Leaf

Dear All,

After 20 years in my office in Great Barrington, MA, I'm moving to another office nearby, at 5 Hillside Avenue. The doors will open there January 3, 2019.  It's a first-floor office, so easier of access, and a bigger one, so better for groups, and in a leafier neighborhood, so friendlier for walking jaunts.  See you there soon!

I'll miss the old office, which as a psychotherapy office has held so much in the way of suffering and love and healing -- and joy, due to the collective energies of group meditation and group spiritual practice.  Thanks to all who have participated, near or far! 

And I'm eager for the new place to receive the blessings of those who enter it, and to bestow on us its gifts of holding and subtle life.  A woman-led construction firm, Creative Building Solutions, built the loft-like building just 10 years ago, on the site of a small woodworking shop, as their headquarters. 

All things change shape and form and environments; all things are in life and motion, some more noisily and some more quietly.  Goethe, whose lovely slogan from "Holy Longing" was, Die and Become!, knew something about change.

After a long apprenticeship of studying plants in his 20's and 30's, he eventually published his Metamorphosis of Plants, at the age of 41.  In it, he announced his discovery -- not a rational discovery alone -- that the leaf was the fundamental organ of the plant, and that the plant's every part and moment, from seed to flower and fruit and back again in reverse order -- is leaf.  His view is now taken as confirmed botanical fact.

Proteus, the Greek god to whom Goethe compares the leaf, is also a shapeshifter.  He knows all, but won't answer questions until the intrepid hero, Menelaus for instance, can hold him in a grasp as nimble as the god's many changes.  Then Proteus reveals his secret.

This last week we marveled over biological life itself, the miraculous more that plants bring over the quite other lives of light, air, water, and stone.  We used as our meditative focus the Emerson dictum:
  Life only avails -- not the having lived.
Next Tuesday we'll find a way to ask, in essence,
  What is a leaf?
We come close to it with the expression, "to turn over a new leaf" -- even though, or especially because, this refers to the leaf of a book.  A leaf is a receptivity that flares into new meaning, a textual flourish of delight: You.

all blessings to all,

Michael