Its 1:30 in the morning on day three after The Burn. Can’t sleep.
Good news is yesterday was an evacuation free day, we didn’t have to relocate.
Bad news is the smoke from all the fires has made the air unbreathable. Haven’t seen the sky since Tuesday morning. The last 72 hours has become a collage of haze, the sound if sirens, and the smell of char.
Yesterday Nancy and I went to pay our respects to my ex-wife Cyndi. In the Buddhist tradition, she has been lying in state at her zendo since her death on Monday. It was very cold in there. Because of safety regulations she has been lying on dry ice. Dressed in her Zen robes, flowers at her head and feet, she looked very peaceful even though her body had started to turn purple under her ears. She was a beautiful soul, and I will miss her.
Then it was back to the motel room for more hours of answering emails, gathering information for the insurance folks, and waiting in telephone hold-hell. I have to admit, if I could meet the person who invented the concept of inane bad elevator music as a backdrop to the recording of way-to-perky and insincere sounding announcers giving useless information in short bursts, only to be repeated ad nauseum, while simply waiting to talk with a real human being, I fear I would be less than charitable.
So, here it is at 1:30 and I’m lying awake. It is quiet. Not a siren to be heard anywhere.
In sorting through the pictures for Larry our wonderful insurance guy yesterday, I came across this one from our honeymoon. Because of all the travel restrictions due to COVID19, Nancy and I drove over for a week to our favorite place on the Oregon Coast.
I find the rock formations, called sea stacks, hauntingly beautiful. They used to be part of the land, but years of erosion from surf, salt, and wind have formed them into majestic works of art. Simple good old regular earth, shaped into beautiful statues of mysterious form. For me, they represent a metaphor of our souls. We’re all shaped by the untold erosions of our lives. Our souls are sculpted by the unimaginable experiences we endure, the losses we grieve, dreams shattered, and loves that don’t last. The trick is not allowing these losses to make me more mean and bitter, but rather, to surrender to their pummeling in breaking open my tiny frightened heart and allow others in. What some would call the alchemy of becoming compassionate. Fancy notions gracing the pages popular spiritual books – but in the no-man’s-land of homelessness, hazardous air, and ever-present fire danger – it’s really not all that romantic. Still true. Just not all that desirable. This is a course I would never have freely signed up for.
While on our beautiful honeymoon just four months ago, I was reading a book on haikus. Nancy is a wonderful poet, I’m not, but I thought I’d try my hand at a few haikus. A haiku is a Japanese style of poem that has a short three-line structure with five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five in the third, for a total of seventeen. Sounds simple but they’re not. The goal behind the practice is to help the writer become more aware of reality – what is really happening in the moment. Haikus draw attention to the impermanence of life. Nothing lasts. Not houses, jobs, relationships, health, or lives. “Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return. All we go down to the dust.”
At any rate, here’s one I doodled while there.
Sea stacks in the surf,
icons of impermanence
slowly becoming … sand
I was just trying to be poetic. Little did I know how prophetic these words would become for my life just four months later …