Month: November 2018

Creating Community One Stone at a Time

amusingpoet4 Comments

I first experienced Zen sculptures about ten years ago when I visited Sedona, AZ and walked along a riverbank that was crowded with such towers. Each of us on the trip built one, but recently, I haven’t thought much about them until I went to Thoreau’s cabin site near Walden Pond. Visitors had built rock towers around the periphery of his cabin’s foundation, and I was quick to add one of my own.

Zen rocks, Brian Potts, photo credit

One morning afterI returned from visiting Walden, I was walking in my neighborhood and passed a large, flat rock that is in a median strip in front of an apartment complex about a block from my home.  On a whim, I picked up a few stones and built a Zen tower.  For the first couple of months, I was the only one building towers, sometimes every day, and sometimes I’d build two.  Building the towers became a vehicle for mindfulness because  I walked the same route nearly every day, and it was easy to let the scenery slip past.

But like a seed that takes awhile to germinate, one day I noticed there was a tower that some unseen friend had built. Hooray! I thought, someone connected with me and is joining in the fun. By early October, when I was about to leave for a two-week trip to Europe, there were three towers on the main rock and one tower on each of the rocks in the back of the median.  I smiled. The idea was catching on and gaining a life of its own.

The rock towers were still there when I returned.

Close-up of Zen rocks, Brian Potts, photo credit

Why is this important to me?

Sometimes when I think of how busy all of us are and how much we’re isolated in spending time with our screens, I lament that we’re losing a sense of community. I never see my neighbors in the apartments and have never met anyone who lives there. I know a few people in my immediate area, but I rarely see the folks who live on my street, and I’ve never told anyone about my Zen project. But I am a firm believer in the power of positive energy and shared consciousness. And now I have proof of my connection–or at least my idea’s connection–with my unseen neighbors. We’re truly in this together–one stone at a time. One idea at a time. One good deed at a time.

 

Armistice Day After My Visit to Flanders Field

amusingpoet2 Comments
A powerful reminder

I recently visited Bruges in Belgium, a small and charming city that is very close to the town of Ypres and Flanders Field, the site of the Western Front during The Great War.  I wanted to see the sites as a way to participate in  commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armistice. I knew I’d see cemeteries and statues, but I had no idea how I’d feel as I spent the day with my tour guide, Philippe, and my companions for the day–four people from Ireland, two from Canada, and one from Italy. All of them had lost grandfathers during the war. My two grandfathers did not enlist, probably due to their ages. Still, as an American, I felt that it was important for me to witness the ground where so much sacrifice and destruction occurred over 100 years ago.

The truly awful fact is that The Great War, or World War I, still lives in Europe, especially in the small, quiet towns of France and Belgium.

Unexploded shells from WWI

The war lives in the unexploded shells that farmers find when they plow their fields.
The war lives in the sinkholes that trap people because they’ve built over an old trench. The war lives in the chemical weapons that are still lethal after 100 years.
The war lives in the Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, German, and Irish cemeteries that cover former battle fields.
The war lives in the red poppies that decorate the grave sites and fill the fields in the spring.

One of the youngest men to die in The Great War

Poet and author Madeline Mysko used a piece from The Sun archives that declares Nov. 11, 1918 “the greatest day in the history of the world!” But the reporter wisely spells out the deeper meaning of victory for the readers:

“It was a victory not so much of material things: of ships and rifles, and cannon, and gas, and men’s lives, as it was a victory of the spirit, a spirit that even in the darkest of days did not acknowledge defeat, the spirit that never would admit that might was right or that brutality and savagery could triumph over humanity and kindliness and love and the decent things of life.”

In Europe, they call November 11th Armistice Day, literally a day to celebrate the cessation of  force, stopping the use of weapons.  We have sacrificed greatly in our many wars, but those wars do not live on our soil.  I wonder if the destruction and pain of war, the futility of force to solve problems, would be more real for us as Americans if we found unexploded shells in our fields?  If our children fell into sink holes when they played tag in the yard?

May we pause and reflect this Armistice Day.

A memorial of poppies