​This past weekend, I did several things for the first time in 18 months. I stepped out of my normal routines. I donned a mask and moved back into the germ-filled world. And it had a profoundly healing effect on my mind's health. 

If like me, you’ve been working at home for the past 18 months. If you live in a rural part of America. Or if like me, many of your family members live on other continents thousands of miles away, most of your human contact may have been reduced to screens in recent months. And perhaps like me, without quite realizing it, a great chunk of your common humanity has become electric, one dimensional, and disembodied. I don't know about you, but all this remote work, all this pandemic living, has got me feeling distinctly odd in recent weeks.

In which I experiment with a social media cleanse, fail miserably at it, then find the teaching within it. ​

It is the middle of January in the year 2021. There is a spring thaw, although of course it's an illusion and not yet spring. We're still in the middle of a deep Maine winter. It was simply a rain storm that swept in and caused the brook to flow with a spring-like energy. In a few days, that water will freeze over again.

And I don't know about you all, but I had to pull myself out of bed this morning. I sat drinking my morning tea and my mind felt rocky and rough and muddy. And mildly annoyed. I felt pushed into a corner. A bit like my elderly cat who jumped into a deep and empty bathtub early this morning and couldn't jump out again.

Today is NKT Day. It is a day to celebrate the founding of the New Kadampa Tradition, a remarkable Buddhist not-for-profit organization of which I am a part. ​I know it is this day because I was just sitting in the early morning light, on this first Saturday in April, sipping tea while the sun rose over the forest floor. I had flicked to Facebook, to see the wonderful Buddhist blogger Luna Kadampa share this news in my feed (the blog she wrote does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of this day.)  In honor of this, I wanted to share this poem below, something I scrawled in my notebook one early fall day. 

​Two weeks ago, at 5:15pm the day before Thanksgiving, my husband Tim had a major accident. For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you may have read what I posted the following morning:

I am grateful for the woman with the calm and kind voice on the 911 call, who told me what to do. ​

To the paramedics who appeared minutes later and carried Tim onto a stretcher, down rain-covered steps and into the ambulance. 

​It was Sunday afternoon, 13 August 2017. The afternoon light was falling over potted plants in my living room. I had spent four days away from my phone and laptop, walking through forests with my family who were visiting from the UK. I had kayaked in the ocean and remembered what it felt like to touch water, air, land. 
 
It was 4pm and I sat on the sofa in the now-quiet house, and flicked my iPhone awake. And there was the Facebook newsfeed. Protests of white supremacists marching in Virginia. Anger. Violence. The shock that hits you deep in your stomach. The horror of seeing humans hurt one another. ​I scrolled further, switching over to news outlets and learning the facts. But then something else appeared in my Facebook feed. Something so drastically different that it astounded me. 

I heard the news tonight as I stood in the kitchen of our tiny apartment in the West End of Portland, cleaning pots.

Terry Gross's voice cutting through the din of aluminum pans clanging, through the ceaseless flow of thoughts. She caught me mid-air as I moved to grab another one off the counter: "... Peter Matthiessen, who died this weekend." 

Time freezes. Like a bell cutting through the forest.

That feeling when you're out in the woods and you sense a great being in your midst. You sense his passing footsteps.

And because of this, you must stop. 

I pull up a stool at the kitchen table, slowly sink down and hold my face to the speakers. And the obituary plays out. 

This ancient tree stands across the street from our second floor apartment. It grows in the back garden of the Monastery of the Precious Blood. This historic building has been home to a cloistered community of Catholic nuns, who have lived here in prayer since 1934.

I live opposite the convent, and am one of the rare people who can look over their wooden fence. And it's truly like a secret garden in there, cut off from the busy world.

Their maple tree provides home to a community of crows and seems to be a timeless, motionless being in our midst. It listens to the musings of a community of nurses from Mercy Hospital who smoke under its shade. It fills my window with leaves and although we don't notice it most of the time, it is constantly changing. ​

​This time of year, that change becomes vivid, like fire. ​