How Things Are
After a short trip to Japan, I am back HOME in Los Angeles. Indeed, this is “home” for me. Even though I consider Yokohama my “hometown” I no longer feel it is “home.” It’s been well over 30 years since I left, and things are very different. The homes I grew up in are long gone. One is now a parking structure, and another a high-rise residential building. There are highways threading through the city, which makes it convenient while the landscape looks quite urban even in the town I grew up. As I wrote last week, my mom is ailing. Even though her general health is not bad at all and she’s actually quite capable. Her caregivers who come twice a week to help her are very impressed by that she can order her grocery on her iPad and can do FaceTime with me. Yet, it was clear how easily she can get confused about little things. Even though I gently asked if she would be interested in moving to a “facility,” she was very firm about staying where she is despite some of the challenges she faces. I had to accept where she was and how she wanted things to be.
Meanwhile, on the first night back home, I was awakened by the buzz on my phone a few times. It wasn’t until about 4 a.m. when I woke up again from the smell of smoke that I realized the buzz on the phone was emergency alerts of the Getty Fire. Although we are not in the evacuation zone, we could see from the kitchen window the red glow over the hills. I had just come back from a country where there were some major disasters caused by record breaking wind and rain from the typhoons and tropical storms. Now on the other side of the Pacific, we’re facing devastating disaster from the fires. Clearly, the climate seems to have gone literally mad.
Now, this is how things are in my world both personally and generally. I do my best to choose to accept them as they are while trying to find the way I can best help my family, my communities, and the world at large. And the truth is that I must first help myself to be honest with myself in my heart, then be kind so that I can treat the rest of the world with kindness regardless of what it looks like. I’m glad to be home to continue my practice, and next week, I will be in my first retreat for the Community Dharma Leadership Program at Spirit Rock. (So you probably won’t hear from me.) I am hoping that I will begin to learn more ways that I can be of service to the world.