Animals

For their trust, their faithfulness, their ingenuity, their affection, and their intelligence, among many endearing qualities. May they all be safe and loved. This is Nike, the first lost traveler who arrived in my back yard a few years ago. He is very sweet though he gets in more outdoor scraps than any of the others (which I somehow never see). He sleeps with his buddy, Hunter, a stuffed tiger, of which he is very fond. Sunday mornings they can always be found together.

Babies

I loved having babies. My two were born in 1965 and 1968, when I was a wacked out young flower child in the Haight-Ashbury. They were both 2 weeks overdue weighing in at 9lbs11oz and 10lbs2oz. I had a crash course in childbirth breathing stuff during the first labor, but was awake for both. I was physically healthy and so were they, thank god. My favorite part of them was the back of their necks. Nursed them both well past a year. I got to experience babyhood again when my grandchildren were born 12 and 8 years ago. There's just nothing like having an infant fall asleep on your chest with their fuzzy little head under your chin. Best of all though is watching them watch the world with fresh eyes. Don't you wish we could all get that back for a minute - maybe just on Sundays?

Cameron

My first grandchild is 12 now and entering adolescence, but he remains a symbol to me of the joy that grandparents experience to be allowed to return one last time to the wonder of childhood in the company of their own flesh and blood. I decided by the time Cameron was two that I wanted to spend every Saturday with him (and later his sister, Sierra, who is now 8). I found him a Saturday friend, a little boy his age who lived across the street from me, and together the three of us had many grand adventures, in all seasons over the past 10 years. The friend has moved away, and now that parent dynamics have changed I see him more like every other Saturday, but I know I helped play a small role in the fine, bright, shiny young person he has become.

I just went out and snapped this photo from my back porch at 6:15 am in Portland, Oregon. It's officially spring now and it's my favorite kind of dawn, Sunday morning dawn. Dawn is kind of like New Year's Day. You get to start fresh. There are no grating motor noises yet, most people are enjoying sleeping in if it's the weekend, and you can actually hear the birds making those waking up sounds - little fluttering cheeping rubbing their eyes with their feathers sounds. You can imagine that today in your life you will be a good person, you won't hurt anybody (at least not intentionally), you might get to hug someone, and maybe there will be good news in the world. You start forth with hope.

Eating

This is a very dicey subject for me and many people. We have become a nation of overeaters, it would seem, and eating is a truly difficult addiction to treat, as one cannot simply stop eating like one can stop drinking alcohol or taking drugs. Apparently, we are a nation in need of comfort and food is one way to attempt to get it. On the other side of this coin is the fact that eating within healthy boundaries is a requirement for a healthy soul and body. It is also intertwined with so many lovely experiences in life - the preparation and tasting of food we have grown ourselves in our own gardens, the sharing of a simple meal with a friend, the first meal with a new lover, the holiday gathering of families around dinner tables, the experience of tasting a new cuisine in a foreign country or in our own. And there is always the awareness that while we eat for whatever reasons many in our world are starving. We may also be aware that some of the food we eat was produced by animals who were treated brutally for this purpose. We now can read labels and become more educated about all the preservatives and carcinogens that are present in much of the food we buy in stores. Endless books are written and diets created to deal with this complex part of our lives. There are whole stores full of nothing but cookbooks. Each of us must find our own path through this maze of information and take responsibility for our own health, both physical and spiritual. Recently, I took my grandchildren for a drive in the country and we stopped for lunch at a small-town diner. The walls were covered with photographs of happy local customers, the tables were busily occupied by them as well, and the staff was warm and hospitable to we three strangers. I chose a vegetarian omelet, as I'm drifting toward becoming a total non-meat-eater in the last part of my life. It was good, being with my grandchildren on a sunny day in the country was good, being part of the daily camaraderie of a small town restaurant was good. At that moment, eating was refreshing my soul.

Faces

Have you ever had the experience of walking along in your daily life and passing someone who looks right at you with the most open friendly smile, maybe just when you're feeling a bit down yourself? You'd remember it if you did, because it really doesn't happen all that often in this bustling stressed-out world we live in. Mostly faces are turned away at some angle or another, lost in their own thoughts, or if they look at you the look is suspicious, antagonistic. I treasure those moments of connection with the smilers. I call them Salt-of-the-Earth people. Faces tell us pretty much everything, even if a person is guarded. There are frown lines and laugh lines. There are the wrinkles of aging and of suffering. There are calm faces of those who have somehow found inner peace. There are children's faces, not yet showing the loss of innocence. (The photo is my daughter in her early Haight-Ashbury years.) There are the faces of lovers of any age regarding each other with confidence in that love. There are angry faces, lonely faces, sad faces, frightened faces. There are faces of different colors. There is your own face looking back at you from the mirror. Hopefully, you like your face and it has served you well. I hope you will smile and look right at someone today with it.

Gardens

This is not a particularly good photo of my mother or of a garden, but it is the last photo I have of my mother gardening before she was gone. It remains in my heart as a symbol of who she was - someone who looked for the good in everything and raged against the bad all her life. She was an extraordinary grandmother to my two children, a devoted wife of over 50 years to my father (though it was not an easy relationship) who gave him meticulous care over his own last years as he sank beneath the combined forces of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, and a vigilant mother to me (as I battled my own demons). She loved on a large scale - she loved humanity. She was political and spiritual equally - she made them seem like the same thing. When I was a child she planted the flowerbox in the miniature house my father built me on the farm, and when she died I left her ashes in her last garden. I am old enough now to need a small chair to sit on when I garden like she does in the photo. And every time I experience the pleasure of my garden - the warmth of the sun on my back, the warmth of the earth to my fingers, the smells and colors of nature - I think of her.

Hands

These are the hands of my aunt Marjorie who lived to be 98 and was still creating collages (that were sold by her gallery for over $1000 apiece) out of rice paper. (You can see some of them here.) She began to do art when she had retired from a lifetime of teaching as a way to find relief from headaches. It opened a whole new world for her. Her hands were still busy till the day she died releasing her imagination for everyone to see. Hands symbolize so many things - creativity, strength, love, cruelty, hard work. Hands give us music. Hands built our homes. Hands delivered our babies. Hands pray for us. And who does not know the comfort of a hand gently touching us in a time of grief. May you find good use for your hands today.