Living in Bali

In June, 2000 I did a thought exercise I read about somewhere:

The designer Milton Glaser assigned his students at the School of Visual Arts: design a perfect day for yourself five years from now.

I set myself down to do this in one nonstop session, the way I was keeping my journal in those days. The exercise caught my imagination as I wrote, and I am surprised, looking back, how it creates a whole community, an ideal civic order of cooperation and neighborliness. It was a life of no work and harmony on a sort of fantasy island, as I then thought of Bali - as a culture where the arts are sacred and pervade life. In that design, we lived in a sort of gated community where nothing evil could enter.

My fantasy began with a house with glass walls - such as I now live in. It sat in a small community of close neighbors - which I now live in. We are not on a beach, it's true, but on a woods, next best thing - our own little woods. What we "own" goes steeply down to the ravine.

We have come a long, long way since then, but it has not been an island paradise. Life has been punctuated with illness and deaths. Yet, as the poet Robert Frost said, "Earth's the right place for love." This life is what we have, complete with all that.

The photo I chose today marks one instructive event that took place two or three years ago. My grandson Otto was visiting, and Tom was gone. It was a pleasant summer day, warm and with no wind, and Otto and I were at the dining room table playing a board game, maybe "Life" (I'm not making that up) when we heard an odd sound I identified as a loud swooshing. My peripheral vision caught something happening to my right: a huge bouquet of leaves falling past the window to our right. We blinked, stood up and went to the window. The back yard was covered with green leaves springing out from a branch. A branch of the maple had broken off and fallen.

I remember that I just kept on saying, "Oh my God." Utterly astonished. It is interesting to think that it didn't seem to rattle Otto at all - maybe when you're seven years old, a whole lot of things are inexplicable and surprising. But he obediently went with me to inspect the back yard. The branch had not scraped a window or poked through a porch screen. Nothing was harmed. We circled the house, had to go across the street to see just where the branch had broken off, high in the tree.

There are moments when our conception of a safe, secure reality is torn apart, and we see the true nature of life - how a branch can tear off when there is no wind, no apparent disease in the tree. There are reasons somewhere, maybe in the unseen world, the 90% that scientists say our senses do not detect. Maybe the buddhas whose spirits are thought to be everywhere gathered to push that branch down just to break me out of my complacency and give me an amazing dharma lesson. But it is also true that organic life is complex, and birth always leads to death. And death is not necessarily announced. Again and again, it cuts through our belief that we have things in order.

Falling leaves

This morning I surprised myself by thinking up what I saw as a children's book about the exciting experience of one leaf, as it fell in autumn. I made it a sugar maple leaf, and could imagine the book being beautifully illustrated. It did not strike me as marketable.

The truth is, the children's books I like (I keep up with the award-winners) are not interested in dying, but in growing up. Some books deal with heroism and have lots of plot, meaningful interaction between forces for evil and good (Only You Can Save Mankind). Some deal with life's very small, very important problems, like fear of being totally out of it in kindergarten (Wemberly Worried). My story is about changing, aging, and dying: a leaf falls. It strikes me now that, sadly, there might be a need for children's books about accepting one's own death.

As we age, those of us lucky enough to be grandparents become opened to the joy of childhood, often with an inner freedom we never felt as kids. When we develop serious illnesses, we become opened, like it or not, to the fact that we are mortal. We are dying. This takes you through a very rocky, arid place, but it can lead outward, to the knowledge that each day is precious, each moment will never be seen again.

Autumn is advancing here, with frost at night. Today the giant sycamore at the corner of Henderson and High strode forth. As it loses leaves, its enormous white branches stand with great power against the sky, which is a certain shade of blue on this day. The various pines are suddenly (it seems) loaded with cones, some smaller than my thumbnail, some longer than my hand. The leaves in the ravine, unspoiled by rain, are drifting down the hillsides, and filling almost-dry Adena Brook with gold.

Looking over the ravine from my back yard, I see there is not as much orange as in the photo above, which I took when we bought the house. That exact autumn will never be repeated, though if you look closely you will see the stone meditation bench, not visibly changed, and near the left edge, the tiny, patient figure of St. Francis with birds.