When I first planned this trip to visit my kids in the States, I thought of dropping by to see my “spiritual brother” Bruce Davidson. Together with his partner Linda Reimer, and the gathered companions at Sirius Community, he had been carrying an inner light for decades, even through the past few years of declining physical health, after a fall from a tree had physically broken him.

He passed in November, and my desire to meet him again in this lifetime were ended as well. Since Sirius is not far from the Pioneer Valley, where both of my adult children are in residence, I took an evening to drive up into the hills, to add my presence to his lingering presence.

With a few simple changes in habit, adding a heaping spoonful of quiet attention, the act of taking tea may be transformed from ”drink" to “oasis”. Perhaps in the end, it is a medium for mindfulness, simple, profound… where repeated action with awareness is infused with ritual, is elevated by stages above the mundane.

Carefully choose ingredients

Attention to the tea you use is attention to your being. This plant was cultivated for medicinal and other uses before the first written reference, in the third century AD; there are many cultivars and nuances of flavor, character, and levels of caffeine. Your choice of leaf affects your experience in the moment and the continuation of your day.

A child wakes before dawn crying Mama, mama Every cry her name Every name his breath:

Breathing in, he breathes her in Breathing out, he exhales her:

The cry of I’m alive:

Want was will wait when Now how he has here:

His mouth fills with what is A cry an inarticulate sigh As the earth wheels The sun to the point of being

“Proverbs Chapter 22, verse 6” by Kevin Williams @ DeviantArt.com

grateful for the given hour an open hand that lets the sparrow fly wings return the spirit from the sky like water to a flower

every element is born to die like water to a flower becomes a scent, a color fills the senses of the passersby

like water to a flower they, becoming blossoms, smile and sigh the petals fall to ground, the sparrows fly grateful for the given hour

I was drawn to the spirit of Brazil before I knew two words of the language, through the open-hearted music of Milton Nascimento, playing over the vegetable fields in Glencoe, Minnesota. Similarly drawn by the music of Silvia Pérez Cruz, I wanted to translate this rendition of a poem by Maria Mercè Marçal, a Catalan poet who lived and taught in Barcelona.

A few days ago we learned that Catalina’s cousin in Sevilla had passed away from cancer; that afternoon I began this translation, only to discover with a chill and a cry that it was Marçal’s poem about her own impending death, from breast cancer, in 1998 at the age of 45.