Two days after her death, I walked into my friend’s house, where she no longer was, and will never again be. Her daughter greeted me with a hug and “How are you?” That’s a tough question to answer at times like these, and when I hesitated, she said, “I can’t believe I just asked you that” - because of course she too has been struggling when people ask her that simple, impossible question.

It was my privilege to sit with my friend as she lay dying, a privilege to be dreaded and treasured, and I’ll have more to say about that some other time. But since many have asked, I’ll respond to the question at hand.

I’m exhausted, sad, and tapped out. I have been writing a lot. It fell to me, and was my honor, to keep the community up-to-date, and draft the obituary. I’ve also been working on the liner notes for a cd we are putting together to honor the legacy of our trio, The Barefoot Ladies, which also involves careful listening to various mixes, and sorting through photographs. I’m frequently working through my tears. Losing an old friend and a creative partnership all at once has been a hard blow.

It’s August, and I have a garden. I’m not doing it justice, but neither have I abandoned the abundance. I’m teaching my classes, attending to those in my care. I’ve paid my bills, but some emails have gone unanswered. I’m compelled by, and grateful for, the demands of daily life.

I am carrying on - the lot of the living. Exerting the efforts of a breathing body, a creative mind, a feeling heart. Why show up here? A sense of duty? An itch that must be scratched? With the bright moon keeping me awake at 2 am, listening to the crickets and thinking of all that still remains to be done, something wanted to be expressed.

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“I miss you like air and water!” my friend exclaimed, referring to a small group of us who gather during the academic year to study yoga philosophy - and our own minds and hearts - together. A reminder how essential our human relationships are. As life-giving as water and air.

The little beach on Lake Myosotis, the source of the hamlet’s drinking water, located on a pristine nature preserve in this secluded corner of the world, has already been shut down twice this season due to unhealthy conditions. In June, we had a harmful algal bloom, and in mid-July wildfire haze made it unsafe to be outdoors. Many folks around here have the means to access safe drinking water and stay inside with air conditioning, but those benefits are not available to all people, and the creatures who live outside have no escape. Our temporary refuge is only illusory - ecosystem collapse spells disaster for all living beings, including even the most privileged humans.

When I was about eight, in the late ‘70s, a family friend burst into the room and began holding forth on the desperate state of the environment. I think she was exclaiming about the Arctic, although it could just as easily have been the Amazon, or our local lake; what sunk in was her vehemence that “nothing else matters if we don’t have a planet to live on.”

As a kid, this made a deep impression, and one way or another, I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Ṛtam is the concept of a natural order, a harmonic flow (it’s the root of our English word rhythm), and looms large in my mind as I consider how unbalanced life has become, both on a planetary and personal scale. Humans have disrupted that flow. As the basic need for air and water asserts itself, I pray we’ll understand and honor the inextricable link between peace, social justice, and environmental well-being.

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When I summited my first Adirondack High Peak ten years ago, I was on fire, in my mid-40s, and newly divorced. Climbing mountains was a great way to channel all the energy coursing through my system. Since then, I’ve hiked 35 peaks over 4,000 feet tall (some more than once), which is a lot of mountains, a lot of miles, a lot of altitude, a lot of rocks.

I have eleven peaks left to climb to become a “46er,” but I had a more modest goal in mind this time, a beautiful place on earth that I walked right past last time as I headed for higher ground. As I pressed on past the cairn, I thought, this would be a great place to come back to someday. Bald Peak is spectacular, and a formidable hike in its own right - eight miles round trip, almost 3,000 feet elevation gain, including some steep rock faces to scramble up, and boasting all the benefits of a High Peak - great swaths of granite, expansive views of the endless Adirondack wilderness before us and Lake Champlain and Vermont’s Green Mountains at our backs. We found a spot protected from the gusty wind, took our boots off, and basked in the sunlight, eating cheese and crackers and fruit. This is perfection to me.

And not only that, the blueberries were ripe. Since we were taking a leisurely pace - no rushing up to bag Rocky Ridge, which isn’t that far as the raven flies, but for us two-leggeds, requires much up-and-downing (the heartbreak of the col!) - we stopped frequently to feast on the blueberries, small purple-black orbs, warmed by the sun… mountainside miracles.

I do hope I’ll get to Santanoni, Redfield, Panther, Seward, Marshall, Allen, Donaldson, Seymour, Emmons, Cliff, and Couchsachraga someday, but for now, I’m happy I got to stop and eat blueberries to my heart’s content on my way to a not-quite-so-high, but oh-so-beautiful wide open summit.

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The spell was broken at five o’clock, but until that time, once I had reconciled to canceling much-anticipated plans, the day was a perfect, timeless sequestration. I woke up feeling ill and gradually surrendered to the reality that I couldn’t do anything I’d planned. And then came rest and peace.

It was a magical day. I hadn’t eaten, and couldn’t, but I was content as I sank into my fatigue and discomfort, lying first on the floor, then the couch, moving in and out of an un-delineated sleep. Eyes closed, listening to the birds and the breeze; eyes open, looking at the play of light on the closed curtains. Just that was enough. In the afternoon, I read a Wendell Berry novel, drifting in and out of sleep. A stillness I could never manage on an ordinary day, but one my body required.

Normally, the mind is like a butterfly, flitting from one colorful thought-bloom to another. That day, my mind folded its wings and perched quietly on one delicate blossom, hour after hour. Not doing. Being.

The day shimmers in my memory.

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Life is savage in a garden. I pull weeds with abandon and don’t hesitate to break a cutworm in half, and even the most privileged plants, which I water and weed, talk to and coddle, are eaten eventually.

Nonetheless, I go to my garden for a moment of peace each morning. I entered the gated sanctuary yesterday just in time to watch a catbird catch and devour a swallowtail butterfly, master of transformation and a beautiful pollinator I would just as soon keep. But undeterred by my presence, the bird ate it, leaving behind only one wing.

A community is an ecosystem, and works best when we know ourselves and interact with care, taking what we require and giving what we can. I have a couple friends who need help right now, and as I offer my small contributions, I am watching myself for pride or resistance, checking that it is love and compassion leading the way as I make an extra stop at the store or whip up another batch of custard, stop to snip some flowers and put them in a jar. Small acts, possibly important. Maybe more helpful to me than to them.

At the lake, I watch a great blue heron wading in the shallows, and wish both the heron and the frogs the best. And tears spring to my eyes as I watch the lovely swoop and dip of the swallows above the water. A swallow can eat a thousand bugs a day. That sounds good to me, but an insect flitting above the water would beg to differ. But that is the way of things. We’re always breathing in and breathing out.

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“How was your trip? Was it amazing?!” I have been struggling to answer this question well. Because on one level it truly was amazing. My niece planned a seamless and thorough tour of six different cities, including excellent places to stay and every kind of delicious meal. We saw endless delightful and interesting sights; were graciously hosted by distant cousins and old friends; and travel logistics went surprisingly smoothly, even on the one day they didn’t.

There were six of us in our travel consortium, a motley crew ranging from age 19 to 79. That’s a lot of hearts, minds, and feet to get moving in the same direction for seventeen days in a row. For complicated reasons, our expected seventh companion, who would have been the hub of our family circle, wasn’t able to come, so we all found ourselves in an unexpected situation, and I’m proud to say we managed it pretty well. My friend Jennifer often reminds me that “everyone is doing the best they can.” It was helpful to remember that.

Some things I loved: the brown cows grazing on Bavarian hillsides; traveling by train; the herds of bicyclists in Munich and Copenhagen, every sort of person riding clunky bikes with fierce intensity. By chance we were in Leipzig on Pentecost Sunday, and were treated to a full sung Mass with boys’ choir, Baroque orchestra, and two pipe organs - in Bach’s home church! Wonderful! It was also our good fortune to be in Copenhagen to see Petra Love and the Royal Danish Ballet perform Balanchine’s “Apollo.” My heart swelled with pride and joy watching this gifted young woman, whose journey I’ve been following for the last decade, dancing on that beautiful stage.

But there was also sorrow. Early in the trip, I was standing in a 15th century churchyard in Stuttgart when my son called with the terrible news of the tragic death of one of my kids’ friends, a lovely young woman we’ve known since kindergarten. The church bells began to ring as I stood in shock and horror, a haze of grief descending.

A couple days later, I was walking around a lake on a glorious May morning, the craggy and snow-topped Alps as backdrop. The clear water reflected the mountains and the clouds. I walked through fields of buttercups, near cows calmly chewing their cud, an idyllic red-roofed village in the distance. Birds chirped in a pine woods, a pair of swans swam gracefully on the water. The tragic and the ecstatic exist side by side; the mundane, the difficult, the peaceful are all just passing versions of reality. I may have cried as I walked, but I was also aware of what is beautiful.

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Life has been showing up at high volume of late. May is bursting out all over… leaves! grass! blossoms! There’s been much joy - our teachers from India were here and shared their wisdom and caring generously; a friend surprised me with a visit, and we spent time in a pasture with about twenty gamboling lambs, and then gathered dinner from an endless sea of ramps; another friend is freshly and totally in love. There’s been much to celebrate.

And also a lot to mourn. One in my circle lost her husband in a tragic accident; another is facing eviction; illness, both mental and physical, is impacting several loved ones. People often say,“It’s a lot.” Well, yes, it is. The world is wild, it is too much with us, and we all suffer in our turn. Sometimes it feels like all 10,000 things are running around my head at once.

During the yoga retreat, I slept poorly five nights out of seven, body exhausted, mind racing, heart hurting. Too many details, too much pain in my awareness. During the day, I taught my classes, held space for the retreat, and as much as possible, sank gratefully into the role of student, sitting humbly at the feet of my teachers, and the timeless wisdom they were delivering; I was nourished by their grace, the light of the ancient teachings, and good company. Hard nights, beautiful days - both realities true.

Taoism speaks of The 10,000 Things; yoga calls it prakriti, an ever-evolving reordering of cosmic energy. Twice this week, I cried in the arms of a friend, knocked off my feet by some of those swirlings. And, too, the birds sing before dawn these days; yesterday I placed a hundred dainty onions in the ground; the quince has bloomed; and I’m about to leave to visit ancestral lands with my family. Vedic wisdom says the fullness of experience is the point, and that there’s also that which lies beyond it.

Tonight I board a jet bound for Germany. I’m traveling without my laptop, so will take a break from these musings until June. In the meantime, thanks for being here, and be well.

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If you’re searching for joy and awe, I suggest turning over your compost pile, as we did recently. A couple years worth of food scraps and weeds has become beautiful lush soil. From what would usually be deemed “waste,” time and microbiology have created one of the true treasures of the earth. Soil. The foundation of life.

The regenerative farming books I gorged on this winter draw a strict distinction between fertile soil and dead dirt, but like William Bryant Logan, author of the excellent Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, I am loath to give up the d-word. Poetically speaking, I’d rather be a dirt farmer than a soil farmer.

And it turns out I am. As I was pitchforking a corner of the garden that was formerly heavy with clay, I realized I was turning good dirt! I’ve been gardening this plot for ten years, and the various inputs - compost, manure, wood chips, straw, even cardboard, have yielded a healthy soil where before there was clumpy clay. In some small way, my efforts have made a little piece of earth better. It’s a modest but real rejection of the extractive economy that drives the world we live in.

Yoga Sutra 1.14 says, “Practice becomes well-grounded when it is undertaken for a long time, without interruptions, with reverence and respect.” Well-grounded. Seasonal ameliorations of the soil; daily efforts of the body, breath, and mind. Little by little, undertaken for a long time, our efforts gradually transform the landscape into something richer.

Happy Earth Day!

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This morning, in the midst of practicing the eagle pose - a twisty balance pose, not my usual fare - I saw out of the corner of my eye an object float slowing to the ground, spinning leisurely, like an autumn leaf. But there are no leaves falling these days, so I wondered if a bluejay had fallen prey to a hawk. I took note of where it landed, and when I went out to investigate a few minutes later, I was stopped in my tracks by a presence in the tree. That’s not a hawk! my primitive brain screamed.

I was being studied by the imperturbable eye of an eagle. I froze in awe. It abided my presence for several breaths, so I went back in the house for my phone, and it stayed a few minutes longer while I took some pictures.

Some people think of yoga as contortionist stretching, but for me it’s about breathing, moving mindfully, and building inner awareness. However, this week, in celebration of the fact that there’s an eagle’s nest in close proximity to the studio, and in the spirit of having some fun, I taught the eagle pose (garudāsana). It is very pretzel-y, with both legs and arms intertwining - while standing on one leg. We all did what we could, and in one practitioner doing a modified version, I saw a perfect eagle gaze, strong, fierce, and calm.

There’s plenty of symbolism around the eagle. I prefer the connection to clear sight and big-picture perception, and linking the earthly and heavenly realms, to the martial connotation, which has persisted through many different eras and cultures. But most importantly, that the presence of eagles in my neck of the woods has become commonplace is testament to the fact that destructive human activity (in this case overhunting and DDT use) can be changed. To step out the door and find a juvenile bald eagle perched in the locust tree is enough to send my heart soaring.

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I was home for Easter. The house I grew up in burned down twenty years ago, so by home I mean the people I find there, and the piece of land, now occupied by a better house. The property’s few acres are mostly wooded, and a creek runs along its southern border.

The stream is one of many that runs into Owasco Lake, one of the smaller Fingerlakes. It is a character from my childhood, the chief source of summer entertainment, whose babbling I heard from my bedroom window, and the first place I ever meditated, though I didn’t have a name for it then.

In recent years, unusually heavy rains have rerouted the water, undercutting trees, and eating away at the bank of our backyard, now diminished to about half the width I remember. Last week it flooded again. The woods were scoured by rushing water, which moved rocks and logs and pulled down trees in its wake. A different personality from the enchanted place where we played as children, catching crayfish and frogs, watching the water gliders, piling stones.

As my parents and I strolled along the washed out bank, checking out storm damage and ogling the spring shoots, we were talking about what will become of us, and the land, in the next five, ten, fifty years. A heavy conversation, mitigated by the spring ephemerals. Black cohosh, wood squill, spring beauties. Trillium and trout lily, no flowers yet. Ramps and wild chives, small, but already pungent. These diminutive harbingers of hope and continuity push up through the leaf litter and along the floodplain. The heart leans heavily on these faithful beings in the face of mortality, war, and climate disruption, and is rewarded. Stalwart and dependable, they are not as delicate as they appear.

Spring and all its flowers
now joyously break their vow of silence.
It is time for celebration, not for lying low;
You too — weed out those roots of sadness from your heart.

A snippet of Hafez, poet of 14th century Persia (Iran), a civilization recently threatened with extinction.

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Yesterday I finally heard the peepers, one of my favorite sounds on earth. Last week, in the same woods, the vernal ponds were icy, silent. Now the painted turtles perched on logs, the frogs croaked their full-throated chorus, and the little peepers chirped their spring symphony.

I approached, slowly, humbly, respectfully. I know they do not like an audience. But no matter how quietly I creep up the trail, at a certain moment, they stop abruptly. I assume it is the vibration of my footsteps that silences them, but I don’t know. Also, in all my years of listening to these small virtuosos, I’ve never seen one. They are secretive, for such exuberant singers.

Last night it rained, with thunder and lightning. This is not spring weather. Walking in the woods, rejoicing in the awakening amphibians and reptiles, I was worrying. Yes, it’s spring, but there is too much war, too much greed, too much injustice. Too many trees have plagues, the pollinators are dying off, the seas are rising, and we have only 50 years of topsoil left. I zoom out and think of the big cycles, the ages of flourishing and destruction, described both in the fossil record and Vedic cosmology. Time is cycling, systems arise and decay. We exist in a pinprick of history.

As I approached the wetlands on my return trip, the peepers were going strong again. But I heard them pause and note my presence when I was still 300 feet away. They tentatively began again as I drew nearer and mounted an old stone wall to record their music, which continued for a few more seconds, and then ceased. I crouched there, listening, hoping for more. I imagined them in the cold water, clinging to a branch or the muddy edge, also crouching, also listening, waiting.

I don’t know how they perceive my presence, or why it disturbs them, but they don’t start again. My ignorance is a point of hope - there is so much I don’t know, which helps me humbly admit, in spite of all the terrible things I do know, that the future is beyond my understanding.

The peepers out-waited me, and I walked off down the trail, leaving them in peace. As I listened to the rain and rumbling thunder last night, I imagined them singing in the storm, a spring miracle, still having their say in the wounded and resilient world.

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On one of our early High Peaks hikes, my friend noticed that a group of young hikers, wearing shorts, gaiters, and boots, were marching defiantly through the center of the muddy patches of trail. We were surprised by the depth and quantity of thick dark mud (which we later learned is lovingly called Adirondack black gold) on the tops of those high mountains. We hugged the edges of the trenches of muck, trying to avoid being sucked down and plastered with the stuff. But we later learned that those kids were following correct trail protocol… we’re meant to walk through the mud to preserve the integrity of the fragile ecosystem alongside the trail.

Yoga teacher Claude Maréchal points to a certain high level of spiritual achievement in which rather than resisting pain, we understand that suffering is a path to growth. This is not to say that we should court difficult experiences, but that when a challenge inevitably arises, we learn to greet it as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.

It’s quite likely that we can look back over our lifetime and see, with the benefit of hindsight, that the hard times we endured were often the engines that eventually propelled us forward to deeper understanding of ourselves or others. What if we could train ourselves to perceive, right in the midst of a depression or a conflict, a growth opportunity? Not to try to escape the ordeal, but to go through it with the faith that the pain is something transformative, and we’ll emerge wiser and maybe tougher for it. Sometimes the best we can do is walk right through the muck of our suffering.

Yesterday as I was tramping along the muddy lake trail, I was overcome with a sense of foreboding, as though I were about to get terrible news. It was so strong tears rose up, and I later mentioned it to a friend and my son. The feeling quieted, but I didn’t sleep well. My son spent the night at a friend’s, and when he walked in early this morning, he was shaken, having narrowly avoided a serious accident as someone blew through a stop sign. It was not a four-way stop. It could have been bad. Fortunately, he was alert, and slammed on the brakes and swerved to avoid being struck. We looked at each other, thinking of my premonition, shocked and relieved.

I mention this incident to acknowledge that we are sometimes required to withstand impossible pain and loss, and to bring great humility to this teaching that suffering is a vector for growth. I’m grateful my son is fine and that I’m not being asked to learn a very hard lesson right now.

“We acquire the strength we have overcome.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I first meditated with prayer beads at the ashram where I spent a month learning how to teach yoga in 1998. We spent four hours a day learning asana (yoga positions) and about the same amount of time studying philosophy, chanting, and meditation techniques. I left the training with a sandalwood mala and a mantra, a simple phrase to repeat to focus the mind and cultivate devotion.

A couple years later, my housemate’s dog chewed that mala (a good opportunity for forbearance and compassion), but over the years I’ve been gifted others. A mala is 108 (or some smaller multiple, like 27 or 54) beads strung together. The one I favor now was given to me by my sister-in-law, large amber beads that are easy to feel in the fingers as I push them along one by one.

My daily hike is most often a loop, and it reminds me of moving around the mala, one step at a time. When I walk, I let the thoughts float through - it’s a time for allowing creative impulses to present themselves, rather than disciplining the mind or solving problems. My writing dried up for three weeks in February. During those same three weeks, because of weather, illness, and travel, I frequently missed my usual solo time in the woods. That lull, during which my energy and mood were generally low, underscored the importance of the time spent moving through space and letting my mind receive inspiration.

This spring, I’m trying a new twist on my meditation practice. Instead of mentally repeating the mantra, I simply listen to my natural breath 108 times, using the mala to mark them. Observing the breath is a time-honored meditation technique, but I’ve never done it with the beads before. It’s a softer, more spacious way of doing japa meditation, and creates a receptive, quiet mental landscape, in much the same way as one step after the other on the trail does.

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When I walked in the door, my friend said she thought I looked congested and wondered if a bath might help. She has a deep and beautiful tub, which she filled for me with very hot water and a healing brew of mineral salts and essential oils; she set me up with a cup of tulsi rose tea, and I sank in. Her bathroom is a worthy salon, and we sat comfortably, me submerged in the steaming water, she on a stool, her dog on the rug. I felt indulged, and it did me good. The congestion - which I felt in my heart, not my head - melted away in the hot water and caring company.

It snowed a lot this winter in the hills where I live, and for these past few warm days, the sound of water running downhill has dominated the soundscape. The water obeys gravity and finds any convenient path down the slopes. I keep stepping outside just to hear it. The snow melt has many sounds, from rushing torrents to trickling rivulets, and there’s water where there usually is none, a fleeting reality.

There’s also the chirp/trill of the red-winged blackbirds, whose arrival I have tracked for the past twenty years… one year, as early as February 9, and once as late as March 23; whatever the date, the aural palette is distinct, and not to be enjoyed at any other time of the year. Our perverted global food system has made it possible to buy a fresh strawberry almost any day of the year. But the progression of sounds - winter’s frozen stillness, the liquid symphony of spring, the robin’s chirruping and the chickadee’s two-note spring song, followed by the spring peepers, then the trilling toads - are preserved as seasonal treats that have thus far survived humanity’s planetary assault.

Winter’s grip is softening. Believe in the lightness it brings to your heart. Don’t let the news drown out the sound of earth waking up. Go out and listen to the melting snow.

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As I was finishing my meditation one recent morning, a text came in from my son. He was on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, sitting on the deck, traveling overnight to a veterinarian who can perform leg surgery on his dog. I tried to conjure the warm, humid air, the sound of the engine, the lapping of water against the hull, the trusting but confused dog at his side. I asked if he could see the moon, and he sent a picture. There it floats, above the ferry’s crane. He rides the planet seventeen hours ahead of me, and it’s hard for me to imagine his reality. But it helps to know he’s looking up at the same moon.

There are more than eight billion human beings on the planet. That is a number I can’t even begin to fathom. Dunbar’s Number represents a theory proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggesting we can only maintain about 150 “primary” relationships - people we know and care about on a meaningful personal level. No wonder we become numb and overwhelmed by the bad news of the world.

Yoga teaches that the proper response to suffering is compassion. Yoga’s aim is to create inner stability and clarity, which will show up in the quality of our actions. I am coming to grips with the fact that I am not a protest activist by nature - I show up now and then, but I can’t sustain an outward focus, which makes me hope “think globally, act locally” and “the personal is political” are true statements. The wisdom teachings seem to concur that if I conduct myself in a loving way in my 150 close relationships, the effect will ripple outward.

In my friend Barbara Becker’s (barbarabecker@substack.com) latest blog, “An Iranian Love Story: On staying human in inhuman times,” she reflects on learning of the US attack on Iran as she emerged from a meditation retreat, and offers the inspiring story of Iranian activists Nasrin Sotoudeh and Reza Khandan, in addition to some simple words for meditation:

May I be free of suffering and danger.

May I open to this pain with gentleness and compassion.

May Nasrin and Reza and their children be safe and well in the midst of all this.

I care about the people of Iran. Your suffering matters to me.

May the suffering of this entire world be met with compassion.

May all bodies and all minds be at peace.

As always, we begin where we are. Thoughts matter, small actions matter. Any attempt to create human connection counters the depersonalizing effect of news of death and destruction. There are eight billion separate stories being told on planet Earth. There is great suffering, there is great beauty, there is deep grief and deep joy. And above each one of us, the same moon shines, reminding us of the truth of our shared planetary citizenship.

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On what was hopefully the coldest day of the winter, bright and frigid, wind chill -28°F, I performed the sacred, hopeful rite of ordering seeds. I also made a pilgrimage to the garden, wading through thigh-high drifts, the air stinging my face. Under the snow, what old-timers call “poor man’s fertilizer,” the earth is getting ready. In just a few weeks, in the warmth of the greenhouse, we’ll mold soil blocks and plant hundreds of seeds; those that germinate and thrive will go in the ground in late May. After that, it’s not quite as simple as “you reap what you sow”… you harvest what you water, and weed, and pick the pests off of, in accordance with whatever the capricious weather gods deliver. But whatever may follow, the season starts with hope.

Even though I’d heard the buzz, and knew Bad Bunny’s halftime show was going to be something special, it blew my mind. The usual strutting, humping, glitz, and egomania that predictably characterizes the annual extravaganza was replaced by images of community, solidarity, strength, harmony, and human connection. I don’t understand Spanish, but the message was clear long before it was spelled out on the jumbotron: THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE. Fertilized by the manure pile that (un)civil discourse has become, perhaps that message will finally take root.

The 20th century American saint known as Peace Pilgrim spent 28 years walking around the US spreading her message of peace and love. She had little education, was unaffiliated with any religion or organization, and, having given up all her possessions (including her name and biography), walked with complete faith in what she called God’s laws, enduring truths that she experienced as direct revelations: evil can only be overcome by good; only good means can attain a good end; those who do unloving things hurt themselves spiritually; these laws apply to all humans beings and must be obeyed before harmony can prevail. In other words:

“Hatred can only be overcome by love.” - Gandhi

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The only way to achieve lasting peace is through mutual trust, respect, love, and kindness. The only way.” - The Dalai Lama

Peace Pilgrim was an extraordinary being who lived absolutely in accordance with these truths. But she got there gradually, and her method is one we might all adopt: “I looked at every situation I came into to see if there was anything I could do there to be of service. I did as many good things as I could each day, not forgetting the importance of a pleasant word and a cheery smile” (11).

We’re not all saints, nor do we all have a global platform, but every action we take is a seed we plant, so let’s do as many good things as we can each day, and see what grows.

Peace Pilgrim’s words from the book Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words.

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Never Miss a Sunset, a book I read once or twice in my tween years, has seared itself into my memory. It’s not the plot, but the title - which stared out at me from my bookshelf for many years - that penetrated. The protagonist was a teenager, the oldest daughter of a poor farming family, who resented caring for her younger siblings. It was a hardscrabble existence, her father was gruff and severe, her mother constantly pregnant and beleaguered. It is not great literature, and you can guess the moral from the title. But the idea stuck with me.

My friend’s father died last week, and at his funeral I learned, because each person who spoke mentioned it, that Sam treasured every sunset. He died in his sleep, in bed, at 95, and lived an active and engaged life, full of accomplishments and adventures. But it turns out his greatest legacy, as articulated by his granddaughter, may be his reminder to appreciate each day, to do something as simple as sit and watch the sunset.

When my children were young, we lived in an old farmhouse, perched on a ridge 2,017 feet about sea level, with no protection from the prevailing winds blasting in from the west. The house had only one west-facing window (in a room that was more cold storage than living quarters), in spite of a spectacular view in that direction, so I missed a lot of sunsets in those days. But occasionally the brilliant sky would catch someone’s attention, and we would all rush out to marvel at it; or I might steal away by myself, face the color, take a few slow breaths, let my shoulders relax, my belly soften. I would remember the title of that book from my youth, and wonder how many tired souls had stood on our hill at the end of a hard day, letting drop all the troubles of the world, absorbed in the beauty of the wide open sky.

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A snowstorm, at least one with plenty of warning and out into which you don’t need to venture, is like a holiday, a surprise sacred respite from the usual overly-scheduled lives most of us live.

In my Pilates class, I teach a position called Constructive Rest Pose, in which you lie on your back with knees bent, arms at the sides, palms up, feeling the soles of the feet against the floor, relaxing the thighs and sensing the sacrum melting into the mat; the shoulder blades flat and wide, softly separated. Arms and hands relaxed; neck, face, throat, easy; feeling the heaviness of the head dropping into gravity’s pull. An important cue is “Do Nothing.” I exhort people to spend a few minutes on the ground everyday, relaxing, observing, breathing - at least that.

The storm created an opportunity, not to do nothing, perhaps, but to settle into slow, non-accomplishment mode. I lay on the couch and read long segments of a book; I watched at length the birds gathering around the feeder, the fine snow swirling down and piling up.

Relaxing into the timeless feeling of the day, I also pulled out a mandolin. It was left here by a friend a couple years ago in the hopes I might take it up, and even though I’ve never played one before, an app helped me tune it and youtube taught me how to play a simple tune and pick out several chords. I’ve heard that boredom sparks creativity, and though I wasn’t bored, the sense of being at loose ends, with plenty of time on my hands, opened up a new little piece of the world.

As I hunkered down, which was the right thing to do, the people of Minneapolis, fueled by warm-hearted solidarity, white hot rage, and deep grief, gathered to protest the ICE storm in their city, also the right thing to do. As I broke trail through a couple feet of snow on my snowshoes after the storm, hard work, I pondered the fact that it’s time for me to get myself to another protest, a kind of hard work I don’t savor, but seems required now.

Do nothing, do something. Inhale, exhale. Take time alone in the quiet woods, gather together with fellow humans. The pull of muscles on bones makes them stronger.

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As I pause to take in the surroundings, the crunch of my spikes on the icy trail gives way to the sound of my breath, then an awareness of my heartbeat. And then, a thrum from the frozen lake, as though someone has gently plucked a single string on a bass. When the ice is free of snow, the lake burps and groans and hums. But I couldn’t hear it until I stopped walking.

I have been listening and re-listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River, the account of the trip she and her partner took with love, codependence, addiction, and recovery, and Gilbert’s ongoing efforts to maintain emotional sobriety. The aspect of the story that keeps pulling me back is Gilbert’s capacity to hear words spoken to her by God. I have no way of knowing if these communications come from the cosmic consciousness, Gilbert’s own deepest discerning intelligence (buddhi in yoga-speak), or her imagination, but it doesn’t matter, because when she gets quiet and listens interiorly, she gets good advice.

I have experienced what Quakerism calls “leadings” or “way opening,” when a path forward laid itself at my feet and made a decision easy to make. Yoga would describe this as being in tune with rtam, the flow of the universe, and you know it when you feel it, like drifting downstream on an easy current rather than struggling against it. If this is to be the closest I come to hearing the voice of God, it is enough. However, I am curious what it would be like to hear actual words or instructions whispered in my ear by the great I AM.

The only thing I know for sure is that I can’t force it, but it’s a good guess that I’ll increase my chances by quieting the babbling of my mind. When I meditate, I mentally repeat a mantra, so even though my mind is focused, it is not silent. The moment by the lake, when I stood still and the already-present murmurings of the ice broke through my awareness, gave me an idea of what it might feel like to suddenly perceive the still small voice of the Great Mystery. That sensation keeps on echoing.

“Perhaps/ The Truth depends on a walk around a lake” - Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

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In 8th grade, my best friend threw a surprise birthday party for me, and it really blew my mind when about thirty kids from school jumped out to shout, “Surprise!” because I was pretty sure most of them hated me. Besides one girl getting freaked out by the Ouija board, the main thing I remember about the night was my shock that all these people would show up to celebrate me. I wish I’d understood the big lesson of that experience back when I was fourteen, but sad to say I’m still working on it: there may be a couple bullies it’s best to avoid, but for the most part, people are benign at worst, and more likely benevolent, and if they come across as self-conscious or stand-offish, it’s their own insecurities at play, not a comment on me.

I’ve had fifty-six birthdays, and though my family taught me that birthdays are cause for a party, only a few of them stand out in detail. In the tween years, a group of girls came over for a sleepover and we played dress-up and laughed uproariously at personalized MadLibs created by my father, and ate cake baked by my mother. My dad and I were in London when I turned 15, and I was touched and awed by a beautiful little bakery cake he brought to our hotel. When I turned 22, the gathering was a mob of people at my punk rock alcoholic boyfriend’s music studio, and a birthday cake I made for myself. I was in Nepal for my 29th, but don’t recall a thing about it. At 30, again I baked myself a cake and a small group gathered at Jonji’s yoga studio to chant together. The hardest birthday was 40 - crossing a decade when you’re in despair does not a happy birthday make.

However, by 50 I’d left that reality and wanted to do something special, so I asked a few women to join me in the Adirondacks. We had an unforgettable time: we put on our microspikes and climbed a small but icy mountain, a first for some of them; we put on evening gowns and lit up the casual dining hall; we played music in the great room in front of the fire, read Tarot, opened our hearts to each other and delved deep. Safe to say it was the best weekend any of us had in 2020.

It requires a bit of gumption to ask people in October if they want to commit to spending a weekend in early January, on their own dime, at the rather funky ADK Loj, where they will eat, share a bathroom, and sleep with strangers, some of whom will definitely snore. But I have extended the invitation a couple times in the intervening years, and several friends have honored me with their presence each time, which brings me to my knees with gratitude and astonishment. These strong, beautiful, creative, resilient, extraordinary humans remind me how very not alone we are. Sometimes it takes a little energy to reach out and make things happen, but simple human connection is the best gift any of us has.

Also, I stopped making birthday cake for myself years ago. There’s a lesson in that, too, about relinquishing control - though miraculously, one seems to show up every year, which makes me love my friends even more.

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