​This morning, I sit and write and attempt to let the emotions of the past three days find alignment. So I can release them to the wind.How does one reconcile the terrorist attacks in Paris? How does one react to a world filled with this sort of pain? 

I want to recount my movements this past week. How daily life and dharma met. 

It began last week, when I was deep in preparation for a meditation retreat. As a volunteer in my local Buddhist center - our Maine branch, I was helping to lead a full-day retreat on Saturday November 14 called Tranquil Abiding - Buddha's astonishingly clear teachings on how to still the mind, to bring it to complete focus.

​The meditation we would be focusing on was called 'Equalizing Self and Other'.

​I was following my teacher, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's exquisite teachings in his books Joyful Path of Good Fortune and Eight Steps to Happiness. In this meditation, we use logic and reasoning to evoke a mind of love. ​I had been allowing this logic to touch my mind deeply in the lead-up to the retreat. Here it is quickly, in a nutshell: 

I first met Mei at a dim sum restaurant in Portland, Maine.

She came dressed in a funky Tibetan wool hat and handed me a photograph of one of her artworks, Tao Seeker (below). ​I was struck by this work, its searching, its journeying. 

It was October 2013 and Suzanne Fox and I had put on an event with the curator and translator Valerie Doran. A quiet legend, Valerie has worked alongside the likes of Johnson Chang Tsong-zung and played a seminal role in the emergence of the Chinese avant garde to the world in the early 90s. I had lured her up to this New England sea port to speak about 5,000 years of Chinese art history. 

At this lunch event, Mei Selvage appeared, her eyes wide with inspiration, telling me that she was an artist based here in Portland. It was almost like we had generated the entire event for her - so intensely did she respond to the themes of the talk. The two of us exchanged phone numbers and met up again the following month.

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. 

I walked yesterday through the West End of Portland, as a wild wind blew. It was a strangely warm day for early October and a full spectrum of red, crimson, and yellow leaves were spinning in circles. Pumpkins lay on doorsteps and there was this kind of funny, wild energy to the air.

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. ​