Silence of Kindred Spirits

Okumura-sensei sent me a postcard in response to my holiday greeting. The carved bodhisattva it depicts now gazes out from my fridge.

Lately the song that echoes through my head and finds its way out through my throat is My Singing Bird, the Irish air.

I have seen the lark soar high at morn
Heard his song up in the blue
I have heard the blackbird pipe his note
The thrush and the linnet too

But there's none of them can sing so sweet
My singing bird as you.

If I could lure my singing bird
From his own cozy nest
If I could catch my singing bird
I would warm him on my breast

For there's none of them can sing so sweet
My singing bird as you.

I am singing to someone. To a particular person, and I know it.

The bodhisattva looked back at me from the fridge. I know it has to be this way. I have to trust life: the having and the not-having. I have to trust that a friend's silence may be the best thing, for the other and for myself. That the bond with a kindred spirit doesn't require a particular kind of interaction.

I took a sharpie and blessed the bodhisattva's body with an old Chinese saying:

If you keep a green bough in your heart
The singing bird will come

There's nothing to chase. But how good it feels
to sing
and sing.