HOW DO I LIVE BY THAT STORY? WHAT IS ITS 'MORAL' FOR ME?

Well, I've been digging around the roots of one of my old novels, many years in the making ( I am now an old woman and it hasn't even been published (the treasure!) yet); I am totally plugged into it, the way the young man must have been, eagerly, to find the treasure. I now see surveying my land that the work on it, that has given me such passionate involvement, that has kept boredom at bay, allowed me to look at my life in a new sort of way, is the treasure. How often, no, always, the doing itself is the reward.

A LOVELY LITTLE STORY, ONE TO LIVE BY

I don't even know where I read it. If you do, please let me know! Here it is with some embellishments I can't avoid.

A father, on his deathbed, tells his son that he has buried a treasure near the roots of one of the apple trees in their apple orchard. He tells him, dig in a circle near the roots, but do not harm them. After his father's death, after an appropriate period of mourning, the son systematically began to dig around the many, many apple trees in their orchard; so many, in fact, that by the time he had hug around all of them, he was an old man. He found nothing, and after digging around the last tree, he went home, rather disappointed. He climbed the steps to his house -- by now a mansion instead of the shack he had lived in with his father -- to the upstairs story and sat down by a window, dejected and a bit angry at his father for putting him through all that labor for nothing.

He looked far into the distance and couldn't see the end of his land. The original apple trees had yielded  so abundantly that he had been able to buy more and more land to add to his own and plant more and more fruit trees. But looking at the original orchard, he saw that the trees were healthy, strong, and laden, as usual with their abundance. He realized in a flash what his father had meant: the trees were the treasure, and taking care of them by aerating the roots was the means to get it!

I AM THE SLAVE OF SOMEONE CALLED KAMLA KAPUR

Yesterday, as I was air drying all my Cashmere sweaters to kill the mold, I said to myself: I am the slave of someone called Kamla Kapur. She likes to buy stuff and then I have to take care of it. At first I wanted to rebel and stop being a slave. That didn’t quite feel right. What? Give away all the sweaters? They are pretty and keep her warm, too. I am bound to her with my flesh. She already knows how hard it is getting for me as I age to take care of her stuff, and is buying less. Well, that is all I need from her – this consideration for and awareness of my flagging energies. And since some stuff is necessary for life, I will devote myself to taking care of it, for her. So this morning when I was wondering what there was to do – I reach such points during the day when the body wants to move and feel ‘productive,’ – I said to myself, let me be her slave for a few hours. Since I have to be one – who was it who said in MOBY DICK, ‘who ain’t a slave’? – why not do it consciously? She is indeed very appreciative and grateful, and quite willing to lessen my loads.   

SIT BACK, RELAX, WATCH AND ENGAGE

Back to the thought – one only needs one reason to be happy – being alive. We can sit back, relax, watch God’s ever-playing show outside the window, or inside the amphitheater of the soul: our various, infinite, perhaps, selves that come, enact their scenes and dialogues, and go, into the wings, or the green rooms, or to beds to sleep, or to chairs to watch the inner and outer drama, and return to play yet another scene. Acting, as well as retiring, watching, as well as playing and participating, is their purpose. 

WHEN LIFE BECOMES A GRIND, DO ONE THING NEW EACH DAY

Take a different path on your walk; wear something new from your closet; eat something different; vary your routine, jumble it up. Buy a plant if you live in an apartment. Tend to a plant if you have one already. Plants give back so much more than they take! Visit a garden near your home and sit in the sun; come, come, walk on the beach! Skip a little as you walk, just a little wiggle is enough. wake up in the morning, fling your arms in the air and shout, yeaaaaaaaaah! I am alive!

A WINDOW IS ENOUGH FOR ADORATION

Standing in the kitchen this morning I felt excitement was missing from my life, and instantly a voice said, there is only one reason for happiness – being alive. When you are alive, everything is possible. I am doing something entirely new from the last several months – sitting in bed with a hot water bottle, my laptop, and looking at the brightening day outside, sunshine on the bark of the canary pine tree, on the pine needles, the broad green leaf with a brown underside of the Magnolia with its spiky seed pods with bright red seeds that the mocking bird loves. Over on the ocean the flitter of white wings, not constant, but teasing in its beauty. What a window we have been given into the world. No, windows. A plethora of them. How little one needs of nature (compared with its vastness), just a picture frame worth of images moving, sometimes like clouds on a windless day, but moving, nevertheless, and never the same, to be in touch with it! To admire and adore.

DON'T MAKE DEPRESSION OR UNHAPPINESS A HABIT. MOVE ON

Okay, it’s time to move on. You have stayed in this space too long already and if you stay any longer, you will damage and/or destroy yourself. So what if your only dream has failed? So what if all the connections you make fall apart before your eyes? So what? Don’t look at the knot. Look at the whole yarn of which knots are a part. Cut it if you can’t untie it, splice it and move on. So what if you find yourself in an inextricable maze? Fly above it, see how you keep going over and over the same small territory like a fool. Time to break out! Fling it all away, scatter it, let the festering dream flow away in the wind. Know, there is nothing to hold up, no one to full down. Be like a house whose windows and doors are always flung wide open so the breeze and the wind comes and goes without hurting anything. No, be like the breeze and the wind, dying down sometimes, but indestructible.