I don’t mind the quirks of the calendar that have me going up to Wilbur only a couple of weekends after my previous visit – except for having to lean on my friends and benefactors more regularly for use of a car… Looking at the forecast for the weekend, I packed for the rain rather […]
After the rains, it has been clear and milder on the whole. I drove up to Wilbur on Friday, taking my time in the old van, under blue skies, with glimpses of snowy peaks off to the east, and a couple not far north of Wilbur as well. Just a month after the solstice, the […]
I am not much of a one for harbouring end-of-times thoughts, unless I stop too long to think about the fate of the planet through climate change, but it has certainly been a strange year so far. On Wednesday, in the early hours, there was a small earthquake in the Bay Area – enough to […]
Since I had a lot of free time over the Christmas and New Year period, I had anticipated getting a lot of exercise – of course it did not turn out like that. First of all I spent a couple of days at a friend’s house, with neither bike nor running shoes, and the weather […]
On Friday I was teaching on the Peninsula in the morning, before heading up to Wilbur. There were banks of clouds massing low in the sky, moving steadily up from the south. Arriving a little early, I had the chance to be by the water for a few moments, watching these huge rolling layers. During […]
Wilbur was entirely autumnal last weekend. Rain having passed through, there was a serene clarity to the low sunlight, and a sense – which came to me as I walked down the road on Saturday morning just as the sun was coming up – of moving gently through the stillness of nature. It was a […]
Rain arrived as forecast on Wednesday, and it felt like a deliverance. The air was markedly different, adding an extra depth to the sense of freshness that rain can bring. I was reminded of this time of year at Tassajara, sitting in the zendo, and hearing the first rain of the winter falling, first as […]
