the forgiving city
As moments of forgetfulness and mental lapses go this one wasn't so bad... the consequences, while potentially painful, were not going to be catastrophic. I would have lost things of sentimental value, but would have gotten over it soon enough.
I have a set of objects I have come to call the SLS, or Samādhi of the Lay Sacraments. These are 'found' and 'given' objects that have, over time, cohered into each other as a singular entity in my heartspace.
There are 2 of the latter type, objects given me:
- ...a red-bead Tibetan mala that a guy named Sonam Tsering gave me, several years ago. I had sublet Sonam's room at the Park Merced neighborhood for three months one summer when he had to travel home to Kathmandu in Nepal, visiting his parents for the first time in many years. When he returned in the fall, Sonam gave me that mala as a gift.
- ...an 8x loupe that a former mentee's dad, Jon Sullivan of Berkeley, CA gave me one time. Jon was an avid, lifetime amateur photographer who had published books of photographs of Berkeley and the East Bay. He appreciated my own long-ago hobby of slide photography, hence the present of the loupe.
Then there are the 2 found objects:
- ...a dense, smooth, black stone, about the size of a walnut, that has the unusual property of having 6 or 7 sides, depending on how you rotate it in space; and you can lay and balance it on any of those sides. I found it along Polk Street near the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods on one afternoon constitutional. Or, it found me. One could say it is heart-shaped.
- ...a smooth, dark-brown stone, about a third of the size of the black one, triangular in shape and flat compared to its larger mineral cousin, and about the size of a macadamia nut. I found it half buried in the sand at Ocean Beach one bright mid-afternoon in early January this year. Or, it found me. Looking at it from either of its wide sides, it most definitely is heart-shaped.
Unsurprisingly, they all go well together as a unit, or an entity.
I've taken to bringing them with me on my long walks through the city, or at my zazen practice wherever meditativeness finds me — and it finds me anywhere: at home in my 3-mat hut, at a community garden, a glade in a park or under a tree there, on a beach or escarpment, at a bus stop bench (or even inside a bus itself), a labyrinth (as in the ones found at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill). And, during these times I often lay them out as a kind of temporary altar and locus of attention.
At those moments, I combine the 4 elements of the SLS (the Four Noble Truths? ::chuckle::) with a temporal 5th element, always different: it could be a book I'm reading at the moment, or the happenstance urban shrine itself — a fire hydrant, a curious bit of the sidewalk, the filigreed iron vectors of a window frame, a balustrade along vertiginous stairways (of which there are a plethora in this hillsome city), the roseate middle of the labyrinth, a holy spot of beach sand, the lap of a Buddha statuette in some random alleyway... the loci are almost infinite.
Thus gathered together, the five elements manifest a reified skandhic form.
There they are, from midday yesterday, Sunday, April 19, 2026... on top of a fire hydrant at the corner of Polk and Chestnut Streets, in Lower Russian Hill and Polk Gulch, in the city of San Francisco, in the Bay Area, California, North America, Earth, the Sol system, the Milky Way, the Local Group, Laniakea.
I almost lost 2 elements of the SLS that day, but found them all over again. Or, they were just waiting for me, like always. Gifts given, or found... once accepted, ever immanent.
As for the notion of forgiveness, as announced in this post's title... well, I actually won't get to that today, and will leave that for tomorrow's or another day's telling on this blogspace. It is enough for me that I have marked this down now as a mnemosynic item and as a 'story unit' in IM [as kids these days say, IYKYK ;-)].