The Path Ahead

These are photos of the winding hillside path that my room mate Orgyen and I built on my backyard hillside.  It leads down to a flat patch of sand I call "Dzogchen Beach" for its seclusion and nice view of the sky.  At various point along the path I have planted a Bay Area native shrub.  I hope they live through the drought!

Perhaps this is a kind of symbol of my own journey, gradually descending to the depths of my natural condition through the path of meditation and cultivation of "the view," the perspective of the timeless purity of our natural state.

As I put the last few shovels of DG granite--the clay-like path surfacing material on the path the day before yesterday, a little dog mysteriously arrived, trailing Lama Pema Dorje and Kunsang who arrived on foot from the store.  The young dog wanted to pay and pounced on the earth and dug beside me as I worked, and one point wrestling a bag of landscaping bark out of my hand as I tried to pour it around some plants.  Later that day I looked up my Tibetan astrology sign, just to make sure.  Ah, the Earth Dog!

So, this old earth dog is going to do to the mountains and turn off the internet for a good long time, to settle into my practice and attend to the here and now.  My dear readers, please be well and happy, and perhaps I will "see" you again when I emerge.

Sausal Creek, Finally!

You were probably wondering when I would get around to writing about Sausal Creek.  I will start today.

I own half of a bit of an urban culverted creek.  Creeks are celebrities in the Bay Area. Sausal Creek has a fairly large community non-profit fan club, called Friends of Sausal Creek.  These folks are dedicated to restoring native flora and fauna to this little stream ecosystem corridor through Oakland.  They tell you all about it on their website.  They are wonderful people, but can rouse little enthusiasm for my part of the creek, in the low income flat part of Oakland.  The original course of the creek down here is unknown, there is a lot of fill and it looks like it's course was straightened when they logged the huge first growth redwoods up in the hill in the 19th century, so they could pull logs to ships using the creek as a sluice to float the logs out to the bay for shipping.   However, there is a little kink in the line near me house, so who knows.

Until the 80's I hear all the neighborhood kids played in the creek behind my house, and neighbors fought over the ill defined border between properties--our deeds say the properties extend half way across the creek.  Imagine the battles when erosion or course changes occurred.  Then, the creek was given high cement walls and base and a strong tall anchor style fence at the top. I have owned the house one year.   There is no way for me to get to the creek (I own half of) now.  But there are a lot of plusses to that for me, so I'm not complaining.

There is a Creek Ordinance in Oakland, and it has so many rules for what I can do with my property, that at times it seems I might be arrested for tossing out a glass of water in my yard... thanks to my friends at Friends of Sausal Creek.  I have a lot of dreams of restoring the habitat, back to what it probably never was, but should have been!  I'm share that as we go along.  Meanwhile, I'll show you the BEFORE photo, the one on top.

I love living here, I'm not the only one who lives here.  We have raccoons, feral cats, a hawk, a lot of hummingbirds, crickets, a Great Egret who visits on special occasions.  There are fish found each year upstream, so they have to go by my house.  I am determined to spot one.