Chance = Change

To your right is an actual photo taken by Steve C...on one of their jaunts around the highways and byways of San Francisco, and as they drove me down the Pacific Coast Highway on my last visit there, I do remember thinking I had never never ever seen such gorgeous natural beauty in my life, and I recall also thinking how sad it would be if that expected Big One - the earthquake to end all earthquakes - were to simply snap that loveliness off from its geographic moorings and make it an island off the coast of California......but I always have thoughts like that when i go out West....
Such thoughts were soon dissolved in the sheer headiness of the beauty i kept seeing and seeing for miles and miles....I tell you: it's humbling. Mankind thinks itself so special...but Nature is better than we are at everything....it's truly no contest....so why we human animals have such arrogance and ego-cherishing...well....that is part of our nature. ...and Nature (with a capital "n" ) smiles on us for it most of the time.

Pat Yonka, Peter's mom, is here for the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations Conference.....she'll be with us for a few days and we are so glad...we miss both Pattie and Chuck whenever we go too long without seeing them.

The past week in the country Upstate was ideal...i am energized and ready to get back to work and this week is filled with many students and things. My poetry class at the New School starts Thursday and that should be interesting....the last time i was a student was maybe two decades ago when I took a fiction writing course at the New School, and i did love it then. Could it possibly have been that long ago? Surely not. Anyway, I look forward to it very much.

The 46-10 Group was wonderful today ...I decided to take a break from working on the Spoon River material we are doing, and go back to reading some of the material we started out with: Shakespeare monologues, two-character playlets, etc. and it was terrific to see how much they have all grown. And, BY THE WAY: you have not lived until you experience an 84-year-old man say words like : "We are such stuff as dreams are made on...." and a 93-year-old Southern belle speak "Juliet's" immortal balcony scene...it is enough to make you actually appreciate growing old: wisdom comes with it, God willing....it certainly has grown into the very skins of these wonderful new actors.....and words i thought I knew well take on exceptional meaning when spoken by older folk.....it's so gorgeous to be with. I feel blessed to have discovered this particular thing in my life.

So much to write about - especially about one particular day we all spent at the Kagyu Thubten Choling Monastery last weekend...an amazing day, filled with meditation and service around the gorgeous grounds that are right on the banks of the Hudson River...in fact, that photo i put in the blog a few days ago of the prayer stupa...well, it sits right on the hudson banks, with an astonishing view, and when winds blow off the River, the hundreds of prayer flags that adorn the stupa just gently flap in the breezes and make a beautiful sound...Wang Mo, a new young novitiate just out of the 3-year retreat, took us inside the stupa, where sits gorgeous and monumental statues of both the Buddha and Padmasambhava, (Guru Rinpoche) the Buddhist saint who brought the Dharma to Tibet...awesome, really...and we were able to actually sit meditation there for a while....i felt deeply moved and refreshed after that, and so so so peaceful. Grateful to Wang Mo...

And so we wend out way into yet another Autumn.
Summer 2007 is complete, though of course that is not actually so until the 21st of September or something like that...but, vacation is over, schools is back in session and isn't it time for a new lunchbox? And a spiffy new pencil case? And lots of new plaid clothing?

When I was little, I used to vomit before the first day of classes.......I imagine I was nervous: would they like me? was i good and smart enough? was it safe to venture beyond the familiar confines of home? I rarely vomit anymore...but the questions, of course, remain the same.
Don't they? We may know the answers, or think we do, but that does not stop us from wondering anyway. That's part of our nature too.