Natural Paramittas

Funny, this First Week

Funny, this pause just now - first week of January.

Seems to be working true to form, this annual renewal.

Me, I've seen that the days are getting longer. Gloom doesn't seem destined to consume all. 

Miracles have been born. The old year has been cast off, a new one just begun, and

This week, just now, we await some epiphany - some glad tidings of this newness and possibility.   

Again. 

Then there's all the weeks to come. 

Same as it ever was, and as unique as THIS time. 

Again. 

So be gentle on yourselves, all of them. 

Next week will follow the impending epiphany, Sure enough. 

Blessed be.

The First Time I Designed for Climate Change

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.

I mean, I'm a place-maker, and the nature of places IS changing faster and faster these days. I guess we can design for that.

But it DID happen a few weeks ago, to me, for the first time:

Just now we're envisioning the next development in the evolution of the Pontoon Docks, part of the Royal Docks in East London.

Came up with some good beginning ideas for the regeneration of the place:

Then Haewon asked me whether we would design it for before AND after - Climate Change that is.

Now, the locks into the Royal Docks are upriver of the Thames Barrier (a sea gate that can close if the tide is running too high up the river), so we're better off than some who are below the barrier - like Central London, Greenwich and Canary Wharf.

But, still and all, it seems there are changes afoot in the places where water and land meet, and this is one of them.

And it seems we're going to have to envision this place we're making, both before and after.

This is a first for me.

And how strange is that??

You?  How are you  adapting to the Earth Changes that accompany Climate Change??

Know any good examples of folk who have adapted their futures to this eventuality??

Any ideas how to make it good?

The Kid Thought I Was Santa Claus

Bucharest Airport, December, 1998
By then my beard was completely white.  But I didn't really know it.

My cheeks have always been rosy. Just happened. My sons cheeks do it too.

In the airport lounge, minding my own business, when this Rumanian kid, looks maybe 6, walks right into my space and, leaning on my lap, says "Santa?".

Such a smile. Such gladness in his eyes.

Interesting kid, I found out. Actually, about 12.

On his way to the American heartland.
His adoptive parents, missionaries, had spent the last 7 months getting him ready to leave Ceaucescu's mass orphanages, where he had lived since his birth.

The Dictator, obsessed with fecundity, outlawed birth control, both before and after conception. The mothers only option was the baby factories which filled myriad orphanages, cribs filling vast rooms, one next to each other, no room to pass among them.

This boy, I was told, was feral and without language when they met him.

Docile mostly, but when food entered the room - an animal, all claws and teeth, climbing across furniture and folks, battling to assure his survival.

Now, a few months later, smile beaming, looking beseechingly unto my eyes - "Santa?"


When I got home, I trimmed my now white beard, not yet ready to be a mythical old man.

And that was years ago now.


Still I think of him as these December 2010 days wend towards Yuletide yet again.

A Conversation with the Yonkers Rotary Club on Thriveability & Economic Development

On October 7th, I started a conversation with the Yonkers Rotary Club about new ways of framing what is traditionally called economic development - what I prefer to call Community, Cultural and Commercial Development.

I'd like to invite the readers of my blog to join that conversation.  The text is at this link.

Have a look.  Add some comments.  Send me a note.

Let's help good things happen.

The Grace of Pursuing Skillful Means

An important dharma path for me has long been the grace of pursuing ever more “skillful means”:  How to skillfully be what this life, this manifestation of these myriad dharmas, gives rise to.  It is one of the bittersweet benefits of 55ness to accept that, in this life, we can actualize this intention ( the work called for in the atta dipa) merely to a degree.  At moments, I can see just that which can be achieved as great accomplishment.  Other times the glass seems half full, at best.

For example, yesterday it struck me, articulately for the first time, that for me, in this life, most of the formative contributions to my offspring had already happened.  Other youths I meet appear to have been raised more skillfully, to have what seem more fortuitous myriad dharmas shaping their lives.  Yet, I tell myself, I have moved my cluster of kharma legacies down the pike.  My kids are wondrous, and fountains of dharma, shaping what will arise from their ancient twisted kharma, more or less skillfully.  I know they aspire  (at least at some moments) to evolve, to be the source of ever more beneficient kharma.  I know I’ve, more or less skillfully at various moments, armed them with the faith that the nest step can always be towards redemption, towards the tathagata’s call in the Atta Dipa.

Sogyal Rinpoche, in a passage read years ago, one I can’t find again yet, discussed how what some call reincarnation can be seen as the gentle evolution of lineages towards enlightenment (lightening up the tangle of ancient twistedness??).  Not a given unique “soul” moving from skin bag to skin bag, but a cluster of dharmas, moving through evolutionary time & its matrix of place/moments, living in these fleeting humanesses, related to lineages of biology and also socio-biology, tendencies and proclivities, mindfulness and mindlessness, moving towards . . . . . . . what?  Getting nowhere, but tending towards . . . . . grace, liberation, freedom from . . . . what seems to ail us (I guess).  Then . . . what whatness?  An emptiness with room for clarity and grace?  A bodhisattva’s effort?  Whatness??

Or so it seems.

Did you ever see this poem?:

MYRIAD BECOMINGS

Bice C Wilson, Late Winter 2007

Becoming,

ephemeral collusion

Interweaving myriad dharma vectors

tendencies become transient actualities

At every scale of time a stillness

Is,

which,

seen differently

Is

simultaneously shape shifting –

never IS the same.

No thing HAS to be, one moment to the next,

We are given, in this fleeting form

gateways to mindfulness,

senses animating our dance

And somewhere,

among the warp and woof of the

many becomings

we are just now

Sings this spark that knows and chooses,

conducting whatever wholeness we can find

step by step, dancing along the path.

Dancing in fields open, empty of must be,

constrained by conventions,

dancing degrees of volition

the sublime suchness

Open to our intention

Emptily

Now, we again harvest what we've sown.

In the ways of some of my ancestors, these days,
                              The end of July --  beginning of August,
Are the days when the sun really starts to deliver the sustenance that will take us through another year,




These are the days when we start to seriously reap what we've sown.




My ancestors called it Lughnasadh, named after Lugh Lamhfada, Lugh-of-the Long Arm, 
who was, 
       for a while,
           to some who inhabited Ireland
             the sun god, god of all the arts, all that is made  -
                                     He whose long arm reaches down and makes all that life possible.


Right Now, 
Summer is at it's maximum,
And just this past Saturday, we woke up in my house and it felt like a fall morning.

Cause right now, summer is at its maximum, and fall is a-comin' in.


You get a glimpse of it in the scent on a breeze,
In a certain kinds and qualities of the light,
          In the way the air feels, just in passing,  


Just now -
A glimpse of Fall.


SO, the change has begun,
And the Harvest has begun.


And we'll see how the harvest season will be.


                   May it be the best of what you've hoped for and husbanded.


                  May you thrive among all that it is.
.