pagan calendar, and the various rituals for reawakening that were appropriate for springtime. Drafting a happy letter to students fit right in! And while this job didn’t always use my highest skills and I sometimes copped a ho-hum attitude as the college moved through its annual cycle, I realized that I was basically content here. My co-workers were creative, lively, and liked to laugh, and there was a steady paycheck twice a month.

Life was good.

I finished the letter. Kitty liked my draft, tweaked the letter in a couple of places, and signed it. I made copies, and we gave the letter out to students as we approached finals week.

Spring warmed into early summer; June gave way to July and the new fiscal year. Cabana Boy took over from Kitty as coordinator, and our good humor carried us through the transition. Some of our students graduated and took jobs; others moved on to four-year colleges. We registered our returning students for fall term with no audible complaints about the increase in lab fees.

We started planning our computer and software purchases, and submitted the required paperwork to Dr. Doubledud, our division director, who was widely regarded as being one of those public employees who was retired on active duty. We’d done our jobs, though, and then some—bowing and scraping as our department hosted a seeming throng of new college trustees, dragged through as part of a tour of the college’s showcase programs—so we settled happily into our summer routine.

Life continued to be good, until our purchasing paperwork fell into a black hole that seemed deeper and blacker the longer the summer went on. When Dr. Doubledud returned from the World’s Longest Vacation, Cabana Boy was lucky enough one day to reach him by phone to get a progress report.

Hmmmm. It seemed that we’d had the mother of all misunderstandings. Cabana Boy was assured, via Dr. Doubledud, that the college never had any intention of using lab fees in those programs where those fees were actually collected. Would we get new computers this year? Nope. New software? Nope.

Now, at this point, here is what a good bureaucrat would have done: Nothing. And here is what a good bureaucrat would have said: Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. And so here is where the story would have ended.

Except that I had never been that good bureaucrat, and anger rose up within me like a lion because that letter Kitty signed, that went out to students—that letter that I drafted—that letter, from back in spring term when the earth was turning and the world was greening and we were basking in a garden of delight—that letter was now a lie.

A lie told, unwittingly, by Kitty, who was right up there at the top of my list of favorite and best supervisors ever. Favorite, because we had similar interests and enjoyed giggles and good conversation about things that were totally unrelated to our jobs. Best, because she was smart, organized, honest, trustworthy, and knew how to give direction without micromanaging. Any one of these traits would have been enough to set her head and shoulders above most supervisors, but she had them all—in droves. And it’s because of her honesty that I had that lion anger about her letter’s being made out to be a lie—because she didn’t lie.

So what I thought of as my Artemis energy—that energy that protects animals, children, those weaker and more helpless than those predators who prey on them—started to kick in. And when Artemis kicks in, look out.

Cabana Boy and Kitty were both thrown for a loop by Dr. Doubledud’s assertions, because they had both been in the meetings in which the lab fee and computer purchase issues were discussed, and they both had heard the same assurances: Lab fees would stay in the departments where they were collected and would be used to purchase materials that were needed for those departments.

It turned out that Cabana Boy wasn’t the best bureaucrat in the world, either. He made some phone calls on the sly to other administrators who were in those same meetings—something he should have cleared with Dr. Doubledud first, because administrators always liked for their underlings to “go through channels”—and was told no, those things he had thought that he actually heard were never actually said.

We realized that perhaps something involving the college’s finances had changed dramatically, something that we didn’t know about—something that would mean the college desperately needed to use those lab fees somewhere else, at least for this year—but none of us could figure out why, if that were the case, the administrators would feel they should lie about it.

Kitty finally accepted the situation but Cabana Boy and I remained flummoxed, certain that there was something more we could or should do, but not sure what that something was.

Then I remembered: The college’s president, Dr. Tumbleweed—for whom I had once written speeches—had what he called an open-door policy, and frequently made himself accessible to students, staff, and faculty by plopping down in various well-announced places on campus for an hour or so, to take questions and comments from anyone and everyone who showed up.

Surely, I thought, if he knew about this situation, he could do something to fix it. He could work some magic, and Kitty would no longer be made out to be a liar to our students. All we wanted, really, were some new computers and new software. All our marketing materials said we had them! We were a showcase department for the college! Why should we have to beg?

I was not above begging, though—or communicating with the college’s president—if either would get us the equipment our students needed. I decided to write a letter because I was the only support staff person, and if I left my desk to meet with Dr. Tumbleweed we would have to close the office.

“Dear Dr. Tumbleweed,” I typed, “I could very easily title this letter, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’” It was one of his favorite phrases, so I figured it would buy me some absolution for what I was about to say: “Our administrators have just made my former supervisor out to be a liar.” And I explained the whole situation, in as much detail as would fit on one page—how neither Kitty nor Cabana Boy were in the habit of hearing things that weren’t said, how we could all understand if something in the college’s budget had changed and in that case, we would all like to hear what that was and why the funds we had been assured we would get were not actually coming to us. Most of all, I stressed that our students were expecting to be trained on the latest hardware and software, and that wasn’t happening.

I marked the letter “CONFIDENTIAL,” sent it through campus mail, and waited.

Weeks went by, and we began fall term with old computers and old software. One day, we had a call from Ruby, Dr. Doubledud’s administrative assistant. Dr. Doubledud wanted a meeting with Kitty and Cabana Boy.

I got a really knotty feeling in the pit of my stomach, the same feeling I got when I had a strong psychic flash that turned out to be right; it was not a pleasant sensation.

“You don’t think this could be about my letter to Dr. Tumbleweed, do you?” I asked both Cabana Boy and Kitty. They doubted it, but I felt no relief.

I have found out, over time, that my stomach does not lie in cases like this. Kitty and Cabana Boy returned from the meeting with long faces. I sensed instantly that something had gone terribly wrong.

“What is it?” I asked. My voice was almost shaking.

“It was about you,” they told me, “and the letter you wrote. Dr. Tumbleweed wanted us to fire you. We said no.”

Kitty and Cabana Boy explained to Dr. Doubledud that they had read the letter before I sent it, that they agreed with what I had said, that there was absolutely no difference between my writing a letter when I could have walked up to Dr. Tumbleweed at an open office hour and said exactly the same things I said in the letter, and furthermore, the letter had been marked CONFIDENTIAL so how was it that Dr. Doubledud now knew about it?

When they refused to fire me, Dr. Doubledud hit them with another gem: They had to give assurances that they would tell me that I was never, ever to communicate with Dr. Tumbleweed again.

“Why would she?” Cabana Boy asked. “She marked her letter confidential, and he’s now violated that confidentiality. You can be sure she’ll never communicate with him again.”

No, I thought, I certainly never would. I was rendered speechless by their support, and bewildered by this crazy turn of events. Dr. Tumbleweed was, after all, not a stranger; I had worked directly for him for a time, and we had, I thought, gotten along fairly well.

That night when I got home, I asked my husband, “What kind of organization is it that tries to silence its employees?”

He thought for a while, but not long.

“Fascist,” he replied.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during World War II, described the domination of the government by corporate power as “the essence of fascism.” Benito Mussolini said that fascism should be called corporatism because it is essentially the merger of state and corporate power. Essential to fascism’s success, it seems to me, is a population that is afraid to speak out, to challenge those people who use power in ways that harm other people and harm the planet. A silent citizenry is a doomed citizenry.

“Adventures in Academia” is a chapter from “Failed Bureaucrat,” a work in progress.

The Springs and The People: A 21st-Century Fairy Tale

2011-03-10T13:17:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time there was a place called Florida that had more freshwater springs, and more big freshwater springs, than anyplace else in the world.

Even before the land was called “Florida,” the springs were gathering places for the native people who visited them to fish, to gather water, and to tell stories as they sat and whittled their arrow points.

When the European explorers first came to the land they named Florida, they were enchanted by the springs. Some of them even thought the springs were fountains of youth, magical places where people could be cured of their ills and come away rejuvenated.

Later on, more explorers and naturalists were drawn to the springs. One of them, William Bartram, gave us some of our first written descriptions of these water wonders. And because people were learning how to communicate over great distances, Bartram’s writings—and Florida's springs—inspired poets and artists and curious people in faraway lands.

As time went on and word about these enchanted places spread, people came from all over the world to visit these water wonders.

People came to camp and canoe and hike the trails along the runs where the clear blue spring waters ran out to join the brown waters of the rivers that flowed long distances to the sea.

People came to dive hundreds of feet below the surface of the springs to explore the vast, mysterious network of underground caves where no one had ever gone before.

People came to swim in the bright sweet clear spring water as it gushed up between limestone rocks from deep inside the earth.

People were enchanted by the springs.

For many years, no one worried about the springs. Everyone assumed the springs would flow forever, crystal blue and shining with that sweet smell of really clear water, under the Florida sun.

But then, as always, things began to change.

People who lived near the springs and rivers began to fertilize their crops and their lawns, not realizing that fertilizer is something that hurts the springs.

People brought in many dairy cows, not realizing that the waste from cattle is something that hurts the springs.

More and more people began to water their lawns, not realizing that using so much water is something that hurts the springs.

Some people even realized that they could pipe free water out of the springs and sell it for profit, not realizing or not caring that pumping so much water is something that hurts the springs.

Eventually, some of the people who visited the springs started to notice changes.

Underwater plants that used to flourish in the clear spring runs began to disappear.

The water in the springs, usually a clear bright blue, slowly began to turn green. Something called algae began to show up where it had never been seen before.

Springs began to produce less water. Some springs even disappeared completely.

The people who were worried began to make little noises. The people in Florida who had the power to make laws to protect the springs mostly ignored these noises.

The worried people began to make louder noises. The Florida lawmakers turned their backs.

The worried people decided to take their case to court. They were willing to use every tool they had to save the springs. They went to court, and got a big federal agency to agree to enforce some laws that the worried people hoped would protect the springs.

But the lawmakers couldn’t be swayed. Protection costs too much, they said. We can’t afford it, they said.

So the lawmakers—who were supposed to represent all the people, but who really represented only a few people who had a lot of money—took actions of their own to make sure that the springs would never be protected.

Over time, swimmers began to get rashes from the water, and some of them even got sick.

Over time, the springs got cloudier and darker.

Over time, fish began to die.

Over time, the water got so murky that the cave divers stopped coming.

Over time, the swimmers and canoers and hikers and picknickers stopped coming to the springs.

Over time, the many people who ran businesses that catered to the springs visitors closed up shop. Little towns along the rivers began to look like ghost towns.

And on bright hot summer days at the springs—when once you would hear the laughter of families and friends as they splashed and swam and grilled and ate and were happy—all you could hear instead was a vast silence.

And when the springs died, a little bit of all of us—and a little bit of enchantment—died too.

Moral: Our springs need champions, but it doesn’t look like we are going to get any from the political arena. So it’s up to each and every one of us to do whatever we can to save the springs. What can YOU do?

Driving to the Writing Workshop

2011-03-09T12:13:00.003-05:00

It's March 4, New Moon in Virgo—which happens to be my birth sign—and I'm driving from Florida to Reidsville, Georgia, for an environmental writing workshop with one my heroines, Janisse Ray.

I drove the Florida-Georgia route many times with my parents when I was small, but I don't ever remember driving this stretch from Lake City, Florida, to Homerville, Georgia. It's just about the longest stretch of nothin' I've ever seen—miles and miles with no houses, no settlements, no gas stations, nothing but planted pines and swampy areas along the edges of the road, punctuated by the occasional sight of a dead deer that was hit by a passing vehicle.

I am travelling the western edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, where the Suwannee River rises out of Georgia mud for its long, meandering flow west to the Gulf of Mexico.

I give a little prayer of thanks that I had enough foresight to fill the car's gas tank before I left Lake City. There's certainly no gasoline to be had on this stretch of road.

Actually, I enjoy this long stretch of nothin'. There are too many planted pines for me to say that I'm in a wilderness area, but there are practically no other cars or humans to be seen, and the solitude is welcome. Music even seems jarring, so I turn off the radio.

It's late winter here in the South, and most of the landscape—except for the ubiquitous planted pines—is still a dull grayish-brown, splashed here and there with the brilliant pink of a blooming redbud or the snowy white blooms of pear or wild plum—tree candy for the eyes, especially after our cold winter.

A grey fox lopes from west to east some distance in front of my car. I slow down.

Crossing into Georgia, I spot a spectacular two-story wooden building right on the banks of the Suwannee River. It turns out to be the Suwannee River Visitors Center, and the building is so impressive that I pull in to investigate.

I find a very welcoming volunteer staffer, some wonderful exhibits, a great selection of books about the area, an array of t-shirts in gorgeous soft autumn colors (my favorite!), and a bona fide composting toilet! Best of all, this is a "green" building—LEED certified—an example of what state agencies everywhere could be doing if only they had the funding.

Coming out of Homerville, the landscape becomes more civilized, though still mostly rural. I smile when I see the signs so common to rural areas everywhere: "brown eggs for sale," "chicks are in," and, amidst pecan groves, "Nut 'n' Honey." Lots of places are selling honey; hopefully this area has not been hard hit by bee colony collapse.

And churches. Everywhere, little country churches.

I can't ever drive for a long way without remembering all the road trips I took with my parents when I was a child. We moved a lot, and we took summer vacations every year, often driving from Georgia or Florida to Texas to visit my paternal grandparents and my father's sister.

I drive by a field and am suddenly haunted by these old memories of road trips with my folks, sparked by the sight of small round stubby bushes flecked with white. I know this crop; I used to see it on the way to Texas when I was little, but it's been so long since I've seen it that it takes me a few seconds to recognize it: cotton, emblematic cash crop of the South, source of "the fabric of our lives."

So much Southern history draped around cotton. So many memories of my parents and grandparents.

So many tears.

And yet, so much still to love.

The pear trees here in Georgia seem bigger and more showy than the pears in Florida. Big and spectacular, these Georgia trees boast oodles of snowy blossoms that toss and glow in the brisk wind. If you love trees, you have to love these pears.

Getting close to Reidsville, with the road winding through farm after farm and pecan grove after pecan grove, I spy a red brick country church bordered on one side by a long row of some of the tallest and most beautiful pear trees I've seen so far.

Like many country churches, this one has a sign out front. The country church, the gorgeous pears, and the sign combine to create a silent sermon in only three words.

LOVE NEVER FAILS.

And just for the briefest moment, my busy mind stops.

The photo shows the Suwannee River Visitors Center in Fargo, Georgia. Great place to visit! Click on the photo for a larger view.

Kubla Khan OR, A VISION IN A DREAM. A FRAGMENT. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2011-02-19T13:07:00.004-05:00

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Some people think Coleridge was inspired by William Bartram's descriptions of Florida's mighty fountains, our own beautiful freshwater springs. The photo, above, is the head spring at Ichtetucknee. Click on the image for a larger view!

What Would You Do?

2011-02-04T18:32:00.004-05:00

What would you do if someone told you that you lived in the middle of the largest concentration of freshwater springs on planet Earth? Over 900* springs in all?

And that some of those springs had already ceased to flow?

And that others—springs widely recognized as the area's gems and state's treasures—had lost 20% or 30% of their flows?

Because too many people watered too many lawns? Too many businesses failed to use best management practices? Too many governments, businesses, agribusinesses, and individuals failed to conserve water and return treated water to the aquifer?

What would you do if you knew that one day, Silver Springs might not exist? Ichetucknee Springs? Wekiva? Wakulla?

What would you do if you knew that we only had 3 years to make a difference, or we might lose our springs forever?

What would you do?

*Thanks to Dr. Bob Knight of the Florida Springs Institute for this updated figure for Florida's freshwater springs.

The image above is of the head springs at Ichetucknee Springs State Park. Click on the image for a better view.

Saving Our Springs by Asking the Right Questions

2011-01-24T09:03:00.004-05:00

I’ve been thinking about Florida’s water issues again and, in particular, the fate of those springs that are our own unique, sparkling jewels—Silver, Ichetucknee, Manatee, Wekiva, and so many more, over 900 in all, the largest concentration of freshwater springs in the world.

Put that much crystal-clear water together in one place, and the springs long ago would have been named a World Heritage Site or at the very least, a National Park. But because they are scattered, held by a mix of public and private owners, and because the State of Florida is reluctant to enforce or even enact regulations that would help preserve these gems, it seems that task falls to all the rest of us.

As I’ve watched and welcomed the expanding dialogue about Florida’s water issues, I’ve realized something else.

Just as we can’t expect the government to step in and prevent the springs from being loved to death, polluted, or pumped dry, so we cannot expect science to provide all the answers to our water problems.

I’m not saying we don’t need science; we do. It’s just that I think the kind of effort that is going to be required to save our springs can only be successful if we advance the dialogue beyond the seemingly endless scientific arguments that surface at every public meeting, and start asking some of the bigger moral and ethical questions that this issue demands.

Science, after all, was not developed to solve every human dilemma—only to explain the workings of the natural world. To solve the really big problems, I am convinced that we need to bring into play ethics, morality, empathy, and compassion.

If we first recognize that each of us needs clean water to survive, and that each of us is capable of contributing to the fouling and diminishment of that water, then I think we can begin to ask some of the bigger questions that might be helpful.

What are our responsibilities as individuals, neighbors, communities, and businesses with regard to keeping our water free of pollutants? Conserving water when we can? Keeping our septic tanks in good working order? Changing the way we fertilize our plants? Making the switch from manicured lawns that need lots of water to alternatives such as native plant gardens that need less? Buying sturdy water bottles and getting our drinking water from the tap? Speaking out about our role in saving our water and our springs to family, friends, and acquaintances in our neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and schools?

And can we even come to collective agreement about the answers to these questions in an environment that seems to polarize us at every turn?

Florida’s new governor seems intent on relegating a lot of the state’s “anti-business” regulations to the dustbin; I worry about how this will affect our water quality, and how it will affect all those businesses that depend on water-based recreational tourism, all those other businesses that use Florida’s natural environment as a recruiting tool for their employees, and all the rest of us who can’t think of anything better than a cool dip in the springs on a hot summer day.

For quite a while now, I’ve felt alone in wondering if we should be asking these ethical questions, so I was delighted recently to discover that I’m not alone. For people who are interested, I recommend the new book Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson.

I think the sooner we start asking the big questions, the closer we may come to saving our springs. I offer these thoughts in the hope that they may start a ripple effect.

Note: The Gainesville Sun was kind enough to publish this as an opinion piece on January 24, 2010.

Freedom, Pointing-Out Instructions, and Dharma Study

2011-01-10T12:51:00.004-05:00

I have just come from an amazing weekend of teachings given here in Florida by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche of Kunzang Palchen Ling in Red Hook, New York, and formerly of His Holiness Karmapa’s North American seat, Karma Triyana Dharmachakra in Woodstock, New York.

Bardor Tulku Rinpoche (hereinafter referred to as BTR, for brevity’s sake) is recognized as the rebirth of one of Guru Rinpoche’s (Padmasambhava’s) 25 main disciples, Nub Sangye Yeshe, and also as the rebirth of the 19th-century terton (treasure text finder), Terchen Barway Dorje.

BTR taught this past weekend on three of Barway Dorje’s songs that have been published in the book Treasury of Eloquence: The Songs of Barway Dorje. For those who are interested, the songs are on pages 120-130 of the book.

The songs, composed for one of Barway Dorje’s consorts, Tsering Yangchen or Tseyang, are beautiful, clear, and heart-felt instructions in dharma practice; they also contain pointing out (as in, pointing out the nature of mind) instructions from teacher to disciple. Lama Yeshe Gyamtso, who was translating for BTR, told us that Tseyang is said to have attained fruition after practicing Barway Dorje’s instructions.

Pointing-out instructions are some of the most sought-after and mysterious teachings in the whole of Vajrayana Buddhism. It’s said that Buddhahood can be obtained in a single instant given the right match between teacher, student, and pointing-out instruction.

One of the things BTR explained—and which I have felt, intuitively, over the last several years—is that teachers give pointing-out instructions all the time. Because of different affinities and karmic connections, however, students often fail to realize when these instructions are being given. It takes the student’s doing the right preparation work (which I think may be different for every student) and the student’s meeting his or her karmically-connected teacher, in order for the pointing-out instructions to really work—so that the student can be introduced to the true nature of his or her own mind.

Rinpoche explained that in Tibet, it was common for teachers to instruct their students to attend different teachers, or go to specific places to meditate; this was because often, the teachers could tell which other teachers would be of the greatest benefit to students, because of the karmic threads that tied teacher and student together. Rinpoche used Milarepa as an example; Milarepa was sent to Marpa by one of Mila’s other teachers.

It was also common for students to take teachings and empowerments from many different teachers, until they found the teacher with whom they had their heart connection; this practice was not frowned upon or discouraged, but rather accepted and even expected.

The freedom to take teachings from different teachers, Rinpoche explained, is not only necessary but also essential for successful dharma practice. Freedom is your right as a student—morally and legally—to study with whomever you choose.

It is important, Rinpoche told us, to follow your faith.

And then, Rinpoche added, no one should prevent students from choosing with whom they will study—to do so is not only an error, it is a grave error.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I carry some baggage around the issues of freedom. I have lost two jobs that I’ve liked because of situations in which I found myself unable to sit silent while things were happening that were just plain wrong. In each case, the things that went awry were big things, not petty ones, and were fraught with questions involving racial relations and how organizations deal, or fail to deal, with issues of racial prejudice and freedom of speech.

I have not written about these things in detail on this blog, because I’m hoping eventually to have the time and mental space to deal with them in another format. But I want to be clear for readers that with regard to issues of freedom, I have always come out on the side of “for” rather than “against,” even when that stand has wound up hurting me. And I can say, with no hesitation, that if I ever were offered a re-do of these situations, I’d do exactly the same things—or I couldn’t face myself in the mirror every morning (which, at my age, is fairly hard to do!).

As some of the readers of this blog may know, there has been a bit of a dustup at KTD over the past couple years involving who is and is not able to teach there, and with whom KTD- and KTC-affiliated students should and should not study. It is not my intention to rehash this history, because the facts are available elsewhere on line.

But when I hear things, as I did this weekend, that trouble me, then I have to wonder: Am I enabling such troubling situations to continue if I remain silent? Is it my dharma duty to speak out? Or are the sangha and I better served if I simply shut up and do my practice?

Most of the sangha members I talked to about these issues urged silence and caution. I decided I wanted to hear what Rinpoche had to say, so I asked him; my question was the last one at the question-and-answer session on the last day of the teachings.

“Rinpoche,” I asked, “last night in the empowerment, you used the term ‘fierce devotion.’ So when I hear about people being banned from teaching in certain places, and students being discouraged from attending certain teachers, that raises a lot of ‘fierce devotion’ for me.”

Lama Yeshe Gyamtso stopped me right there, and explained that the term “fierce devotion” means intense devotion, not anger. I was happy to hear that, because part of my question was going to be, “What is meant by ‘fierce devotion’?”

I explained that I was not asking out of anger, but rather out of a strong protective instinct—dare I invoke the words “mama grizzly”?—to protect the students’ freedoms to choose their teachers, to protect the teachers’ livelihoods, and to protect the people responsible for imposing limitations from the negative karma involved in their actions.

Lama Yeshe Gyamtso then let the question go forward, and I got my answer.

You have many freedoms in this country, Rinpoche said. One of those freedoms is freedom of speech, and Rinpoche said he would never tell any of his students what to say, or what not to say.

I had a feeling much like the one I had in graduate school when my professor, who was teaching our class in Social Reality and Human Organizations, stood up and said, “Issues of power and authority in organizations are never issues of power and authority; they are issues of fear and insecurity.” I wanted to stand up and cheer!

So when I hear things like the ones I heard this weekend—that a brilliant Western translator and teacher has been banned from teaching at certain Western centers, not by a Rinpoche but by another Western lama—I have to wonder: What kind of dharma traditions do we really want to create here in this wild dharma borderland of North America?

Do we want to stand on the side of freedom or oppression? What organizational decisions and structures do we want to support? I think the times call for some serious introspection and questioning for all of us who are involved in Vajrayana practice in the West.

With freedom comes responsibility. Part of that responsibility, it seems to me, is learning how to trust yourself, follow your faith, and make your own decisions, rather than letting other people make those decisions for you.

These kinds of situations are especially hard for people who, like me, have feet planted in a couple of different—and sometimes conflicting—dharma camps. How can we revere our teachers and the dharma, yet object with lovingkindness and compassion instead of anger and hatred when we see things happening that we feel, in our guts, are just plain wrong?

I know that I will continue to struggle with such questions, and I trust that one day, the answers will become clear.

In the meantime, I think I just got permission from Rinpoche to say a lot more than I have said previously about my observations and concerns.

Oh, and the picture of the sandhill cranes, above: They were in attendance for the full weekend of teachings. Some people even saw them dancing!

And when Rinpoche began to speak about pointing out instructions, the cranes began to call.

A Word Witch welcomes thoughtful comments framed through the lenses of lovingkindness and compassion. Comments are moderated and may take a couple of days to show up; please be patient.

The Christmas Owls

2010-12-25T16:05:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time there was a woman who liked to listen to owls. It happened this way.

She had lived in The City for a long time—too long. One day, she packed her small car with her animals and some belongings, and joined by her companion, she headed home. Because she had always wanted to live in the country, she decided to look for a place outside the city limits.

She got lucky. Down a dirt road, she found an old farmhouse—raised off the ground as the old cracker-style homes are—with a screened front porch, tin roof, heart pine paneling in three rooms, an old propane heater for the cold months and a huge yard with a western breeze for the hot months, and big, old, beautiful big trees—live oak, hackberry, pear, dogwood, and pecan.

It wasn’t long after she moved in with her companion that she met the owls. Sitting on the back stoop one night at sunset, she heard a strange little whinny followed by other whinnies and strange hooting noises. In that twilight time when light and shadow play tricks on the eyes, she watched as her whole yard filled with tiny swooping shapes and haunting calls.

Because she had lived in The City for too long, she had to ask people who know about these things what she had seen, and then she realized that it had a been a family of little screech owls—probably some of them fledglings who were leaving their nest for the first time.

The woman continued to see the little owls and hear their calls. One day she realized that the owls were bringing her a message. She found out that her father was very ill, and was soon to die.

One night after her father had died, there was a terrible storm. After the storm, the woman didn’t hear or see the screech owls any more.

Instead of the screech owls, the woman began to hear the distinctive cries of the larger barred owls: “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” punctuated by the owls’ occasional loud screams and laughs. Sometimes the woman would hear a more rare call, the softer hooting of the great horned owls, but it was mainly the barred owls that sang to her.

She came to love the calls of the barred owls so much that her companion would come in from outside to tell her, “Your people are out there, calling for you,” and she would go out to listen and to marvel.

She liked living in the country so much that she decided she would like to work in the country too, so she got a job in a state park. She was leaving work one day when she spotted two big great horned owls in a large tree, mating. At another time, she watched as a family of tiny barn owls that could be spotted through a hole in a large tree grew to adulthood. And at home, she felt honored to sometimes catch a glimpse of a barred owl eating its dinner, spitting bits of discarded food onto the ground from high up in the trees by the sinkhole near her house.

One night she even dreamed she was an owl. She flew low to the ground over the pasture behind her house, hunting for mice and rats. When she woke from the dream, she woke to the words and music of an owl song humming in her head.

When her mother was sick and in the hospital, the woman traveled to be with her and to do what she could to help. Driving back from the hospital to her mother’s house just after twilight one November night, the woman was surprised to hear the calls of screech owls coming from the oaks in every direction throughout her mother’s yard. She had never heard the screech owls there before, and it was the first time she had heard so many screech owls since before her father died.

Not long after that, the woman’s mother died.

With the money she got from the sale of her mother’s house, the woman bought her own house even farther from town than the places she had been renting. She could hear the barred owls some nights, down by the river, but one night the woman got a little worried. Her companion was sick, and she heard one lone screech owl whinnying in the pines behind her house.

Sure enough, her companion got sicker—very sick, in fact. But thanks to some good doctors, he didn’t die.

The woman wondered if the fact she had heard only one screech owl was some kind of indicator that his illness would not kill him.

The woman missed having owls in her yard. So she planted some young live oak trees, thinking that maybe the owls might eventually find her yard a pleasant place to be.

She spent some time contemplating her relationship with the owls. She knew that owls were often considered omens of death, but that they were also the companions of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and that they were associated in different cultures with healing powers, magic, and clairvoyance.

She learned that owls and hawks often share the same territory, with owls hunting at night and hawks during the daytime. The woman built a relationship with hawks, as well, while living in the country—indeed, one of the woman’s family names indicated that her ancestors might well have been falconers. In her heart she began to resonate, more and more, with the raptors.

One night she had a dream—or was it a vision in that state between sleeping and waking?—that she was lying on the ground and looking up, and a small parliament of owls was flying overhead. She was struck by the very human look on the faces of the owls, and then it came to her: Long ago, people had seen the eyes of owls flying overhead and had imagined that the owls were people, and from this vision had come the idea that witches can shapeshift and fly.

So one particular Christmas, the woman was delighted when her companion made her a gift of several little owls. One owl image hung from a bell. Another was a metal sculpture of a group of three owls. And there were a couple of pairs of owls, and one wee baby owl.

And the woman welcomed the new owls into her home as she had learned, over the years, to welcome the wildness of the raptors into her heart.

Seminole Pumpkins in Soup

2010-12-17T18:12:00.002-05:00

The first of the five Seminole pumpkins that ripened got used in this soup, a mix of leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, barley, black beans, and other veggies.

The big golden globs are the pieces of pumpkin. And yes, they are delicious!

Ferals' Progress, Part 9 (Bedfellows)

2010-11-28T12:02:00.004-05:00

The cold weather (in the 30s here last night) makes many combinations of bedfellows. It's a tribute to patience and persistence on our part and tolerance on their part that we found this pile of red cats on the futon here in the house today.

When we first got the ferals, they wouldn't come near us. They spent the first few years of residence here huddled under a heat lamp on the back screened porch when the nights turned cold. Finally, slowly but surely, they migrated into the house, where conditions are better—especially during our weather extremes of summer and winter.

From left to right, above, that's Bill (aka William of Orange) and Angie (aka T-Angie-Rine) with her little arm giving Grover (aka Orange Grover) a hug.

It's like a little miracle; I was really never sure anything like this would ever happen. Mom would be pleased, I think.

Success! Five Harvested Seminole Pumpkins

2010-11-28T11:55:00.004-05:00

While five pumpkins aren't really a lot, they're more than we've ever managed to grow before, so I'm counting this year's crop, above, as a huge success.

It got colder than forecast last night and the pumpkin vine got nipped, so the pumpkins were picked today. They should continue to ripen in the house, hopefully, and should all eventually turn the same color as the palest one. I've heard they store well, so I'm looking forward to enjoying pumpkin "something" from this crop over the next several months.

So, now we know it CAN be done—and next year, we will try again.

“The Gulf Between Us” by Terry Tempest Williams in Orion Magazine

2010-11-22T14:02:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite writers, Terry Tempest Williams, has written a long, thoughtful, and thought-provoking article called “The Gulf Between Us” that appears in the November-December 2010 issue of Orion Magazine. The article describes her trip to the Gulf of Mexico and the people she met in the aftermath of BP’s oil spill.

Thanks to Terry and Orion, the article is available on line at:

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5931

There is a recording of a followup call in which Terry and others discuss the situation in the Gulf Region; you can listen to it here:

http://www.oriongrassroots.org/conference_calls

Look for the heading marked “Archived Calls” and click on the November 17 call.

I am posting this information in my blog because I think what’s gone on in the Gulf, and what’s going on there right now, are possibly the biggest untold stories of our time, and I want more people to know about them.

For example: Did you know that there are people—not birds, not fish, not marine mammals, not turtles, but PEOPLE—in the Gulf Region who are sick, chemically poisoned by the Corexit used to “disperse” the oil, and who cannot receive medical attention? I did not know this until I read Terry’s article and listened to her call.

I’ll admit that the conference call made me cry, and not just because of the chemical poisonings. There’s just so much there that resonates with me.

First, this is a major news story that's not being reported anywhere else, as near as I can tell. Where are the journalists? Why isn’t the fact that there are people here in the USA who are chemically poisoned plastered all over the newspapers and the TV? Have we become so numbed that we’d just simply rather fret about “Dancing With the Stars”?

Second, Terry makes some excellent points on the conference call about how artists, writers, musicians and other creatives need to be involved in keeping stories like this alive—bearing witness for the benefit of others.

Third, there are more excellent points made in the call about the need to move beyond preaching to the usual environmental choir, and important questions raised about the commitment to environmental preservation (or lack of it) not only here in the USA, but around the world.

Something else struck me about the Gulf Region as I was waking up yesterday morning.

Following the loss of Gulf wetlands, following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and now following the BP oil disaster, I glimpsed that the situation in the Gulf right now offers us a clear view of the choices that we as a society are going to have to make, and soon.

There are probably as many people in the Gulf Region who make their living in what I call nature-based jobs—fishing, shrimping, and otherwise relying on the ocean to support their tourist-related or other ocean-related businesses—as make their living working in oil-based jobs, working for the oil industry.

Now, given disasters both natural and man-made, all these people—both the nature-based workers and the oil-based workers—are suffering the loss of their way of life.

The nature-based jobs have taken a hit—although hopefully only temporarily, but we don’t know yet—by the oil. And the oil-based jobs took a hit from the oil industry itself, when the BP disaster resulted in a drilling moratorium.

So, what’s it to be? Will we choose to support the nature-based jobs or the oil-based jobs? I see this very much as an “or” choice, not an “and” choice, because the oil obviously has the potential to ruin everything. If we choose the oil-based jobs, how soon will such a disaster happen again, and what will be the costs? Because people aren’t perfect. We make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, we can screw up whole ecosystems, and whole ways of life.

We can decide, now, that we want to end our dependence on oil and begin a massive, society-wide effort to do this; or we can lumber along, ignoring the problem and sticking our collective heads in the sand, and wait for the next disaster to overwhelm the next unlucky region and drive yet more folks into poverty.

Luckily, Terry is not a gloom-and-doom environmentalist. I was heartened to hear on the conference call the talk of a Marshall Plan-like effort for restoring the Gulf Region’s ecosystems and economy. If ever there were an ideal site for such an effort in the USA, the Gulf Region is it. I wonder how many people could be put to work if such an effort—one that might include an all-out push to develop solar and other alternative energy sources—received backing not only from our government, but also from our banks and private businesses, many of whom have enjoyed windfall profits due in part to the labors of the men and women who live near the Gulf of Mexico? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, collectively, we could build a broad coalition of people—of all races and all political persuasions—to help?

Please do me a favor and read Terry’s article and listen to the conference call; it’s important, and time’s a-wastin’. Thanks.

I took the picture, above, at Cedar Key, Florida, the day of the Hands Across the Sand event last summer. We are fortunate—very, very fortunate—that the BP oil spill did not affect us here. Next time, of course, could be very different.

Young Adult Pumpkins

2010-11-20T15:31:00.005-05:00

Yeehaw! Some of our Seminole pumpkins have actually grown, and are approaching maturity. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we can avoid any really cold weather until these young "punks" are ready to be picked.

This was our first year with trying to grow these pumpkins with a later (as opposed to earlier, when they would succumb to mildew) planting date. Now that we know it can be done, we just have to figure out exactly when that later planting date should be.

What Price Clarity?/or, What about the ‘common good' in regard to water?

2010-11-16T10:52:00.005-05:00

Back in the dark ages when I went to school, classes in Civics and American History were required even into the college years. In these classes, we learned that sometimes the members of a society would choose to have laws that—while they might be burdensome for individuals—were important enough for the common good that people would agree to abide by them.

Lately I wonder if this idea of “the common good” hasn’t been lost in space. I’m thinking, in particular, about the renewed debates about recent actions that have been taken to protect the quality of our water supply.

Because the State of Florida has, to a large extent, refused to do its job with regard to water protection, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has stepped in to mandate water quality standards. And of course, people are protesting this—based, in many cases, on debatable financial analyses of what meeting the new standards might cost them.

One thing the State did right was to enact a law to ensure that septic tanks are maintained in good working condition. Now, after the latest elections, there are loud cries for that law to be repealed because it will cost homeowners to have their tanks pumped out every so often, or repair or replace them if they start to leak.

At the core of the debates about these issues, it seems to me, are issues that are bigger, even, than economics or government control.

The core issues—from where I sit in my home near the Santa Fe River—are, How important is it to us to have a clean, clear water supply? Are we, collectively, going to go on fouling our waters without considering what effects our actions will have not only on us, but on the kind of world we leave to our children and our grandchildren? Is the idea of “common good” still viable in today’s society? What kind of a society do we really want to be?

We know what the problems are with regard to our rivers and springs and the Floridan Aquifer that nurtures us: too many nitrates from leaky septic tanks and agribusiness, a population that is almost certain to grow in the coming years, and the voracious appetites of water bottling companies and other industries whose use of our water resources threatens the amount of water that is available to all the rest of us.

So if we are all a part of the water problem, doesn’t it stand to reason that we all need to be part of the solution?

Thinking back to those old Civics and American History classes, here is what I wish some political leader who loves Florida would stand up and say to us now.

The decision to maintain and protect our water supply is one that should not be based solely on economics. Because all of us need clean water to survive and remain healthy, each of us has a part to play in maintaining the health of our waters. The decisions we make today will determine the amount and quality of water we have tomorrow, and the water that is available for our descendents. If we decide, collectively, that clean water really is a priority for us, then each one of us is going to have to make sacrifices and changes in the ways we live and the ways we do business.

Which, in the long run, leads us back some economic questions: How can we afford to live here if our water supply gets so bad that we cannot use it? What price are we willing to pay, now, for clarity?

Teenage Pumpkins

2010-10-07T00:24:00.002-04:00

With some encouragement, our Seminole pumpkin plants have begun to climb the fence, and there are quite a few blossoms.

We are keeping our fingers crossed!

Baby Seminole Pumpkins

2010-09-30T09:45:00.004-04:00

One of my aspirations for my next life is to live on a pumpkin farm, some place where there are actually four distinct seasons and autumn is as glorious as I experienced it in October two years ago on a trip to KTD in the Catskills.

Pre-climate change, October was always my favorite month because that was when we Floridians could expect the first serious cold (or at least cooler) weather of the year. Nowadays, that season seems to have bumped up into November or beyond. But my love of autumn, of Halloween, and of pumpkins has only grown stronger over the years.

It was only recently, however, that I discovered that there are pumpkins that are native to Florida—Cucurbita moschata, the Seminole pumpkins, or chassa-howitska in the Creek (Native American) language, "hanging pumpkin."

My first introduction to the Seminole pumpkin came from the wonderful pumpkin bread served at the Florida Folk Festival held every year on Memorial Day weekend in White Springs. Mmmmm....

My second encounter came when I was working for the Florida Park Service and one of the rangers at Dudley Farm was growing these native squash. Until then, I had no idea that one could grow pumpkins in Florida, but evidently the chassa-howitskas are prolific farther south.

These are climbing pumpkins. Amy Goldman, in her beautiful book The Compleat Squash, relates how one vine covered four acres of a grapefruit grove with hundreds of pumpkins, and how "...John Bartram, the noted Philadelphia botanist, found it exceedingly curious in 1774 'to behold the wild Squash climbing over the lofty limbs of the trees; its yellow fruit, somewhat the size and figure of a large orange, pendant from the extremities of the limbs over the water.'" (p. 93)

We had tried growing Seminole pumpkins before, but always planted earlier in the summer and lost the plants to mildew and rot. This year, we are trying later in the summer, from some seeds saved from previous years.

Here (above) is the baby picture of our pumpkins that I took a few weeks ago.

Highly recommended for fellow pumpkin fans: The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower's Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds, by Amy Goldman, published by Artisan, New York.

Mowing

2010-09-17T16:54:00.003-04:00

I have a confession to make. I like to mow.

In the Florida summer heat, mowing can be more than a challenge--it can be dangerous. Stay out too long, and you risk not only sunburn but also dehydration, heat exhaustion, or heat stroke, the last of which can be fatal. So you have to be careful, take a lot of breaks, and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. I alternate Gatorade, when we have it, with water.

I'm not a big lover or supporter of the idea of "a lawn." I think grass is highly overrated; it requires too much water, for one thing, and we are moving into a time when we are all going to have to conserve water. I'm much more intrigued by the idea of using native plants for landscaping, thereby cutting down on the need for watering with the added benefit of providing food and shelter for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife.

But when I bought my house, there was a huge lawn. Converting it is going to take time; I can't afford to pay thousands for a landscaper to come in and re-make the yard instantaneously. So for now, we must mow.

But we are heading into the time of year when mowing can be a joy. Even though the love bugs are back, it's less humid now than it was at the height of the summer. The quality of light is less harsh; it has more of a golden hue than the white heat of July. And there's more of a chance for a breeze.

I like mowing because it gives me an excuse to get outside and move around, and immerse myself in these changes of late summer/early autumn. I have a really sedentary job, so any opportunity for physical exercise is a welcome relief.

When we first moved back to Florida from California, we rented an old cracker shack on about 130 acres. Next to our house was a picturesque old barn where, we were told, neighbors used to gather for weekend dances and parties. There were a couple of huge, old live oak trees next to the barn--some of the biggest trees I've ever seen, one of which came down after the fourth hurricane in 2004, the season of Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne.

One autumn afternoon I was out mowing behind the old red barn. The sun was going down. The moon—a harvest moon, not quite full but close—was rising. Somewhere in between the sun's beginning to set and the moon's rising, a breeze kicked up and the weather shifted, and the oak branches started to wave in celebration. It was one of those unexpected moments that happen sometimes--and that take my breath away--when I find myself suspended between earth and sky, caught up in the beauty of the world and marveling at Mother Nature's magic.

I couldn't stop mowing—I had to finish while there was still light—but mowing at that moment ceased to be a chore and became a joy. The sun, the moon, the oaks, the barn, the breeze, the welcome shift in the weather all combined to make a kind of magic.

It was then that I realized I like to mow.

Perfect Naga Day

2010-09-15T13:17:00.005-04:00

Today I went to make an offering to the naga at our local spring. It was a perfect late-summer morning, clear and warm but not humid, with a strong breeze that rippled the water into sparkling diamond patterns.

The river has been high and the tea-colored river water has obscured the spring, tinting the water in the shallows an unusual golden color.

After I made the offering, as I was standing on the limestone shelf that surrounds the spring, I noticed many medium-sized fish approaching me in the sparkling water. I stood very still, and the school of fish gathered around me and hovered in place, staring at me. I was surrounded by shimmering water and glistening fish!

As I stood there, I thought about what His Holiness Karmapa had said this morning, on the first day of his autumn teachings.*

Karmapa's topic is "How to Generate Relative Bodhicitta," the wish for all sentient beings to become enlightened. We are so wrapped up in our own wants and needs, Karmapa said, that it is hard for us to remember to shift our focus to other sentient beings. As an example, he referred to the animal realm: "These are the real owners of our world," and not just those animals we can see, but also those we cannot—such as nagas.

We kill many of these animals, some for fun, some for food. Who is to protect them and serve their interests? And what about the bigger picture of the whole environment, and those it sustains? We must consider these things, Karmapa said (and this was the part of the talk where I noticed he was most animated).

"This is not just big talk, but a critical responsibility that challenges us," he said. It is the responsibility of each individual to benefit each and every other individual, so that we begin a chain reaction of helping each other. If this does not happen now, we have no guarantee that we will have this chance again in the future.

We need to pay attention to "what is really going on in the world, and what sentient beings are being made to experience." We need to consider the happiness of the whole environment. What companies serve sentient beings? (What companies do not?)

The Earth does not discriminate with regard to who lives on it. Cultivation of relative bodhicitta means that we must be ready, willing, and able to take responsibility for the sentient beings who share our world.

So this morning, standing in the spring surrounded by fish, watching the constantly changing patterns and swirling energy in the golden breeze-swept water, I stopped for a moment to consider: What energies am I a part of? What energies am I sending out? Am I really up to this responsibility of caring for and helping all other sentient beings?

I think if I am going to study with Karmapa—and from what I have learned from my other dear teachers—the answer must be yes.

*Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the teachings are being live streamed on the Internet.

Fall Colors, Part 2

2010-09-04T10:00:00.004-04:00

From the rich purples of the beautyberries and the golden hues that begin to shine in leaves and grasses, we turn to the other sacred colors of fall—orange and blue.

Today is the first day of football season at the University of Florida. Yes, the Gator Nation extends even out into the boondocks where we live, and football fever has been palpable now for a couple of weeks.

Football fever is the sign of the times—a sure guarantee that autumn has, indeed, arrived—as witnessed by this proclamation at a neighbor's driveway.

GO GATORS!

Fall Colors, Part 1

2010-09-04T09:44:00.004-04:00

Forrest has done remarkable things with our garden spot this year. There's a profusion of flowery plants attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds, although we think our hummers may have already left for Guatemala.

Of course my favorites are always the beautyberries, with their gorgeous purple berries that serve, in these parts, to herald the arrival of autumn.

About the same time that the beautyberries turn purple, the night-blooming jasmine begins to perfume the air. We started our plant from cuttings from a plant at my parents' house, and our jasmine dies back every winter (winters are colder here than they are in Central Florida); fortunately, it regenerates every spring. Now, we are just starting to get the first subtle whiffs of sweetness when the sun goes down.

Autumn has always been my favorite season, maybe because my birthday falls near the equinox, maybe because of the new energies associated with the beginning of the academic year. I spent the largest part of my life either in school or working various jobs in higher education, so fall semester = fresh start, which is kind of odd, since autumn is traditionally a time for harvesting and weeding out.

And of course, there are other fall rituals as well. See next post.

Kind, Kind Root Guru

2010-09-03T23:14:00.002-04:00

Namo!

Kind, kind root guru,

We have long been connected through deep aspiration

You are committed to kindness; don't abandon me now!

Kind, single father: regard me with wisdom.

I am tormented by chains of karma and kleshas.

I am ignorant, stupid, and infantile.

I may be swept away by the waves of my suffering in the ocean of samsara.

Compassionate one, grasp me with the hook of your kindness.

When I embark on the path of the essence, supreme means,

My heart may be poisoned by the demon of pointless depression.

I may sink into the quicksand of distraction and laziness.

Kind one, extend the long arm of your power.

In the darkness of my obscurations' clouds,

I do not see the authentic essence, absolute truth.

I wander about, blinded by self-fixation.

One with blessing, grant me eyes of wisdom.

Your devoted child prays to you from afar.

Please hold me with great compassion.

Now, later, between, and always,

Hold me, beings' protector, supreme guru.

Beyond a moment's separation,

Grant the blessing of your mind uniting with mine.

Written by Barway Dorje at the request of a young woman named Tseyang. Virtue!

From Treasury of Eloquence: The Songs of Barway Dorje, translated by Yeshe Gyamtso, KTD Publications, 2007, p. 279.

Hands Across the Sand, June 26

2010-06-19T19:07:00.004-04:00

Hands Across the Sand, an event/movement that began here in Florida, is gearing up for what may be the largest demonstration ever held against ocean oil drilling. The event—which has now gone global—will be held for 15 minutes beginning at noon local time, wherever you are, on Saturday, June 26.

I am planning to participate at a small beach on the Gulf Coast, and I imagine that folks who live inland can participate as well. If you don't find a site near you on this link, just pick a site, preferably near water, register it by emailing one of the folks listed here, and invite your friends. It might be good to alert your local media as well.

Never underestimate the power of a good picture and a cogent quote.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

The Seeker

2010-05-29T19:23:00.004-04:00

I heard legends about this hidden valley long before I found it, and now it takes my breath away—a place where the animals have no fear and communicate with humans through mental images; where birds gather to fly before you and guide you if you have lost your way; where the trees shimmer with life force in the sunlight and the plants and grasses heal your ills; where the water is clean and cool and sings mantras as it rushes over smooth grey stones; where the natural world is a living, breathing, magical thing; and where the spirits and local guardians welcome visitors who have loving and compassionate hearts.

It sounds idyllic, and I’m sure it is, but my real destination is the mountain in the distance. It’s said that travelers who make the ascent come down the mountain changed somehow—either crazy, or gifted with the power of poetry.

I’ve always loved poetry. I have decided to take my chances.

I have found this valley, and the way to the mountain, by what feels like serendipity. I saved this red fox, or one of her kin, from a hunter once; now, she has trotted ahead of me up this almost-hidden trail, and we have come upon this magic valley. She has turned to see if I will follow. Yes.

Yes, although I am barely equipped for such a long journey. I set out today only to swim in my favorite spring and then sit a while in meditation beneath my favorite oak. Luckily, I brought my walking stick and my pouch of precious objects—a labradorite wand, two flint stones, a tarot talisman, a small bag of cornmeal, and my sacred feathers, these last a gift from my grandmother, long ago. I’m not carrying water, but with that clear river down below, I don’t think I’ll be thirsty. I’ll feast on the plants and grasses that I find.

My life, up until now, has not been entirely satisfactory. I know that there is much I need to learn about how to live in harmony with Mother Earth and all Her creatures, and with my fellow humans. Some people would say that my journey is a fool’s errand; I prefer to think of it as a gift, a blessed opportunity. And I get the distinct impression that when I come back, I will be a different person.

I hesitate for a minute, taking in the vista and feeling the soft grass and firm earth beneath my feet. I feel grounded; I feel ready.

I wonder who I’ll meet.

In the Gaian Tarot Circle, one of the exercises we're encouraged to do is to write about the cards. This was my first effort—for The Seeker card (pictured above), created by Joanna Powell Colbert as part of this lovely new deck, the Gaian Tarot.

Happy Birthday, Gary Snyder!

2010-05-08T20:48:00.005-04:00

Gary Snyder, one of my all-time favorite poets, has a birthday today. Here's a poem I heard him read when I was living in California, about another of my all-time favorites, Lew Welch. And yes, I got chills when I heard him read it, too.

For/From Lew

Lew Welch just turned up one day,

live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,

"you didn't shoot yourself after all."

"Yes I did," he said,

and even then I felt the tingling down my back.

"Yes you did, too," I said—"I can feel it now."

"Yeah" he said,

"There's a basic fear between your world and

mine. I don't know why.

What I came to say was,

teach the children about the cycles.

The life cycles. All the other cycles.

That's what it's all about, and it's all forgot."

-from Axe Handles, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983 (p. 7)

Mother's Day Musings/Bumcham, Machik's Mother

2010-05-08T17:32:00.006-04:00

On this Mother's Day weekend, I have been pondering what it must have been like to have been Machik Labdron's mother.

So much emphasis is placed in the Buddhist teachings on the energies of our mothers—how they protect and care for us when we are helpless, without asking for anything in return. We are encouraged to extend this lovingkindness—the wish for a tiny baby to be happy—and compassion—the wish for a tiny baby not to suffer—to all sentient beings, beginning first with ourselves and then extending outward in spirals to include those people for whom we feel affection, those people toward whom we feel neutral, and finally to those people we dislike and toward whom we feel hatred and revulsion.

But what must it have been like to have been a mother who had prophetic dreams in which her heart was cut out of her and feasted on by dakinis, to be replaced by a glistening white right-turning conch shell? It's said that Bumcham, Machik's mother, was not disturbed by this dream imagery—in fact, it brought her bliss, and she felt better than before!

While she was pregnant with Machik, at age 48, Bumcham's wrinkles faded and everyone commented on how young she looked. It was said she could see in the dark, that at night her room was lit as from the glow of butter lamps, and that she knew the thoughts of other people.

And then there was her daughter, Machik, "One Mother," who would one day become a mother herself, born with three eyes and able to speak. What a shock that must have been! It seems Bumcham dealt with the shock gracefully. By the time Machik was born, Bumcham probably had a good idea that she was birthing someone special.

Bumcham—who, with her husband, was a dharma practitioner—was likely little Machik's first dharma teacher. It's said that the two of them recited sutras together in the family chapel.

Bumcham died when Machik was 10 or 13 (I've read both ages), so the two of them had only a short time together, but I'm sure her influence on Machik was important for both of them.

I wonder if Bumcham took rebirth or went to a pure land? I've never read anything more about her, other than in Machik's biography.

Of course, to each mother her baby is special, a gift, and all time together is special. On Mother's Day, let us honor the best about our mothers, who are often our first spiritual teachers, and honor ways to pass the lessons of lovingkindness and compassion on to the young people in our lives.

Happy Mother's Day!

Naga Skins

2010-04-27T22:09:00.001-04:00

The nagas must be pleased. They have left us gifts—two newly-shed skins under the boxwood bushes in the front yard. Forrest found the first one, then I spied the second. I like to think the nagas were sunning themselves, all warm and happy, and shed almost simultaneously.

I wonder where they are now?

We think they are maybe black racers.

Pine Candles Moon

2010-04-26T22:26:00.003-04:00

I've heard the new growth on pine trees described as "pine candles," and that's an apt description. For a couple of weeks now, on my way home from work, I've been passing some classic examples, and waiting for just the right time to take a picture.

Tonight was IT, in the evening light with the sun setting behind me and the moon rising ahead, temperatures in the 70s and a brisk breeze that made it feel even cooler.

In another two months, we will be shut up in the house running the air conditioner and fans, and evenings like this one will be beautiful dreams that will, hopefully, carry us through another brutal Florida summer. The pine candles will have turned to green boughs, and these trees will be a good foot to foot-and-a-half taller.

Remember to click on the picture for a better view!

Ferals' Progress, Part 8 (Bill's Stomach)

2010-04-26T22:11:00.001-04:00

Yes, Bill..aka William of Orange...is a housecat!

Naga Tree, Part 3

2010-04-10T22:18:00.002-04:00

Finally, here's a view of the whole tree. Remember that you can click on the picture for a bigger view.

Naga Tree, Part 2

2010-04-10T22:15:00.002-04:00

Here's another view of the Cellon Oak, looking back toward the trunk from one of the branches that runs along near the ground.

Naga Tree, Part 1

2010-04-10T21:49:00.004-04:00

Nagas are sometimes said to live in powerful trees, and there's no local tree more powerful than the Cellon Oak, Florida's state champion live oak located just a little bit north of Gainesville.

The trunk is 30 feet in circumference. The oak is 85 feet high, and the average spread of the crown is 160 feet. Supposedly it is visible from space via Google Earth!

One picture can't do this tree justice, because to get the whole tree in a photo you have to back up about a quarter of a mile—so I'll post a couple of shots. Here's a closeup, above.

The Cellon (pronounced SEE-lun) Oak was named for a descendant of one of Alachua County's pioneer families. Painter Angela Hoppe has rendered a lovely image of this tree that graces the poster of this weekend's Santa Fe College Spring Arts Festival.

Purple Wisteria

2010-04-07T22:07:00.003-04:00

As long as I'm on a wisteria kick, I thought I'd post a picture of the purple-flowered plant I pass on my way to work every day.

This picture was taken in mid-morning light, which was rather harsh. The blossoms have also begun to fade a little bit.

I learned last year that if I don't stop and take pictures of certain plants within a very short window of time, that chance disappears for another year. Wisteria is one of the plants that doesn't bloom for that long, and our dogwood trees have already started to lose their flowers and leaf out. I saw a big flurry of dogwood blossoms coming down in a breeze just this morning, like dakinis dancing in the wind.

The phlox, however, will bloom for quite a while—pink and purple carpets of wildflowers along the roads and in the old fields.

Pine with Wisteria

2010-04-05T21:11:00.003-04:00

I couldn't resist posting this one too. For more information, see "White Wisteria" (previous post).

Remember that you can click on the picture for a better view.

White Wisteria

2010-04-05T20:52:00.006-04:00

This may become known as the Spring When Everything Bloomed at Once. I pass a tall pine tree on my way to work that is covered in white wisteria, a vine that climbs almost to the top of the tree.

Since I've only figured out how to post one picture per blog entry, I decided on the closeup (above) because it gives a better view of the wisteria's flowers—but the picture of the whole tree with the vine climbing up it is pretty impressive, too.

Wisteria is a member of the pea family, and Wikipedia says there are about 10 species of climbing vines native to the Eastern United States and the Asian countries of China, Korea, and Japan.

I've always loved the purple wisteria, and the little plant we started from a cutting that belonged to my mother's neighbor is hanging in there but not doing well enough to warrant a photo. The white-flowered wisteria is not as common down here, so my jaw dropped about a foot when I first saw this vine on our neighborhood pine tree.

I think in one of my parallel lives, I live in an old wood frame house with a huge porch that is shaded by a thick, luxuriant growth of purple wisteria. In the hot summer afternoons after I come back from the springs, I drink limeade on the front porch and swish the bugs away with my grandmother's heart-shaped palm leaf fan.

I just found out that this vine was planted by my neighbor Bonnie's aunt. Talk about deep roots in the neighborhood! (See previous post.)

Bonnie's Flowering Dogwood

2010-04-03T17:38:00.006-04:00

My neighbor Bonnie lives in a house that sits where her mama and daddy's home used to be, at the highest point of the glen. She has an unobstructed view of the setting sun and some of the most wonderful wildflowers I've ever seen, and she also has this magnificent dogwood tree that she says is a descendent of the old dogwood she remembers when she was growing up.

She has often told me, "I would never want to live anywhere else."

My family moved so much when I was young that it is hard for me to imagine what it must be like to be rooted so deeply to one place. I am rooted here, now, by love—but that's not the same as loving a place you've grown up in, a place where you and your parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins once, twice, and thrice removed all have history going back probably hundreds of years.

If I had to choose them, I'd choose two places where I felt rooted growing up. When I was very young, my paternal grandparents' house in Arlington, Texas, was a stable center for family vacations. When I was a little bit older, my roots shifted to my great-aunt and uncle's old house in Orlando, and then to my parents' house there.

As an adult, I've lived in North Central Florida longer than I've lived anywhere else—but the roots I've put down here are very shallow compared to those of my neighbors.

The flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is described in Florida's Best Native Landscape Plants as "One of northern Florida's most attractive and well-loved trees...a showy indicator of spring." Bonnie's dogwood is certainly putting on a show this spring!

If you live anywhere in the eastern U.S. from Massachusetts to Central Florida and west to Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas, you've probably seen this tree and know what a welcome sight its flowers can be after a long, cold winter.

An Offering to a Naga

2010-03-31T21:04:00.005-04:00

In Machik's Complete Explanation, the Tibetan saint Machik Labdron explains to her followers that there are many unseen beings and spirits that co-inhabit our world.

Even though I've never been one to see such beings, I have absolutely no trouble in believing they exist. I can't see ultraviolet or infrared light either, or electricity, or atoms, yet scientists assure me that these things exist—so why not nagas?

Nagas–spirits who live in or near water or powerful trees–are said to be of three types. Some are "bad guys," mischievous and hurtful. Some are "good guys," and even protect the dharma teachings. Some are mutable, and can be good guys at one time and bad guys at another.

One of my teachers, Khenpo Ugyen Tenzin, has said he thinks a naga may live at our neighborhood spring.

One of my other teachers, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, recently gave me instructions on how to make offerings to our neighborhood naga.

So yesterday afternoon found me rushing to the grocery after work to buy milk and sugar—because nagas like dairy products and sweets—and then rushing home to change into shorts and drive the five minutes to the spring, just as the sun was setting.

I was in luck. The last two spring visitors were leaving on bicycles when I drove up. The only other people there were fishing at some distance from the spring. So I had some privacy, which was good.

I waded into the water and made the offering, following Khenpo's instructions as well as I was able, then stood there for a few minutes to take in the scene. It was lovely, as always. I wondered if I would ever be able to see a naga.

Today, I received two pieces of very welcome news. I am not saying this good fortune is connected with the offering, but given that everything is connected, ultimately, I would not be a bit surprised.

The most surprising thing, though, was how happy I felt that by making the offering, I had done something helpful for an unseen being, and for the Earth that sustains us.

Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche recently stressed to me, when I told him how inspired I am by HH Karmapa's commitment to helping the environment, that there are two reasons why it is important to take care of our surroundings.

First, of course, is because our environment sustains us, so by helping it we are actually helping ourselves.

Second is because of the unseen beings, like nagas, who can be sickened by pollution–and since it's human beings who cause pollution, guess who becomes the target for revenge by the bad guy nagas? We do.

So I am wondering if a lot of us started making appropriate offerings to the unseen beings and spirits in our local areas, could we help turn back the tide of pollution and destruction that seems to lurk everywhere we look?

And could we, for our children and grandchildren, preserve even a bit of the best that Florida has to offer?

Note: Naga offerings, and other such offerings, always come with specific instructions that I am not qualified to give. Ask your teacher what you can do, though, and you might be as surprised as I was.

Plum Blossom Spring

2010-03-28T20:37:00.003-04:00

Every spring it's a contest between the redbuds and the plums to see which will bloom first. This year it was the plums, but not by much because we are having a very late spring.

Plum blossoms always remind me of a wonderful art exhibition that was held back in the 1980s at the museum where I used to work, the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley (now the Berkeley Art Museum). I still have the catalog: Bones of Jade - Soul of Ice: The Flowering Plum in Chinese Art.

The title was taken from a poem by Su Shi:

In Flowering-Plum Village at the foot of LuoFu Mountain,

The flowering plums' bones are of jade and snow, and their souls of ice.

In their multitude the blossoms seem moonlight hanging from the trees,

In their brightness they are alone with Orion on the horizon at dusk.

In solitude I live on rivers and seas,

Melancholy like a sick crane perching in a deserted garden.

Heavenly scent and the land's foremost beauty: a comforting sight!

They know I am heavy with wine and ready to bring forth pure, warm verse.

Here's another good one, by Zhu Dunru:

At the old creek, a single flowering plum;

It escaped being locked in a garden or park.

The road is far, the mountain deep; it does not mind the cold.

It seems to play hide-and-seek with spring.

Hidden thoughts—who knows them?

Contracting friendships it's always hard to hit it right.

Lone romance, lone fragrance—

The bright moon comes to look for me.

And finally, Wang Wei:

You have come from my home town

You must know about things at home.

On the day you left, had the winter plum

In front of my open-work window blossomed yet?

What blooms first where you live?

Mourning Doves and Mahakala

2010-03-27T21:04:00.005-04:00

It is my last trip to KTD for the foreseeable future, unless I win the Lotto or identify some kind of funding source other than my paying job—which doesn’t really pay enough to support the lifestyle to which I would like to become accustomed, summer and fall in Woodstock, winter and spring in Florida.

I am sitting on the patio outside the old Meads Mountain House, eating lunch with friends, and I notice a tiny chickadee at the newly-installed bird feeder. Such a cute, sweet little black-capped bird!

We have had a break in the winter weather. Days are sunny, and warm enough to sit outside. After the winter we have had in Florida—and the snow that fell here in the Catskills a couple of weeks ago—I feel blessed with this springlike gift from the gods.

I have come to hear my refuge lama, the incomparable Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, give the final teaching in a two-year series about Machik Labdron and her practice of severance of fixation on the self.

Yes, I am blessed indeed.

One of my favorite things to do when I am at KTD is to sit in on the evening practice of Mahakala, the great protector of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

I love the practice when it has the full complement of instruments, especially when there are enough people so that two drums can be used. The sound of those two drums always reminds me of two hearts, beating together.

But tonight there are only three people in the shrine room for Mahakala—Tenzin Chonyi or Tenzin-la, who is the president of KTD; a lovely young woman whom I do not know who is spinning a prayer wheel with very little effort; and me.

Tenzin-la, who was sent here years ago by His Holiness the 16^th Karmapa, is the only one of us who is actually doing the Mahakala practice, so there are no drums tonight.

We are about a half-hour into the hour-long practice when I notice that I am sitting across from one of the loveliest Guru Rinpoche thangkas I have ever seen, and it looks OLD. I usually sit on the other side of the room, right underneath and next to the thangka, so this feels like the first time I have ever actually seen it—and it takes my breath away.

We are about 45 minutes into the practice when I realize that Tenzin-la is chanting without a text. He must know this practice by heart!

I am stunned. I cannot imagine how many times someone would have to do Mahakala in order to be able to do the whole practice without a text.

At the end of the hour, I thank Tenzin-la and approach the young woman with the prayer wheel. I can’t think of anything intelligent to say in praise of her efforts, so I try something lame: “Doesn’t your hand get tired?” I ask, “Or, have you done this so much that you are used to it?”

“Oh, no, it’s very easy,” she says, “look,” and very generously shows me how she has attached an amber-colored glass crystal ball to the wheel as a weight, so that it practically spins by itself! I must remember this, I think, when I get a prayer wheel.

As I leave the shrine building, I am struck once again by the beauty of the mountains to the north, still dappled with snow in the evening light. On the hill above the shrine, above the line of prayer flags, I hear a rustling in the leaves—probably a squirrel, but I stop to look just in case we might be having another visit from the black bear who came down the hill for a torma feast last summer.

Tenzin-la comes along behind me and we say hello. He stops.

“Do you know what bird that is, that makes that sound?” he asks.

I don’t hear it, so I ask him to describe the sound. “Oooo-oooo,” he says.

“Well, it could be an owl,” I offer.

“No, it’s not an owl,” he says, sure of himself.

Then I hear it, clearly. “Wooo-ooo, hooo, hooo, hooo.”

“It’s a dove!” I cry, pleased that I can identify the bird by its voice. “A mourning dove.” I describe the bird to Tenzin-la, who listens again and says, “Mourning dove,” and heads across the parking lot to his home.

The dove cries again.

In an instant, I am transported from the Catskills in 2010 to 1956 and a wonderful old two-story, rambling Florida house with a great front screened porch at 521 Revere Street, near Lake Dot, near downtown Orlando, Florida—my great-aunt Grace’s house and realty office, where she lives with her husband and where my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother have a small apartment.

I am nine years old, and my parents and I have moved to Florida from Decatur, Georgia, and are living at my aunt’s house until our new home on the west side of town is finished.

The sun is hot, but there are fans in the house and lots of shade trees and cool breezes in the evening, and from dawn to dusk and sometimes even after dark we hear the soft “Wooo-ooo, hooo, hooo, hooo” cries of the mourning doves.

My grandmother and I grow closer and closer as she indulges me with scary stories and encourages my love for the mysterious, the psychic, the supernatural.

My great-grandmother insults me by calling my favorite Disney cartoon character, Peter Pan (I love him because he can fly!), “an insect.” I am not sure why I take such offense at this, but I do.

My great-aunt’s husband entertains me by occasionally speaking in a deep voice through the old house’s heating vent system. “This is the voice from the hole,” he announces with great solemnity, and his deep echoing voice elicits shrieks of delight from me and sparks laughter even from the adults.

And of course there are my parents, who take great care to do everything parents must do to make this childish nine-year-old feel safe and loved in a new home.

Amazing. Here I am on a mountain, at Karmapa’s monastery in the Catskills—yet in my mind, I have instantly been transported 1100 miles south and 54 years back in time! How is this possible?

Because of a bird call?

Of course they are all dead now—Grace and Buz, my great-aunt and her husband; my mom and dad; Momie, my great-grandmother; and my beloved grandmother, Mama Kitty, the person in my family to whom I always felt closest.

These memories are a lesson in impermanence, yes—yet so much more.

I wonder how it is possible, now that they are gone, to still feel such love for all of them.

When I was small, they kept me safe. When I was stubborn, they loved me. When I fell down off my bike and skinned my knees, they kissed the hurts. When I was naughty, they showed me what it meant to be kind and considerate of others. When I was selfish, they taught me how to give.

And it seems I only repaid them, in the end, with more bad behavior.

Standing here in the parking lot, listening to the call of the mourning dove, I feel, very viscerally, the truth of the words of the Four Vows, which I have taped above my writing area at home:

However immeasurable sentient beings, I vow to save them.

However inexhaustible the passions, I vow to extinguish them.

However immeasurable the dharmas, I vow to master them.

However incomparable the Buddha’s truth, I vow to attain it.

I could mourn those who are gone, or I could take a lesson from my teachers and wonder how is it possible that in my 62^nd year, I finally have come to realize the depth of compassion that wakes that sleeping giant, bodhicitta?

It is only through the blessings of my dear teachers, I think, that this waking is even possible.

Something inside me feels cracked open, like a winged seed bursting forth from its pod, about to take flight—or like a small bird emerging from the egg.

I’m home now, and spring is coming after a long, cold winter.

The beautyberry is leafing out. Cardinals and sparrows and bluebirds and, yes, even a mourning dove are showing interest in the bird feeder in the crape myrtle in the back yard.

I’m sitting in the dining room, my favorite room in my house, eating a couple of slices of pizza. Outside in the garden spot, in the beautyberry that’s just beginning to leaf out, two chickadees alight on the same branch. They are so small! And so utterly beautiful.

I watch them, fascinated. This is why I love this room—for its view of the yard, especially at sunset.

As I watch, the chickadee on the higher part of the branch reaches down to give the lower bird what looks exactly like a tiny bird kiss!

Yes, it’s spring.

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you, not knowing

How blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They’re in each other all along.

-Rumi

KTD in Winter

2010-03-05T12:12:00.004-05:00

The teachings about Machik Labdron that I began attending two years ago are rapidly coming to a close. At the last session in February, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche finished his transmission of Machik's Complete Explanation and announced that at the final session this month, he will give a "general instruction" about Machik's practice, chod or severance, which is designed to sever our fixation on the self as the center of our universe.

Because I have wanted to receive these teachings for so long, I am still a bit gobsmacked that I have been able to attend all but one session—and thanks to Rinpoche's kindness and the cooperation of the good folks at Namse Bangdzo, I got caught up on the teaching I missed via a set of 4 CDs.

I expected flack from my director when I put in for vacation time for the last teaching later this month—but not only did my supervisor approve my request with a "Go for it!", but our director simply said, "Sure, have a good time."

With 100% confidence, I can say that my attendance at these teachings has been made possible not by anything I have done, but by the blessings of my teachers—His Holiness Karmapa, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, Bardor Tulku Rinpoche, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, Khenpo Ugyen Tenzin, and now, I feel strongly, by Mother Machik herself.

The February trip was quite remarkable for its timing; it came just after one big snowfall and just before another one. There was snow all around, but the roads were clear and the accommodations were warm. I also got a great reiki treatment on a problematic leg, courtesy of a good friend. Maybe the next time I see Rinpoche, I can actually do a prostration instead of a little lame bow! And when I tripped and fell flat on my face in the street in downtown Woodstock, there were two protectors there in the form of helpful young women who stopped cars from running over me and helped me up and away from harm.

I cannot, after all this, ever doubt the profound blessings of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

All homage to the sages of the snowy ranges

Whose wisdom and compassion

Our ignorance assuages

Here's a picture of KTD in the snow. That's Meads Mountain House to the left, the main KTD shrine building to the right. If you are thinking about visiting but dragging your heels, I highly recommend a visit.

Frosty Sunrise

2010-02-08T18:50:00.003-05:00

With all our cold weather, I've been hoping we would get one of our really spectacular heavy frosts—where it looks like snow covers everything. But so far, no luck, or else I've missed it by sleeping in.

We had a little warm spell last weekend, warm enough for me to wear sandals to the opening of the new art co-op in the small town closest to where we live.

This morning, though, we had frost again—and though it wasn't spectacular, the sunrise was pretty enough to send me digging around in my purse for my camera.

That whitish glaze over the grass is our frost.

Come August, I will be longing for cool mornings like this one!

Steve's Sycamore/Winter Fog

2010-02-08T18:37:00.004-05:00

Here's a great winter view of our neighbor's sycamore tree, courtesy of my husband who was home at just the right time to take this picture.

Remember to click on the picture for a better view.

Vibrant Visit From a Precious Teacher

2010-01-31T20:21:00.005-05:00

For an 86-year-old gentleman, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche—my beloved refuge lama—positively glows with vibrant, loving, compassionate energy. It was wonderful to see him looking so well, and to connect even briefly with his travelling companions, Lama Karma Drodul (pictured on the right, above) and Lama Gelongma Karuna Tara. All three are shining presences at KTD, and that shine glows all the brighter when they are out and about in what my mom would call "the real world" with all the rest of us, as they were this weekend in North Central Florida.

Rinpoche drew a capacity crowd to his talk about "Keeping an Open Heart in Difficult Times" on Friday night at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Gainesville, where I took the picture above. The talk—held on the night of the closest and maybe brightest full moon of the year—provided a great opportunity for people who aren't familiar with Buddhism to ask questions.

Saturday's teachings, held at the Florida School of Massage, were even better—targeted messages about the importance of lovingkindness, compassion, and bodhicitta (enlightened heart).

Chanting the Karma Kagyu lineage prayer on Saturday morning, I got a strong image of all of us gathered together somewhere in a green Tibetan valley, surrounded by snowy mountains. In "reality," it was rainy and chilly outside of our big meeting room; we could watch the rain through glass doors that gave us a great view of the woods behind the school.

So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when Rinpoche explained that our precious human birth is not acquired by accident, and that our opportunity to meet teachers in this life comes from the pure aspirations that we have made in past lives—not just from whatever good deeds we have done in the past.

I guess I hadn't realized that aspiration was that important! And so I wonder...could my flash of us all chanting together in Tibet have some grounding in a reality that is even more real than what we label "the real world"? Perhaps we were all together at one time, at least in the spirit of making aspirations to meet this outstanding teacher.

At one point, Lama Gelongma Karuna Tara, the nun who travelled with Rinpoche, got up to place one of her cushions behind his back. I guess she could see that he was uncomfortable. Rinpoche gave a delightful grin with a big "thumb's up" sign. One of our sangha members, concerned for the lady lama, then took her a replacement cushion, which got another big grin and "thumb's up" from Rinpoche. He's just so...precious (in the highest, best sense of the word). Just those grins and thumbs' ups lifted our spirits.

Among the many things Rinpoche talked about, a few stood out.

Often we may wonder if our dharma practice is bearing fruit. Here are some signs of successful practice: You have less anger and fewer discursive thoughts. You are able to remain calm in all kinds of situations. Your communication with others becomes more open and genuine.

Bodhicitta has two primary aspects, pervasive and profound. Pervasive bodhicitta means you want to help ALL sentient beings, not just those you care about. Profound bodhicitta means you want to establish all sentient beings in the state of ultimate enlightenment.

On the importance of confidence and trust in your practice: "If you have these, your progress will be swift."

Because Tibet was invaded and so many teachers came to the West, we are now able to practice dharma here when before, we could not do so. "You are very fortunate. You must not waste any of your precious time."

At lunch with Rinpoche and a small group, a large video of Ireland was showing on a far wall. Rinpoche turned around to watch it in silence while the rest of us chatted. The Irish scenery was very beautiful, and I got a wild hair.

"Can you translate something to Rinpoche for me?" I asked Lama Karma Drodul, and he agreed.

I told Rinpoche that the seat of the high kings of Ireland was called Tara, and that Ireland has a legendary race of people called the sidhe and that word has always reminded me of the Sanskrit siddhi, or powers that can be gained on the path to enlightenment—so I have always wondered if there might be some long-ago connection between the lands of India or Tibet and the land of my ancestors.

Rinpoche just smiled at that thought, but then said, "I know about that land" (meaning Ireland) "and how they have fought for a long time for independence from the British, and I know about their horses."

Aha! So there ARE parallels between Ireland and Tibet!

:-)

I had to miss Sunday's teaching because I had to work. Hopefully I can find someone to fill me in, or I can purchase a copy of one of the tapes people were making.

Many, many people from the local sangha worked long and hard to make Rinpoche's visit successful; my profound thanks go out to all of them!

Homage always to our precious teachers, shining like jewels in the darkness of samsaric confusion.

Change of Venue for Rinpoche's Teachings Is Official

2010-01-27T06:53:00.002-05:00

Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche's teachings on Saturday and Sunday, January 30-31, will be held at the Florida School of Massage on U.S. Highway 441, just south of Gainesville and just north of Paynes Prairie. The building is on the east side of the highway.

I have confirmed this information, and we are awaiting the official announcement from Gainesville KTC which I have been told is forthcoming.

The public talk on Friday night remains at the Unitarian Universalist Church on NW 34th Street in Gainesville, as previously advertised.

Change of Venue for Rinpoche's Teachings

2010-01-25T19:38:00.002-05:00

I am hearing rumblings that Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche will not be teaching on Saturday and Sunday at Sanctuary, but rather at the Florida School of Massage.

Since I doubt if I will be able to confirm this and do another post before this weekend, I urge anyone who is interested in the Saturday and Sunday teachings to immediately email:

secretary@ktcgainesville.org

for further, accurate information.

Sorry, a phone number was not provided on the flyer I received.

May all beings benefit from our precious teachers!

Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche in Gainesville

2010-01-18T19:30:00.005-05:00

I would be remiss if I didn't post this announcement: Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche—abbot of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra in Woodstock, New York—will be in Gainesville, Florida, for a public talk and weekend teachings January 29-31.

The public talk on "Keeping an Open Heart in Difficult Times" is 7 p.m. Friday, January 29, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The Saturday and Sunday teachings are at Sanctuary Center.

For more information, email:

secretary@ktcgainesville.org

Rinpoche is an amazing teacher. He is 86 years old. This is a rare opportunity.

(Remember that you can click on the flyer, above, for a better view.)

Some Really Frozen Grass

2010-01-18T19:20:00.002-05:00

At the tail end of our spell of hard freezes, the grass in our yard turned a very unusual yet lovely burnt sienna color.

I can't remember ever seeing grass quite this color before. I'm glad I took a picture of it when I did, because later we had rain and today the grass is a completely different color–more of a nondescript beige.

I wonder how long it will be before the grass is green again?

A 100-Year Record Cold Spell

2010-01-14T20:09:00.005-05:00

I've counted 12 nights in a row that our low temperature has been below freezing, with quite a few nights of hard freezes included. Our local paper says that this spell of freezing weather is the longest recorded in the past 100 years.

Forrest reminded me that this prolonged cold spell could make for a very beautiful spring.

Tonight's low is forecast to be in the mid 30s. That's above freezing. It almost feels like we should have a party!

Plus, as I left work tonight, I was greeted by this beautiful sky—clouds like this everywhere, over the whole sky from north to south and east to west. Just beautiful.

A Spell of Long, Hard Freezes

2010-01-10T20:00:00.004-05:00

We are deep into what is most likely going to be a record-setting number of days of hard freezes, more than I can ever remember all at once and definitely longer than the ice storm spell of 1989.

Yesterday, there was snow to the south of us–Ocala and Orlando areas–but our air was too dry to permit the white stuff to make it to the ground, for which we are cursing our luck because if it's going to be this cold, we might as well have something pretty to look at!

This morning when I got in my car to go to work (yes, I work on Sundays), it was 16 degrees and the frost had painted these beautiful little star-like designs on the side of my car. (You can click on the picture, above, for a better view.) Driving in to work on a rural highway, it was frosty on both sides of the road, and as I was driving there were bright little twinkly lights emanating from the frost.

I keep hoping we will at least get one of our beautiful heavy frosts, so I can post a picture of something besides my car in the cold weather—but so far the frost has not been heavy enough to really show up well in a photograph. I guess the air has been too dry.

Brrrrrrrrr!

2010-01-06T18:41:00.005-05:00

The last time it was this cold for this long was in the winter of 1989, when I moved back to Florida from California. Two days before Christmas, there was an ice storm—which I had never experienced before, and may never experience again.

This week, we have had several straight days of hard freezes, with more to come. I know that much of the rest of the country is in much worse shape from the cold than we are, but since we're only used to a couple of days of hard freezes at a time, we are really feeling it.

This morning, three faucets in the bathroom (sink, tub, shower) weren't producing hot water. My husband had to crawl up into the attic and thaw the pipes out with a hair dryer; very luckily, none of them was broken. Tonight, our freezing temps start at about 8 p.m., and you'd better believe we will be leaving those faucets on to drip.

Here's a big OM MANI PADME HUNG for all animals and humans that have to be outside tonight. (That's the bodhisattva Chenrezig's mantra that carries many blessings.)

What Is Happening to Our Springs, and What Can We Do About It?

2010-01-02T20:13:00.009-05:00

Florida's priceless jewels—the freshwater springs that exist here in one of the largest concentrations if not THE largest concentration in the world—are in trouble.

Springs that I remember being crystalline blue are now tinged with green, victims of rising pollution levels. Springs that used to draw tourists and swimmers have quit flowing and dried up entirely, victims of increased withdrawal of water from the aquifer by water bottling companies, agriculture, and an increasing human population.

What's worse is that there doesn't appear to be any kind of coherent statewide agreement that the degradation of our springs is a huge problem that needs to be fixed.

Our legislators are too afraid of angering business, agribusiness, and private citizens to put in place any new protections that might save our springs.

Most of our water management districts view their roles as being limited to issuing permits to whoever wants our water, never mind the effects on the environment.

Bureaucratic territorialism rears its ugly head whenever federal involvement or help is mentioned.

For all their good intentions, local environmental groups are limited in their abilities to influence collective vision and/or legislation.

Probably the worst part of the whole situation is that any kind of protective action that might do some good gets bogged down in arguments about scientific data.

Now, before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you that I am not anti-science. As someone who struggled for the first 18 years of her life with recurrent tonsil infections, I would never have made it to ripe old age if it hadn't been for the scientific advancements that brought us antibiotics. Science is a wonderful system for investigating the natural world, but we have been sold a bill of goods if we have come to believe that science has all the answers—it doesn't.

For every piece of data that "proves" a water permit will not adversely affect a local river or spring, there exists another piece of data that "proves" said permit will do damage.

So since it's the new year—traditionally a time for looking forward as well as backward—I will make a prediction:

The fate of Florida's springs, and the solution to Florida's potential water wars, hangs in the balance of spirit, not science.

The questions of who owns the water, who can have access to it, who can charge for it, whether or not it should be moved or removed, and whether or not our springs are worth preserving for future generations, are not questions that can be answered by science. These are ethical, moral, and even spiritual questions at their cores, and the only way I think we can come to agreement about what we need to do is to elevate the dialogue to include the ethical, moral, and spiritual considerations that surround our use of natural resources and stewardship of the planet.

Luckily, some of our best-known religious leaders are beginning to speak out about such problems. Just this past week the Pope gave an address titled, "If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation," in which he made the following points:

"Can we remain impassive in the face of actual and potential conflicts involving access to natural resources?" the pope asked Friday. "All these are issues with a profound impact on the exercise of human rights, such as the right to life, food, health and development."

"Technologically advanced societies must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption and improving its efficiency," while preparing "sustainable strategies to satisfy the energy needs of the present and future generations," he said.

While researching Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life and popular pastor of a huge megachurch in California, who has acknowledged that environmental stewardship is an important issue for Christians, I discovered the Evangelical Environmental Network's web site. The organization aims to "educate, inspire, and mobilize Christians in their effort to care for God's creation, to be faithful stewards of God's provision, and to advocate for actions and policies that honor God and protect the environment."

His Holiness Urgyen Trinley Dorje, the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa, recently launched a web site dedicated to the environment and what we can do to help it. Karmapa is providing leadership through publications, conferences—and even graphic design and jewelry design—to encourage people to become more aware of the environment and more active in protecting it.

So I remain hopeful—even in the face of multiple reasons to doubt!—that Floridians can agree that our springs are worth saving, even though that will mean some very fundamental changes in the lifestyles to which we have all become accustomed.

If we can't preserve the best our environment has to offer us here, where can we expect it to be preserved? If we can't do it now, then when?

And, isn't it really true that the way we treat the environment reflects the way we treat ourselves?

P.S. Here's another blog entry that deals with these questions, from the Ecological Buddhism blog.

Starry Gate/A Supplication from the Queen of Vajra Space

2010-01-01T15:55:00.003-05:00

Our gate has been decorated for Christmas and the New Year's celebrations. As I contemplated the star motif (one of my favorites), I was reminded of Machik Labdron's secret name, "Queen of Vajra Space."

And since the arrival of a new year or new decade is often a time when we are receptive to inspiration for new projects, I offer the following—Machik Labdron's supplication to Sonam Lama, one of her teachers, for a teaching that Machik wished to receive. May it bring benefit.

Homage to all lamas

Who teach the timeless wisdom of intrinsic awareness.

Homage to the yidam deities

Who surely grant spiritual powers.

Homage to all the buddhas

Who have total renunciation and realization.

Homage to the sacred Dharma

That brings peace and freedom from desire.

Homage to all the sangha

Where offerings become meaningful.

Homage to the dharma protectors

Who surely clear up obstacles.

From now until enlightenment,

I supplicate all of you.

I go for refuge in you.

I offer the five sense desirables.

I confess each and every misdeed.

I rejoice in the virtue of all beings.

I supplicate you to turn the dharma wheel.

Please stay and do not pass beyond our pain.

I dedicate the roots of virtue to help beings.

-from Machik's Complete Explanation, Snow Lion, 2003, pp. 81-82.

Steve's Sycamore/Christmas Day

2009-12-25T14:49:00.003-05:00

The rain has stopped—for now—and there are breaks in the grey clouds. I sneaked out during the most recent break to take this picture of our neighbor's sycamore tree, which stands now like a skeleton in the winter landscape.

You may search the blog for "Steve's sycamore" to see the tree as it has changed through the seasons over the past year. Clicking on the pictures will take you to their larger versions.

At the darkest time of the year, we celebrate return of the Light. Merry Christmas!

Goodbye Autumn, Hello Winter

2009-12-12T20:25:00.005-05:00

It's been raining and cold and we haven't seen the sun for about a week—reminiscent of one new year's in Berkeley, in the early 1980s, when I counted 10 days that we didn't see the sun.

And because I grew up in Florida, I'm used to a lot of sunlight. I don't lie outside to tan any more, but if I go for too long without sunlight, I begin to feel a bit comatose. That winter in Berkeley, I'd get up, walk to work, come home, and go straight to bed. I'm trying to resist the temptation to do the same thing now, but it's hard.

All this rain is knocking the remnants of autumn's leaves off all the trees. Pretty soon, beauties like the one pictured above (a pignut hickory, maybe?) will be bare skeletons, reaching bony arms to the sky.

And if we needed any certain signs that winter is upon us, they have come over the past three nights—the high chirruping cries of sandhill cranes, arriving (late, I think) for the winter.

Fall in Florida/Proof #2

2009-12-06T19:56:00.003-05:00

Here's more proof—a couple of autumn-hued beauties on the banks of the Santa Fe River.

Season of melancholy! Eye's enchanter!

How pleasing to me are your farewell hues—

How I love the pomp of fading Nature,

The trees arrayed in gold-vermilion dress,

The fresh wind blowing through their tops and

chanting,

The dense and darkly undulating skies,

The sun's infrequent ray, the early frost,

And grizzled Winter's lightly murmured threats.

-Alexander Pushkin, from Autumn (A Fragment)

Fall in Florida/Proof #1

2009-12-06T19:50:00.004-05:00

Yes, we have it—fall is an actual season in the part of Florida where I live, although in some years the colors are more intense than others. A couple of years ago, we had a really spectacular fall, so much so that the local newspaper even ran large full-color pictures of the foliage.

We haven't been so lucky this year, but we are finally seeing some good fall color. Here's proof, in the picture above—a carpet of leaves at the nearby spring.

The River Styx, View #2

2009-11-27T21:46:00.004-05:00

Here's a view of the actual river. I've always thought it very beautiful.

Remember that you can click the picture for a bigger view.

A Visit to the River Styx

2009-11-27T21:40:00.005-05:00

Today we paid a visit to the River Styx. No, not that one; the one out near Cross Creek, where the blue flag iris grow in the spring--and the one named in the prophecy about my friend, Janis Nelson (search for "Mistress of Magic" on this blog).

Just to prove I'm not making this up, here's a picture of the sign at the river crossing.

Autumn Abundance

2009-11-26T19:00:00.003-05:00

For some reason, nothing says "abundance" to me better than pumpkins—lots of pumpkins. So I was struck this year by a wonderful fall tableau outside a school in the small town where I work.

Here's just one part of the tableau, above, complete with an "autumn person" like those sold in the craft stores this time of year.

Somewhere there must be a heaven where it is fall all year long.

But then, wouldn't the season lose some of its sheen?

A (Semi) Vegetarian Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T17:31:00.005-05:00

We decided not to eat a dead bird this year for Thanksgiving, but our meal wasn't completely vegetarian either--Forrest (the cook at our house) made a delicious crab bisque. Then we had a lovely salad of lettuce topped with bleu cheese, pecans, dried cranberries, and mandarin orange slices, topped with balsamic vinaigrette.

The main part of the meal, pictured above, was acorn squash stuffed with white & wild rice and assorted vegetables and topped with bechamel sauce, brussels sprout hash, cranberry chutney, and cornbread. Still to come: pumpkin pie.

And oh yes, we do give thanks. Many thanks.

Steve's Sycamore/Nearly Thanksgiving

2009-11-21T19:56:00.003-05:00

This beautiful tree has shed enough leaves so that its "bones" are becoming visible; soon, it will be completely bare. I thought it looked particularly beautiful when I took this shot--about a week ago--its leaves rustling and almost twinkling in the gorgeous afternoon autumn light.

Remember that you can click on the picture for a larger view. Also, you can search the blog for "Steve's sycamore" and all the pictures of this same tree will come up.

Ferals' Progress, Part 7 (Hortie in Bed)

2009-11-21T19:45:00.004-05:00

It's happened. Hortense, the tortoiseshell feral, has decided that a comfy bed is the place to be, even if it means letting your muzzle be stroked by a human.

I honestly never thought this day would ever come. However, Forrest--who earned the nickname "Chicken Jah" a few years ago for his rapport with some free-ranging near-dinosaurs--has managed to lure this most-feral-of-all-ferals to the futon.

Also in the picture: Bootsy, the trendsetter--the very first of these ferals to become a housecat. And Sake's tail; that's the grey blob between Bootsy and Hortie.

Can happy winter snuggling be far behind?

Goddess of the Springs

2009-11-14T11:03:00.003-05:00

I am always intrigued and amused by the sightings of people—both holy and mundane, as in the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa, and Elvis—in trees, office windows, food, and other various places.

What interests me is not so much that these images show up—because I know our brains are designed to find patterns in our surroundings, and also because I do believe that there are instances of spiritual energies that manifest in the elements for whatever reason—but how people react to them.

Several years ago in Clearwater, Florida, there was a stunning image of the Virgin Mary that appeared in the windows of an office building. Many people were drawn to the image to wonder and to pray. So many people came that the building was eventually sold to a local church. Unfortunately, a local high schooler decided to toss some ball bearings through the window with a slingshot, and destroyed the image. Too bad; I don't think that kind of destructive energy serves anyone well.

The cypress knee pictured above at first reminded me of the Virgin Mary, but since she's dipping a rather elegant toe toward the aquifer, I think I'll just call her the Goddess of the Springs.

Proto Canoe

2009-11-14T11:00:00.002-05:00

This old log in the springs reminded me of a canoe.

I wonder if the sight of an old log like this inspired the creation of the first canoe?

Afternoon Light at the Springs, Fall 2009

2009-11-14T10:51:00.002-05:00

This is my favorite time of the year for afternoon light, but unfortunately my work schedule doesn't give me many opportunities to get out and about at that time of day.

Here's a view of the springs near my house, taken one day last week when I did seize the opportunity to try to get some good shots. I think I was really about an hour too early to get the kind of light that I like—maybe I'll get another chance soon.

Pink Muhly Grass

2009-11-14T10:23:00.004-05:00

In our search for pretty things that give fall color to the yard, we discovered pink muhly grass.

The grass is pretty spectacular when it catches the last rays of the setting sun, as it was doing last week--shown in the picture above. (You can click on the picture for a bigger view.)

And, best of all, muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) is native in Eastern North America from about Massachusetts down to Florida and then west along the Gulf Coast--so it's relatively easy to maintain.

Our grass benefits, I'm sure, from being in a part of the yard that gets watered by sprinklers during the hottest part of the summer months.

This Body Is Not Me

2009-11-11T19:00:00.003-05:00

This body is not me, I am not caught in this body.

I am life without boundaries. I have never been born,

and I shall never die.

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars,

manifestations of my wondrous true mind.

Since before time, I have been free.

Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,

sacred thresholds on our journey.

Birth and death are just a game of hide and seek.

So laugh with me,

hold my hand,

let us say goodbye,

say goodbye, to meet again soon.

We meet today.

We will meet again tomorrow.

We will meet at the source at every moment.

We meet each other in all forms of life.

-from "a verse that is drawn directly from a sutra written by the Buddha," cited in the article "Becoming Truly Alive" by Thich Nhat Hanh in Buddhadharma magazine, Winter 2009, p. 46.

Waiting for the Cranes

2009-11-07T19:36:00.004-05:00

Usually around the middle of November, our area welcomes hundreds of sandhill cranes who arrive from up north to spend the winter in our marshy areas. We watch the skies, listening for the cranes' distinctive cries.

We have a small, year-round breeding population of cranes that live here, but their numbers mushroom every winter. We haven't heard any cranes yet, but we're watching the skies, and listening...