all the leaves are brown

I returned to the Palisades online gathering of people Monday morning. My longtime friend Keith, who I met in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod in 2007, had sent me an invitation to Sunday’s group – folks he spends time with regularly. Sunday, doing nothing other than being a witness to all that emotion, and I felt the need to return. These next four mornings I’ll be off to work.

After yesterday’s group I did the normal things of driving to OB to fill the Camry’s gas tank, strolling down Newport Ave to buy a container of Tums, finding a closer space to park and linger by the Pacific Ocean a while. The waves were lovely, and surfers were making the best of it. Here’s a picture I snapped.

Sunday morning in the Zen Koan group I often attend, this week after the first Palisades meeting, the teacher John Tarrant said that more than one billion animals were killed in the great Australian fires. Fortunately I can make out sea birds in the above photo.

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. — Rainer Maria Rilke