like a cup of tea

i am so glad that all of you have made comments here.  There was a comment about tranquility, and how one searches to find it. I have discovered in my experience that tranquility is something you create...like a cup of tea, or a pair of mittens.  Silence. 

 We are all in need of this creation in our lives, but what i am getting at with the original post is that fury, and grief are everpresent.  The hurricane in Galveston is full of these things, but the spirit of the zen master is as well...just like the stars, we are dizzied wheels of furious action.  I do not hold the word "fury" to any connotation here, it is not seen as negative in my heart.  

Even the most loving, tender exchanges in the world, especially between people, are filled with fury...flurry...fury...chaos.  If you bend to kiss your child, the storm of energy that exists in that exchange has enough power to bend time if you wanted it to.  

A disscussion of language with that awareness, with that intensity is what i hope rises to surface of the lake of our work....bubbling and churning, dangerous and intoxicating.

There is a long tradition in this world, the indigenous claim it goes back beyond pre-history...a tradition of people who seek power stealing away with the language of the people they seek to rule. 

We see this in the way the eager Europeans divided the children of the Native Americans, stripping their language and the sounds of their language from them. It has happened across the world, and now....the pendulum swings...the very people who seek your approval for power, are slowly snatching the language away from your children....from our children.

the work that stares us down in this time bears a daunting glare.  Not only must we preserve what we have, but we must go back and discover as much as we can of what has been lost, and for this we have to listen to the natural world. we have to become fluent in the verse that the ancients hid in the waters, in the wind, in the leaves, and in the soil.  whenever we drink, we are ingesting a music that we can barely hear.  whenever we sleep we are lying in a symphony of such dimension, the milky way galaxy is green with envy...

W.S. Merwin wrote in his collection, The Rain In The Trees, " i want to tell what the forests / were like / I shall have to speak / in a forgotten language."