All real living is meeting . . . Martin Buber

This morning I was looking for some inspiration from Roshi Norman Fischer.  He’s a poet, writer, teacher and Zen master.  His writing and teaching are informed by his experience of being a spouse, father and friend.  I was seeking him out after reading his beautiful book about growing up: Taking Our Places.  The book describes his years long mentorship of a group of teenage boys.  I was drawn to his approach of not having a specific agenda other than supporting these young people in their search for meaning and purpose at a pivotal time in their lives.  They created the group together and it took shape as a living thing which grew to meet the boys’ needs.  Here are a few tastes from the book:

We are all struggling with our own maturity, none of us can claim the job is finished to satisfaction.  But we feel for each other, and that feeling softens and opens us, driving more room for us to grow.  Although the process of maturing is endless, and all of us are in the midst of it, we can help each other through our human feeling, which is always wiser than we are.  . . .

. . . I eventually came to  see that, paradoxically, my vow never to grow up and my vow as a Zen practitioner to become mature myself and to work to mature others were quite compatible.  In fact . . . these two vows were necessary mirrors for each other.  “Not to grow up,” not to drop the endless search for truth because it is too difficult or too risky or too impractical or too costly, really meant “to grow up,” to become a person capable of true responsibility and real love because true responsibility and real love depend on a constant involvement with the truth. . . .

What is true maturity, anyway?  It’s a good question, one that needs to be pondered for a long time.  There are answers to life’s most important questions, but they are never final; they change as we change.  Maybe true maturity is finding a way of keeping such questions alive throughout our lifetime.  For when there are no more questions, we stop maturing and begin merely to age.

The beautiful feeder tree or nursing log I filmed seemed to illustrate the endless cycle of growing, maturing and touching each other in feeling, intimacy.  According to Wikipedia, “a nurse log is a fallen tree which, as it decays, provides ecological facilitation to seedlings.  Broader definitions include providing shade or support to other plants. . . . Recent research into soil pathogens suggests that in some forest communities, pathogens hostile to a particular tree species appear to gather in the vicinity of that species, and to a degree inhibit seedling growth. Nurse logs may therefore provide some measure of protection from these pathogens, thus promoting greater seedling survivorship.”

Okay – these are words which can only point at the tree.  Being there I was able to experience the tree – the shared space of change, growth, death and decay.   Tree body, human body, wind body, water body.  Moist greenness, crispy brownness.  Wind currents, moisture vapors.  And then, there is ineffable feeling.

I’m so grateful to be alive.  Thank you nurse tree, thank you Roshi Norman, thank you Zen.