Thaw

Today I worked from home and, because the office is still a pencil-eraser-sized camera wherever you are, at lunch I walked our dog down in the woods to the logging tarp-shack for lunch.

The road was mostly impassable for the last several days, and various combinations of our family members reminisced as we walked up and down the muddy hill, several times each day and a couple of times at night.

In 1997 I saw a Subaru sunk in the middle of Moscow Woods Road in Calais twelve inches above the rocker panels and the next day we stayed home instead of trying to travel down those roads.

I remember bouncing out to the Family Program at Shao Shan Temple through the mud inside a van full of our unhappy children who wanted nothing less than to go there, which is in itself a question of Buddhism.

Then the guest at the Family Program told us his story of surviving the 2011 Tsunami in Japan, and how now he doesn’t care if children spill milk on the laptop.

Another time, after a great celebration at the temple, the visiting monks smoked cigarettes at the end of the temple driveway. Another time, Taihaku unexpectedly died.

Chances to look at our situations from different perspectives are all around us; sometimes subtle, faint, sometimes intrusive or disrupting, but ever present. We freeze and thaw to them like mud.