An emerald hummingbird gathered red nectar, instantaneously, from a new blooming plant...three feet from me early this morning. Each day, I rise at dawn, seeing the peach light turn pink , the "rosy fingers of dawn", turn golden, while the hot air ballons rise. Each day I count these orbs a typical day there are three rising in the valley to the foothills and mountains where we reside. The most has been 14 last Saturday. I zen rake each morning, usually after my walk down the mountain driveway to the gate, and back...yesterday, a mule deer was standing on the peak of one of the hillocks, until he saw a golden ball of light, which caused him to evaporate. I rake out the footprints, mostly mine, of the previous day and of the morning...each evening, I drag the hose full around the house, to offer what is living, and green, water. Rosemary bushes line one side of the house, the head corner spaced with a alabaster brittle bush which has taken root, and a ground red geranium. Then, I make a pot of green tea, settle into a chair, having spread wild birdseed in the back yard, and await the pair of rabbits, another pair of scrub jays and the other assorted song birds and a variety of "well dressed" sparrows, arrival. One has a red breast and red "cap", and another a striated breast and black and white cap. I hand write in a journal of the house, which in another entry notes that Athol Fugard's daughter spent a residency here; she remarks that she found one of the characters in her fiction in her residency and enjoyed the pair of owls, which still talk to each other each morning, inquiring: who -o-o-o-? I hear them each night or early morning.
Having gone to the knoll before returning to the cottage and settling in, and then in returning to my desk to work -- I do my yoga poses, "facing the sun", "tree" pose, "warrior" poses, and a couple of others that require dance like positions, with one hand and leg suspended...this begins the day. I have always loved "the praise the sun" pose, as well as the tree pose. Both require balance and let me know how "stable" my feet are upon the ground and if my spirit is light or burdened. I now have a yoga mat so I continue the poses when I first enter the door, the pushups, and all the floor poses, including the shoulder stand, to the end. I feel remarkably better, when I persist in this workout, and await my DVD to get more support in my practice...
"Wabi Sabi" describes the life here, which I had dreamed of. I am reading ten selections each afternoon, for 30 minutes in the gazebo, from HAIKU MIND: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness, which I downloaded on Kindle. Patricia Donegan taught at Naropa in Colorado and includes zen and nature poet, Gary Snyder, who lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and has lived in Japan, travelled in India and China. Japan and haiku are strong meditative influences in his writing. The Academy of American Poets has just awarded him $25,000 for life time achievement. She also has poems by Alan Ginsberg, Diana de Prima and other "Beat" poets, whom she met at Naropa. She includes many Japanese writers of haiku and the past presidents of the Haiku Society in America and in other countries. She is brief, like the haiku form itself, and each entry is no more than two pages, so it turns into a meditation, and I feel immeasurably refreshed after reading them. I had visited the potter who defined the "wabi sabi" way of life in my month in Kyoto in the zen gardens there.
"Sabi"embodies a sense of solitude, and "wabi", a weathered or rustic feeling of a small hut (or cottage like mine) in the mountains. Wabi Sabi began as a form of aesthetic in the tea ceremony in the 14th century in Japan. The bonsai shares small size and elegant form to create a beauty of simplicity. The concept internalizes that human beings need beauty or perhaps a flower as much as they need bread in their day.
"Be careful of what you wish for; you may get it!" was my thought when Dorland invited me. Like Mrs. Dorland who created this place, to emulate colonies, she as a musican had attended in the East, I wanted to find a colony in California like the ones I had known in the East, in my earlier years, which had provided me nourishment. I also sought silence, solitude, and a cabin high in the mountains, as a projection of what my spirit needed, after the past 7 years in China, following the loss of my beloved cat to diabetes, and the passage of my mother and father in a year's time, Mother in Februrary 2011 and Dad in December 2011, respectively. I have found that bliss, as Noe Fugard terms it, here at Dorland...
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