It is difficult to remember what month it is . Weather leapfrogs then reverts, circles, ages, jumps from hiding, crawls down hole in ground.
Ok, it is May. The rains came late. Basement sump pump woke from slumber and picks up as if half a year was half an hour ago. Sweet green stepped from hiding. Tiny umbrella clusters of budding leaves peek from popping bud, wriggle free, open, straighten out, and swell in rainfall mixed with reluctant sunfall. Everywhere it is spring! Mice are ambivalent about returning to outdoors.
Saskia finally returns to Maine after what seems (to her) like eons of sorting, packing, ridding, remembering, and brother-sistering her parents family home in Massachusetts. The tarped final trailer load is in the dooryard neatly wrapped and waiting as skeptical barn looks out as if sated stomach were to say, "That's going...where?"
We are back in the meditation cabin for practice. Quaker Meeting will migrate to Vesper Hill Chapel in Rockport come June. A potential reception of a yurt begins to scout out southwest direction for doorway and proposed deck up by brook. Black-flies are uncertain the surprising drops in temperature are finished. They hold caucuses whether to tea-party passersby but cannot (yet) come to consensus.
There were 22 of us at final class of East Asian Philosophy at hermitage. We did a thorough practice before small circle discussions and wider circle completion in wohnküche. Saskia's soups and hazelnut cake sealed the metta and metaphor of the evening.
You can hear lawn mowers. Winter tires wonder if it is safe to crawl into white plastic for their rest. Barn knows nesting rafters will fill with phoebes and bats. Empty bird feeders lay on side outside barn on kindling box as straggling birds come by like scouting parties to verify it is not a temporary lapse of attention, but the end of sunflower seed for the season. They fly off to mountain trees and bushes to renew foraging skills passing grumbling grey and red squirrels complaining the loss of cracker barrel gathering place that beckoned them the last two months.
Cody, the big German Shepherd, knows he is here for good. He contemplates adjusting his modus operandi to befit a place of sequestering stillness. Rokie likes having his cousin around. They are good together.
Meetingbrook considers gratefulness, hospitality, study, and spirit worthy considerations and attends as best it can to their practice and conversation.
Flannel clothing, heavy coats, gloves and scarves, all grow accustomed to hooks and hangers in foyer.
It is spring!
For now.
With love,
All are blest
Peace, and what is, good!
and all who grace Meetingbrook
11May2012
