This morning the little wild birds didn’t arrive behind my house to partake of all the seed I lovingly put in the feeders, and right away I felt that things were amiss.  I have been spending a lot of time in my office these days and I was used to them swooping in and out, chirping, sparring with one another in the air.  My little wild companions blessing me with their beauty…  Why didn’t they come?  I was clearly taking it personally.  I chose to look further into this mysterious relationship in the hopes they’d return as I wrote.

I can’t remember when I first knew that I was fascinated with birds.  Was it back in the days when my grandmother took me to the duck pond at the Palace of Fine Arts, when I was 6 or 7, and I watched the fat glossy ducks snap up our stale bread, or was it later on in childhood when I saw all the white seagulls congregating on the beach as we feasted on a picnic lunch, or later when I picked up a mangled dead bird off the ground that my cat had teased and killed, her feathers all wet and withered?  Maybe it was when I saw egrets, flamingos, blue footed boobies, and ostriches on some of my trips to far flung places.  

When I learned that birds were descended from the dinosaurs, I was thrilled at the improbability of it:  these tiny delicate feathered beings are related to the tyrannosaurus and other megalithic creatures that traveled mainly on land.  I looked at them differently, I wondered about how they moved the way they did.  How did the animal that lives in the sky have a dinosaur as an ancestor?  How does an animal fly?  Magic comes to mind.  We can never know this.

That’s another thing I feel about birds: they manifest magic.  They sing like no other creature and they fly.  They tend their nests with the tiny pearly white eggs, they feed their young, and dedicate their lives to survival, pure and simple.  And then there are those amazing feathers.  Not just the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, with their brilliant green and red outfits, but even the common little goldfinch, whose yellow coat screams neon sunlight …  the red wing blackbirds that visit my house at the beach – their blacker than black feathers pierced with shocking red streaks at their wings.   How did this all happen?  Birds get to be beautiful just because they are born into a family – they are endowed with beauty - and humans have to go out and buy fancy brilliant clothes to make themselves beautiful.

Birds are comical too.  Just look at the pelican, the huge pouch hanging from his beak, his strutting on land or dive-bombing into the water to feed…  Or the little snowy plovers who skitter along the wet sand as the ocean recedes, as though practicing for a dance routine … or the blue jay who looks ever ready for an argument somehow, with cocked head and piercing eyes.  The magpie is another theatrical personality in the bird world:  he has a swagger about him, he is crafty, as he steals shiny objects or eggs for his own nest.  You forgive him his thievery because his iridescent feathers – brilliant blue and green blended into black, with tuxedo white accents - dress him up so beautifully.

I was named for the magpie.  The why of this is inexplicable to me, as my mother had never before seen a magpie. So, why did she choose this name?  All I can come up with is that she liked the sound of it, or perhaps she had learned somewhere that magpies were extraordinarily smart like their relatives the crows and ravens, and she was sure her daughter would be too.  When I lived in northern New Mexico I got to know these birds well and I fell for them.  They were clever, funny, and elegant.  I never saw them as mean-spirited and cruel.  I watched transfixed as a magpie or two teased my haughty black and white cat on the prowl outside our home.  The cat didn’t have a chance with these birds.

I have been courting hummingbirds for some time now with minimal success.  I have a good friend who travels the world to watch hummingbirds in their habitats and photograph them.  Catching this bird whose wings work at the speed of electricity seems implausible to me, but he is a driven person.  I understand the compulsion, for I have purchased and put up more little feeders for these elusive creatures than I’d like to admit.  I’ve learned the key times to expect them to show up (morning and very late afternoon), and I have also figured out that you don’t need a fancy feeder.  Nice colorful flowers are often a good draw.  But I believe it boils down to being lucky and very, very patient.  If you’re outside and quiet, you can sometimes hear them clicking at you, and feel the whirr of their wings as they dart past you.  They never linger, so you must continue to be patient.   

The most elusive and mysterious of creatures captivate us, they compel us to find and record them in some way.  It’s that “hard to get” thing maybe…  Even domestic cats can be that way:  marching to their own secret tune.  Birds of all kinds, whether they’re little house finches, wild parrots, or red wing blackbirds, lowly pigeons, noisy crows, or indifferent seagulls, live and survive through extraordinary efforts, and they’re not members of the human society.   They delight us when they visit for a just a little while, and then they recede effortlessly into vast air space.

They’re in bird world, and they’re free; we never know when they’ll come and how long they’ll stay.

Yesterday I killed two crabs as I tossed them into boiling water so that I could eat the succulent sweet white meat for my solitary dinner.  I felt a bit like the executioner of these strange snapping, flailing creatures hauled in from the cold waters of Bodega Bay  (and lusted after by so many during this winter season).  The only way I could manage this was to stay right in the moment with them, watching their shiny wet bodies dripping with salt water and frantically clawing at the air, thank them for their lives and then let them go, watching as their bodies turned from dark brown and twitching to pinkish red and quite dead in the cooking pot. Many of us eat animals without pausing to envision the moment of their deaths, that instant when they go from alive and vital to lifeless.  When I realized that the only way I was going to be able to savor the local crab on this New Years weekend was to cook it myself, I saw that I had a great opportunity both to face the reality of consuming living creatures head on, and to send the particular living being(s) off with great thanks and a prayer.  It’s true that I’ve never seen myself as someone who chooses to kill animals, but it is also true that I frequently eat animals that have been killed.  So, it was time to get real, be thankful, and do the deed.  After I carefully washed and cleaned the cooked crab bodies, I felt both sad and strangely satisfied...  Sad that I had been the instrument of death, and satisfied that I had looked death in the face and been able to breathe freely and not be frightened or disgusted.

Last night I very slowly cracked the pink shells, and pulled out the perfectly white meat and dipped it into melted butter laced with lemon.  I thought again of the crab whose body had to be pushed down into the boiling water, who had once been minding his own business in the ocean, just trying to make it from day to day.  A wave of gratitude came over me that I was allowed to feast on this sweet, delicate meat, the tangy flavor of ocean just barely identifiable as I ate.

Everything had unfolded as it should — mindfully and with reverence.  I now know exactly how it feels to perform this act, and it really isn’t terrifying.  There are no shrieks or screams of terror...  It is all about life that comes and goes, and about how we all need to feed ourselves in order to live.  The closer you get to what is in front of you, the more intimate and profound it is.  The Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico chant prayers to the deer and the elk before they shoot them, and they then consume every bit of the animal, including fur and skin.  I thought of the Indians as I cooked my crab, remembering how it made me feel when I first learned that many years ago; it allowed me to see hunting and killing animals for food in a completely new way:  normal ...not violent or evil.

Intention is everything.  And respect for life in all forms.

I think this meal of crab may have been one of the most reverent and delicious I have ever had.

I pondered a question recently that invited me to identify a word or two that shows up a lot in my writing and do a riff on that word.   The first word to emerge was "unspeakable," which many assume conjures up something dark and dire and frightening.   I must admit that I have fallen back on this adjective when I simply can't figure out how to frame or describe something, but that something isn't always horrifying and sad.  It can be something ineffably beautiful and good. Looking at the dark side for a moment, I'd have to say that unspeakable includes genocide and ravaging in many countries of Africa, the rampant dishonesty of this country's politicians who are driven by greed and ignorance, the dysfunction and cruelty of our President, the long standing pattern of patriarchal abuse of women, the ravaging of our landscape by hurricanes and terrifying fires, the propensity of law enforcement to kill black people, the plight of Syrian and Rohingya refugees, child pornography and sex trafficking, abuse of those incarcerated in our overcrowded jails, mass shootings that are becoming more and more frequent .... I think I'll stop there.   One of the reasons I get a headache and feel my hair is about to catch fire these days is that I watch too much news, I consume too much information that is laced with cruelty and horror, and I forget to veer toward balance and peace.  It's easy, isn't it, because this culture is drenched in media output?  Everywhere we turn, there is some new horror story to listen to.  When Northern California was being swept by wildfires recently I remember feeling that I too was burning up, and I couldn't even find the right words to speak about my suffering.  All I knew was that it was suffering.

And then I was saved by the meditation cushion and the wisdom of the Buddha.  I remembered these lyrical words used in one of his teachings: "The Ten Thousand Joys and Ten Thousand Sorrows."  There is beauty and sweetness and love in this life that is also unspeakable.  I am thinking of the face of a young deer wandering the retreat grounds whose coal black eyes gazed out at the world with trust, the sound of a roomful of people chanting in harmony the lovingkindness sutta and filling the hall with warmth and peace, the hug of a grandson or a daughter, the exquisite blurry form of the hummingbird coming to find nectar right outside my window, the sound of a Bach variation on my piano that conjures the composer's giant loving heart and his trust in God, a painting by Matisse that dances wildly with color and his heartfelt dedication to making beauty, San Francisco's blue bay shimmering in early morning light as the beloved Golden Gate bridge stands proud, all the supposedly average citizens who open their hearts and homes to those who had to flee disaster and destruction, the thousands of dedicated souls who put their lives in danger for Doctors without Borders in terrifying situations around the world, all the journalists who are daring enough to always tell the truth no matter what the consequences, and the teachers in this world who give their hearts and minds to young students so that they may experience the joys of an open mind ... There is certainly a lot more.  So, my prescription for myself and others like me who are trying to navigate in the realm of dark unspeakable things is to invite in all the acts of indescribable beauty and kindness and allow them a seat at our table.

Rumi's remarkable poem The Guest House offers this :   "This being human is a guest house.  Every morning a new arrival...............Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.  He may be clearing you out for some new delight."   Talk about unspeakable -- this poem really captures it all!

The dark and dishonorable will be showing up in this life without fail along with the stunning, peaceful, and the loving.  We must continue to speak out our truth from deep inside ourselves, no matter how "unspeakable" and impossible things feel.  Grope around and find our words and offer them up.  They will show others who we are and what we value.  And hopefully this stream of words will continue to connect us and help us reject the fear and have faith in the human spirit which carries innate kindness, goodness, love.

I stayed up late into the night on Thanksgiving talking to my youngest daughter about my life, and in that magical and timeless window looking into her affectionate eyes, I realized that my 72 years have been filled with a wonderful array of opportunities, adventures, and discoveries.  I felt so inspired by this awareness that by the time I staggered off to bed at 1am I wasn’t even sure I was tired enough for sleep.   Yes, this has been – and is – a life of substance and love, one that often unfolded unconventionally, but a significant journey nevertheless.

I have spent too much time in my life bemoaning the loss of love from my mother, the absence of intimacy as I find myself incontrovertibly single, and the abandoning of a teaching career that seemed to mean the world to me … Writing my memoir entitled Bowing to Elephants for over two years forced me to focus, and sometimes wallow, on loss of a sense of self, loss of love, and endless yearning to find safety in the world.  Writing a personal narrative is intense, and in order to make it the best of all possible books you must persevere like a dog with a bone, continually peeling away the layers of comfortable and familiar information until you arrive at the painful (and beautiful) heart of your story.  Once I felt my memoir was ready for the outside world, I set about trying to find a publisher for it.  Then came a test of my determination — could I continue to offer this quirky intimate story and face the endless rejections that came?  The answer is yes, oddly enough.  I seem to have put on a new hat now, that of spokesperson for a piece of work that I think is wonderful and will move people’s hearts.

The reason this book will move people’s hearts, I believe, is that it is a lot about finding love – for yourself and for others.  It is about stepping back and seeing the breadth of a life:  the travels around the world searching for beauty and truth, struggling to reconcile with the eccentric selfish soul of a mother, the adoration of a grandmother who had love coming from every pore, the courage to develop my heart and mind as a piano player, a student of literature, a writer, then becoming a mother at a very young age and feeling lost, losing deep love more than once… and finally it is about finding inside the love of humankind in the Buddhist teachings that would free me to touch  kindness and know myself profoundly in any given moment.

I believe that the “substance” of a life springs from the numbers of mindful connections you make with your fellow beings.  And my connections are many.  There was a great French lady who taught me piano when I was 8, a friend who first looked me in the eyes at age 4 and has stayed in my life ever since, a woman who taught first grade to my daughter and showed me the brilliance and joy of being a teacher, a young Italian man who played his guitar for me when I was 14 and made me believe in love for the very first time, my grandmother whose gentle care kept me safe when my mother couldn’t handle the job, a Buddha-like teacher who showed me the joys of service, and all the people who have opened doors for me – to museums, restaurants, bookstores, and such.  The cast of characters is vast, and from all of these encounters, I learned about myself.  I learned I was smart, loved communicating and making things with my hands, adored eating and reading, and playing Bach on the piano, that I had a true and loyal heart, was a good hugger, and was always inspired by beauty.  As I write this, I see a rainbow of colors spraying outward like fireworks, and then weaving back in with one another.  These colors symbolize those I have been touched by and have touched.  I smile and know that those stories I spun for my daughter the other night are inspiring, heartbreaking, and funny — they speak of a full, meaningful life.  The meaning lives in the loving connections.

When I worked in hospice care as a volunteer, we often reflected on the rituals that would most help those who were dying.  Letting go, life reviews and such…  One question kept coming up for both those in the bed and ourselves:  have I lived (loved) well?  For, if you can look back and see your canvas colored by loving connections and kindness,  you can then say, “I have lived well.”

Let this be so.  For myself, and for all beings.

I have been around the world this summer, it feels like, and have returned to my comfortable little nest on White Street a changed person.  I not only looked into hundreds of weathered elephant faces, but have had the remarkable opportunity to look a mountain gorilla in the eyes. Today is World Elephant Day, they say, and to honor these most wise and remarkable mammals, I want to try to describe what it feels like to feel the boundaries between man and beast fade away.  My family and I journeyed to Africa, specifically to Rwanda  and Kenya.  In Rwanda we trekked ever upward through bamboo forests to witness the gorilla family of Pablo.  It was a grueling journey, wet and misty and slippery and steep.  I was carried in a stretcher because I couldn't manage the rigors of the climb.  I struggled with my self image and my pride and all that, and I soon figured out that a wildly unique experience lay ahead of me if I could just forget my frailties for a day.  After hours of marching uphill, we met up with our three trackers who took us to the secluded grove where the family of about 8 black mountain gorillas was spending their morning.  Mothers, young ones, a tiny baby clutching her mother, and two huge silverback males who strutted, grunted, and stayed ever watchful.  We were within about eight feet of these formidable yet gentle animals, and they paid us no mind.  We took picture after picture, we silently "oohed" and "aahed" as we watched them eat the beautiful bright green leaves, groom one another, and take a morning siesta. There was a moment when I pointed my 600 mm zoom at one large female - she was looking right at me - and when I put my eyes to the camera, her face took my breath away.  She was staring me down, calmly and peacefully.  I took away the camera and looked again.  What I saw in front of me was a human face, giant and soft and black and soulful.  Just looking.  My heart pounded.  Not from fear, but a sort of joy that the layers of defense between myself and those wild beings had temporarily fallen away.  Our beloved guide, Julius, when I asked him just what these animals feel and think when they stare back at our faces, said, "they see something very familiar."

The first time I had that kind of experience was my first visit to Kenya in the late 90's when I stood in a Land Rover having a staring contest with a huge elephant matriarch.  She had approached our vehicle, and then stood her ground, simply watching us.  Curious, and wary.  When I caught her gaze I felt witnessed by another living being, and I ceased to feel definitively or uniquely human.  There was a lightness in my body, a transparency, and a wildly beating heart that kept affirming that we were all safe and sound, that we were all really in the same place with nothing to fear.  The eyes of an elephant are framed by exquisite feathery lashes and they look timeless, so ancient and so in the moment.  As I write in my memoir, appropriately titles Bowing to Elephants, this single moment of recognition marked the beginning of my lifelong romance with the elephant.

I have returned to Kenya twice since that time, always to be witness to the elephant.  You see, I have feared for this animal's survival -- and rightly so.  This ancient beast has been brutally murdered in obscene numbers over the decades so that certain people can carve their tusks and create precious marketable objects.  There was talk earlier on that the elephant might become truly endangered, that there might be a time when this wisest of mammals wouldn't walk the earth anymore.  The outcry against this has been powerful and passionate, with people and organizations from all over the world working hard to bring this travesty to people's consciousness, and there is now the sense, I believe, that some profound lesson has been learned.  The ivory market may very well collapse, and with that the killing...

Something else happened to me this summer in Africa that is quite beautiful.  I began to witness the living beings around me more fully, looking people whom I didn't know in the eye and extending my goodwill.  When I saw this unfolding, I saw I was being changed in a subtle way.  I could touch people with my eyes and my voice, and I no longer felt the ache of isolation that had plagued me in recent months.  When I came home I continued this practice of connecting -- talking to drivers, to people in restaurants, to those who served me my food, who bagged my groceries, those who swept the floors and cleaned bathrooms.  I no longer want to be in the habit of making my fellow human beings invisible.

I bow to the gorillas and to the magnificent elephants of Africa for showing me how much a part of the mammal family I am.  We need one another in order to understand safety and to co-regulate.  In Rwanda and in Kenya I felt this deeply, and the memory of those wise faces remains in my mind and heart now in urban San Francisco, as I greet other beings and hopefully remind them that we are in this struggle of being alive together.

A few weeks ago I received a brand new 7/8 cello that arrived in a tall box that could have accommodated an average size human being, I thought.  So, you might ask, why a cello?  Why now?  I have been a piano player much of my life, and found my home at the ivory keyboard, as I plugged away at Bach's music and thought about my beloved grandmother and all the mysteries of her life before I came into the world... This WHY is haunting me for some reason, and I want to reflect on what drove me to do this - again.  You see, I purchased a cello impulsively many years ago after being at the Carmel Bach Festival and becoming enchanted with the chamber music events in the little church on Dolores Street.  I remember being particularly fixated on the cello player, a young woman who had refined facial features, short dark hair, long white fingers, and an oh-so-serious look on her face.  So, I bought a used cello and took it home.  I then found a young teacher, and I tried like crazy to figure out how to wrap my arms around (literally) this formidable instrument and extract sounds from it that reminded remotely me of Yo Yo Ma and Bach's Cello Suites.  I had fallen in love with all that years before.  I gave it about six months or so, I think, and then admitted defeat.  I couldn't make my little hand hold the bow properly so it could glide evenly and firmly over the strings.  Best return to the piano, I said to myself.   At least I knew the territory there and could move my fingers properly over the keys and with enough perseverance play a beautiful variation by Bach.  I didn't feel embarrassed or ashamed, I simply felt that it was no use making myself suffer over something that was obviously an uphill climb for both my physical and mental body.

So then, what happened exactly?  Was it that I saw Yo Yo Ma again at the Greek theater and marveled at his genius (once again) this spring on a beautiful sunny afternoon with a good friend?  Was it that I kept seeking out a sight of the principal cellist at the symphony - a mature meditative woman - hoping to see exactly how she held that beautiful bow?  Or that every time I hear the cello when listening to my classical music station, I feel my heart literally melting inside?  These are all plausible reasons, but I think the real reason is that I want to challenge my mind - again.  I want to exercise it, forge new neural pathways (they say meditation also does that!).  I am getting older and older as the days pass, and one of the things that sends chills through me is that possibility of losing my mind.  Senility, dementia ... these are both words that fill  me with terror.  A guy I used to live with said once that if he were found to be facing Alzheimer's, I should take him out and shoot him.  I think many of us as we become elders (currently preferring this to "getting older") come to realize that even a well-educated and beloved brain is subject to deterioration, a fraying around the edges OR worse, and that what we must do is give it lovingkindness and deep respect, and perhaps a little exercise!  And because life is inherently uncertain, we need not take any of it for granted.  And this means not waiting to do something helpful for ourselves.

Is trying to learn the cello at the age of 72 "helpful"?   I'm not sure, but I do have this abiding hunch that my brain is asking to be stimulated.  I have always loved feeding it, I must admit, and was an avid student much of my life.  And when I rattle off insights and learning from my past, whether it's about James Joyce,  Dante, or Bach, or the cultures of foreign lands, I feel happy and energized.  And I forget how old I am.  I inspire myself once again.  I have been reading a lot in the last few years, but mainly as a form of research for my memoir (now finished) -- reading memoirs like crazy and becoming inspired at how many different ways one can dig into memory and tell a story. But now I want to read different things.  I want to read Shakespeare again, and have even started with King Lear; I want to read The Better Angels of our Nature by a writer called Pinker about how the volume of violence in the world has actually decreased in modern times, despite what we see on the news and read in the paper.  I want to re-read Flaubert, and go searching sacred literature for the life-affirming beauty of Hafiz and Rumi.  And there's a book on the elephants' capacity for communication that I'm now reverently perusing.   It's all about feeding the mind... There clearly is not enough time to read all that we think we want to read, but you have to start somewhere, don't you?

And so I start with the cello, again.  I am going to sit down this week and try to get to know this beautiful shiny instrument hand crafted in the midwest and sent to me by some stringed instrument artisans.  Before I approach another teacher, I am going to start to make friends with this daunting instrument that emits such achingly beautiful deep tones, and some say, is more like the human voice than any other instrument.

Maybe my old brain wants to be sung to, who knows... and just maybe I can get this instrument to do some singing.

"Come, let's spread flower petals and fill cups with red wine,

Unlace the roof of the sky and fashion a new world."    -------   HAFIZ

And why not, I ask?