Fort Greene Rock

There's a boulder in Fort Greene park - perhaps a glacial artificat -resting where the land levels at the bottom of the hill, in the corner of the park that points to the Williamsburg Savings Bank. On Saturday its smoothed surface was warm and in the clear light it was possible to see the grain of the crystals that comprise its granite. The stone's bulk and heft had been polished to the smoothness of flesh in many spots so that it became tempting to nestle into it. My kids played for hours on the rock, we never even got to the playground on the other side of hill that rises in dignity in the center of the park, a throb of green in a glacier of row houses and apartment complexes bound to the West by the East River.

I was going to take a picture of the three kids perched on top of the rock but as I turned my camera on it registered an error and the lens fell into a paralysis and wouldn't retract. As if the rock had resented being used as a pedestal, comfortable that it is in itself an apex in a ground of apices, a footnote to the column that rises towards the sky at the top of the hill, finishing in a large, graceful verdis gris urn most likely informed by the oracle at Delphi. Interred inside, the remains of 200 Revolutionary war soldiers, men who died, most likely of starvation, aboard British prison ships. Their lives and their deaths still touch us, as do all the lives and deaths of those who've been born into times of war, drawn into unrelenting currents to find themselves sacrificing all. It is Memorial Day today, and also Immemorial Day, because so many of those lost lives are unknowns. How can you remember what you never knew? They must be honored obliquely, being beyond image. Ultimately, the ship of the heart sails blindly.

linden flowers

Yesterday in Prospect Park I found the Lindens blooming; these were photographed in the Long Meadow. Where were the honey bees, though? I thought the amazing scent of the Linden would draw at least a few but saw none - perhaps they seek out less narcotic pollen. In other years I've visited that subject in more depth.

So far this year I've only seen 2 honey bees, both gathering nectar from clover in Nelly's Lawn. Bumblers, though, I've seen them.

pollinator's palace

Last week, I finally came across a tulip tree in Prospect Park that had blossoms low enough for me to examine. A bug's life might be short and hard, but they at least get to crawl around inside these Godly places and eat from the altar. And sometimes they are themselves the offering, transformed into songbirds.

9th avenue detail

Solanum dulcamara

I know, it's an invasive weed. I know, it's poisonous, but I still love these tiny shooting stars and tiny egg-shaped berries.

Reminds me to regard with gratitide the ancient Inca for breeding the poison out of one of the major solanum staples, the potato (Solanum tuberosum). More on Solanum dulcarmara, also called bittersweet, bittersweet nightshade, bitter nightshade, blue bindweed, Amara Dulcis, climbing nightshade, fellenwort, felonwood, poisonberry, poisonflower, scarlet berry, snakeberry, trailing bittersweet, trailing nightshade, violet bloom, or woody nightshade, here.

chives, trucks, bodhichitta

I was wishing for a copy of A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life by Shantideva the other day. Last night, someone gave me a copy, courtesy of the Dalai Lama's visit. Thanks Anna! Also in the mix, Nagarjuna's commentary on Bodhichitta, another text provided by the Dalai Lama gratis.

I understand many took Bodhisattva vows in the Dalai Lama's presence last weekend. I wish them a smooth takeoff.

cephalopods

seed

sidewalk dancer

closing for the night

the choir

Not sure what these are but I find them compelling. Blooming now throughout Prospect Park and elsehwere, the Yellowwoods, wafting arias for the nose.

rate of change

Not all dicots have as pronounced cotyledons as this squash plant or as remarkable a contrast between the first true leaves and the embryonic ones. This is a lot of change in a fast little package. On the other hand, how long did it take scrooge? Or me, to remember to request the hot oil, por favor, with the order of chinese takeout?

winter in spring

Last night when I came home from a meditation session I found this drawing by my youngest daughter on the table, another tribute to this injured dolphin my mother and daughter are especially fond of namedWinter. As a baby it had gotten caught in some fishing lines and wound up losing its tail, so the line my daughter drew shows where the prosthetic tail overlaps with what's left of the dolphin's actual tail. Ironic that a lot of innovations in prosthetics inspired by attempts to help Winter were then adapted for use in human amputees, especially injured soldiers. Certainly seems that dolphins inspire where humans don't. I guess it's somewhat harder to like humans at times.

2-3 thoughts

I'm hearing the F train between Church and Jay won't be working for a long, long time on the weekends. This Saturday in order to get to Manhattan I walked to the Grand Army 2/3 station through Prospect Park, walking the path that marks the margin of the forest to the right and the fields to the left. It was paradise. I saw lots of people out with their dogs and became aware of how much loneliness the dogs dissipate. Temporarily, anyway.

Loneliness, emptiness. Such strong winds. In our endless longing, we consume endlessly, and sometimes cannibalize essence. Some have learned to feed on air, finding that resonance and idea are as affective as matter. What do we know about imagination? A little, that it can go through the eye of the needle like the finest byss, a condensation trail of the essence of essences.

Ruach

One of the most beautiful things I've seen or read about in recent years is the ritual in which a medicine man or woman blows prayers into leaves - in South America for instance prayers might be blown into the leaf of the extremely sacred and powerful Coca. The closest practice I've come across is the way we blow kisses to each other, as a sort of airborne expression of affection. We bless each other with our breath.

In Levertov's poem "Passages" the wind is the breath of God:

Wind from the compass points, sun at meridian,
these are forms the spirit enters,
breath, ruach, light that is witness and by which we witness.

The grasses... numberless, bowing and rising, silently
cry hosanna as the spirit
moves them and moves burnishing

over and again upon mountain pastures
a day of spring, a needle's eye
space and time are passing through like a swathe of silk

In other literature wind becomes a symbol of human folly, the howling winds of emptiness and loneliness at the root of all human desperation and agony, the embodiment of an extreme longing that can never be met with material things or any sort of grasping. As if God prods the wretch until she realizes she too is as unlimited as the wind. Take heed, those who object to the non-Disney ending of Anderson's The Little Mermaid. If she doesn't get the prince, she gets to become space itself:

...But the daughters of the air, although they do not possess an immortal soul, can, by their good deeds, procure one for themselves. We fly to warm countries, and cool the sultry air that destroys mankind with the pestilence. We carry the perfume of the flowers to spread health and restoration.

Absolute Sweetness Sweetens Absolutely

Thanks to Malku and Alanna, to Joe, to the hummingbird and the condor whose head she rode on to reach an altitude 20,000 feet. Now I know better what a bodhisattva is. How else can you dance in the sky? Thanks also to Troy for bringing the world of Chöd back to me, and to the Kestrel I saw perched on PS 154 last night. Without birds of all kinds, I think I would be lost altogether.

flower district tabby

When I first came across him on 28th St. he was sniffing a box of flowers.

fashion guru

14th Street dweller.

Red-Tailed Hawk

The audience of three observing her feast didn't seem to put her off too much but we didn't stay long. Through the binoculars the lump between her feet resembled a pigeon.

swimming lessons

creatures

I overheard some people talking about creatures and realized it's a very strange word coming out of such odd mouths as we humans have. But we can't help ourselves can we, given the compelling designs and definitive haecceities held by those crystallizations of organic matter we find ourselves among. Every spring I look forward to greeting the larval ladybugs I find on the spirea bush in front of the house, some say they look like spiny little alligators. This one took a break from devouring aphids and waved one of its tiny front legs at me. If it's lucky it will avoid itself becoming a snack for one of the birds that glean such things from trees and shrubs, like the warblers I saw this morning snacking on all varieties of immaculately green caterpillars. It's strange that these things that go so fast are, in a large measure, made of things that go so slow.

sylvie's trees

I don't know this child, but her drawings stood out from all the others on the bulletin board. What strong trees Sylvie drew! It is amazing how resolved they feel and how flooded with vitality and strength. They have a bit of that pollarded look that fascinates me; I often wonder what it is about that bizarre form that's so compelling.

Smerf Falls

Smerfs, warblers, nude performances... you never know what you'll come across in a morning romp through Prospect Park.

glass and metal

We ate at Smith St. restaurant Wild Ginger on Saturday to celebrate a visit from my mother and sister. This installation of bulbs and jars hangs over the bar at the front - I admired the way the upended jars gave me the sense that all the pet bugs had just been freed.

At Historic Richmond Town in Staten Island this barrel of old nails was among the artifacts in Mr. Black's general store. Not actually for sale, though, but a compelling macro subject not just for me but for my daughter, who took the picture below.

anemone

Kornfield

My dad recently returned from a Buddhist retreat with Jack Kornfield and was moved to send me Kornfield's book, The Wise Heart. I cracked it open to the middle for a core sample and found something I rarely see, an account of someone's experience of meditation. This is tricky, subtle territory and even experienced buddhists I've met at times don't really see the purpose in meditation beyond focusing the mind. But in meditation things GO ON, things few people even have words for, so I'm a little awestruck with this passage:

Her first two weeks were filled with the usual ups and downs of body and memory release, the gradual settling down. When her mind became more silent, the boundaries of her sense of self began to evaporate. Her consciousness opened. She would look at an oak tree and feel her arms as the branches. She would breathe and the room breathed too. As she became ever more carefully attentive, an almost atomic level of perception was revealed to her. Each sound, each step, each sight broke apart like a pointillist painting. Over the weeks, her senses became a river of thousands of vibrating points of light. At first this was alarming, but with trust she let go into the changing river. One day both her self and the universe dissolved, dropping away into luminous emptiness. Later a tentative sense of self reappeared and she floated between form and emptiness for some days. She described it as "sitting like a Buddha," experiencing a joyful release, the sweet fruit of years of practice. p.87

It gets better. Kornfield recounts how, when she returned to the real world, this woman experienced what psychologists would call a spontaneous psychic integration and what a shaman would call a soul retrieval. All her life she had tried to be the son her father had hoped for, but finally, after dissolving, she came back together as the woman she was never allowed to be, reborn to her formerly marginalized femininity at the age of 48. "Like a newborn."

canyon

He asked if I'd tell my world, just how hard the little clouds try...

fence

bather

anemone

Waking dream–the words "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were spoken by the earth itself.

brutal sleep

The rainstorm woke me up at 5 to a forest of sound and unexpected time to doze. It was hard to get back to sleep because of the unidentified tapping sound I was too tired to trace to its source. Finally I fell back to sleep and overslept, then awoke at 7 feeling mugged by sleep, shredded, without a drop of energy. Moved the aching tired bones.

Later in the morning I remembered the dream I was having as the clock ticked past due and sleep beat me to a pulp. I was adopting a puppy.

Times Square

windsor terrace formations

Down the hill someone's furrowed the yard for planting. I want to plant watermelons, gourds, beans, squash, okra for the flowers, and corn, but it's not my yard.Last week the rain engorged these London Plane buttonballs to the size of plums. Watch out below!