Listen! a frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond!

-- Matsuo Basho, Spring Days, 1686

This is the sort of thing that makes me despair of ever writing a decent haiku--a perfect, irreducible observation of nature.

Matsuo Basho was a Japanese poet in the 1600's and one of the first haiku masters. He is best known for his masterpiece, Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Interior, a chronicle of a five month journey through Japan told in a combination of haiku and prose.

There is a lovely article about Basho by novelist Howard Norman along with some beautiful photos taken along the route of Basho's journey in the latest issue of National Geographic magazine. You can read the article, view the photos, and even read a travelogue of Howard Norman's trip retracing Basho's steps on NationalGeographic.com

Progress!

I've been trying to get my budgies used to my hand in their cage: talking softly to them, moving slowly and deliberately, not reacting when they freak out. The ultimate goal, of course, is to hand-train them to step up onto my finger so I can take them out for free flight and return them safely to their cage.

Today, I took a little millet spray (their favorite treat) on a string and held the string between my fingers so they could kind of reach the millet, but it wasn't very comfortable from the perch. Kiwi, in particular, just couldn't contain himself; he had to have that millet! Pretty soon he was perched happily on my finger, flinging millet everywhere. Calypso couldn't handle being left out. He (she?--not sure yet!) tried to move onto a little branch jutting from the perch, but I slowly moved my hand until he had to step up if he wanted to keep eating too.

So, after only a week, I had two budgies perching obliviously on my hand, devouring millet like there was no tomorrow. Woo-hoo! The picture above shows the hungry birds. I'm sorry about the quality; it is a tiny portion of a picture Amy took from about six feet away.

Unfortunately, toward the end of this session, the perch I was partly leaning my hand on shifted, and they freaked out a bit. Still, I think we made definite progress tonight. It won't be long before I can let them out to poop on the rest of our bedroom.

Everyone a Healer

For those who don't know, we get exactly zero television stations where we live, and we don't have cable television, so radio is kind of my TV. Over the past few months, Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett has become my favorite radio program. It bills itself as "public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas," and covers a delightfully huge range of topics within that conversation.

The most recent episode I heard was "Listening Generously: the Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen." In this conversation, Krista Tippett explored the humanity and spirituality of medicine with physician and educator Rachel Naomi Remen, who also happens to be chronically ill herself. They spoke about the importance of listening, loss, and the difference between curing and healing.

From the link above, you can read a transcript of the show, listen to or download the audio of the show, or listen to an extended interview with Rachel Naomi Remen. Here are a few quotes from just one portion of the conversation that spoke to me:

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident*. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It's a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It's the restoration of the world...

...And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world. And that story opens a sense of possibility. It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It's about healing the world that touches you, that's around you.

* The "accident" refers to a story from the Kabbalah in which the wholeness or light of the world was broken and the fragments scattered and hidden in all events and people.

I love Rachel Naomi Remen's emphasis on understanding the world through story. I love too, the idea that there is a bit of wholeness, a bit of light, a bit of God, if you will, everywhere, waiting to be discovered. Her conclusions from this story are the same as mine. We are all healers, but we don't have to fix everything, just explore and nurture those bits of light in us and around us, the ones we touch. To me, this is compassion: seeing the light (or wholeness or divine spark or image of God) in every person and situation and responding accordingly.

Good to Eat

For some time, I have been interested in pet birds. I have even had a campaign going that, as the only family member without a pet, it's only fair that I should get a bird to keep me company.

My original thought was budgies, which are more commonly called "parakeets" in America. Of course, there are many kinds of parakeets, so budgie, or budgerigar, is perhaps a more meaningful name. Apparently, the name comes from an Australian aboriginal word which means "good to eat." Tastiness was not what attracted me to them but rather their energy, intelligence, and ease of care.

However, budgies, like most parrots, require regular out of cage time for exercise and stimulation. Amy wasn't sure she could handle a bird flying around and pooping in her house, so we decided finches were the way to go. Their pretty, chirp nicely, and are generally content to live in a large cage. I purchased an appropriate cage with some Christmas money and started preparing a home for the finches. This weekend I was planning to go to Quincy and bring them back.

About three days ago, Amy surprised me by saying she thought budgies might be OK after all. I was thrilled! I think finches would be wonderful birds, but budgies have such pretty coloring, and they are incredibly smart and playful. To make a long story a long story with a short ending, above is a picture of my two new budgies. Kiwi is the normal green on the left, and Calypso is the pastel yellow and pale green on the right.

Wasted

In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year's gadget and replacing it with this year's model - do we end up tempted to think of people and relationships as disposable? ... If we live in a context where we construct everything from computers to buildings to relationships on the assumption that they'll need to be replaced before long, what have we lost? ... God is involved in building to last … God doesn't give up on the material of human lives ... and God asks us to approach one another and our physical world with the same commitment ... God doesn't do 'waste'

From a New Year's message by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury