I remember my dad told me about a news show he watched on New Years Eve, at the turn of the millennium. A journalist was interviewing a group of religious leaders about whether the world was about to end when the clock struck Y2K.
The main concern in any religious discussion being arriving at a workable definition of the word "god," the interviewer was attempting to establish a suitable definition so the participants in the discussion could agree to move forward into other topics within the conversation.
There was a Rabbi and a fundamentalist Christian reverend and a Catholic bishop, and they were all bickering back and forth about various disqualifying characteristics of their perceived opponents definitions.
Meanwhile the fourth member of the conversation, the Dalai Lama, kept calmly, incessantly repeating, "God is love."
"'God is love, God is love,' he kept saying," my dad told me. "Everyone else was arguing, but all the Dalai Lama kept saying was, 'God is love.'"
Expectations of what things should be get in the way of my ability to just let things be.
When I let go of my desire to be in control, wondrous miracles occur - my definition of a miracle being, "that which occurs which I did not expect to occur."
I did not expect to Elijah to love the beach.
It was a miracle how he ran like a child across the sand, chasing the waves into the sea, then retreating as they chased him back onto the shore. I felt his heart unlock and open up to the ocean. He sat in the sand by our side and surveyed the impossible landscape. How a dog born in a barn and raised on a farm could embrace so easily this alien horizon so inspired me that I almost wept. It makes a man happy to please another creature, on any level, even so simply as taking an old dog to the beach for the first time.
After the beach I felt my heart open again, wider still, as we attended the Free Farmer's Market, a neighborhood vegetable giveaway in the Mission, two blocks from our home.
By virtue of our address we are welcome any Sunday, between 1 and 4 in the afternoon, to come by 23rd and Treat Street and help ourselves to free, organic vegetables and greens, organic citrus fruit, organic artesian bread and free plant starts, courtesy of a man who calls himself "Tree."
"Tree" started this neighborhood garden so that, in his words, "People from the neighborhood would have a reason to meet each other and say hello, and so working people could get their hands on some organic, fresh food that doesn't cost an arm and a leg."
Tree maintains the public garden and solicits unsold organic produce donations from the various farmer's markets around the city. He gives everything away for free, including advice on how to maintain the starts. (Click the title of this post for a link to the free farm stand's blog.)
In exchange for our mere presence we were rewarded with a free persimmon, bok choy, a bushel of Russian chard, three tomatoes, a bag of walnuts, a green fig, an uncut loaf of spelt bread and a chard plant start, which we took home and planted in our back yard.
Along with the lemon tree, the eucalyptus and the two banana trees, Eli and Pico will watch over it, nurture it, love it, and we will all hope for each other to grow.
