My neighbor John in the apartment building next door to mine keeps his sliding glass door ajar most of the time.  He keeps a basil plant on a table and a couple of chairs randomly oriented around his parcel of deck space.  He drapes his freshly laundered clothes over the chairs to dry them.  Occasionally I see him out there doing some sort of eastern-oriented exercise, like qi gong or tai chi.  Less often I see him sitting out there with company.  Once a very young man, more recently a younger man than John but further along than me.  They were sitting bare-chested in the hot sun, eyes closed.

I know John by name because I introduced myself one day when we were walking up the hill to our co-located apartment buildings.  I had seen him before, observed some of his routines and there was a curiosity, a wanting to know, an affinity of sorts.  On the day of our meeting, he acknowledged my relative youth measured by the pace at which I was taking the hill in comparison to him.  Since then I have learned that as a young man he enjoyed his motorcycle very much, had 17 accidents over the course of his riding career, and a handful of them were severe enough to leave him more fragile than he might otherwise be with the onset of his twilight years.  That doesn’t stop him from regularly walking up and down the hill to go where he goes and tend to his errands.  When I don’t see him for a while I worry.  One of these days we will chat over a cup of tea.

Today John’s door is opened a sliver more than usual and there’s an old school antenna jerry-rigged and fully extended just outside the door. I presume he’s pre-positioning himself to watch the first game of the American League Division Series later this afternoon, OAK @ DET.  The buzz in Oakland is pretty contagious of late, given the history making performance of the Oakland Athletics, even for a non-sports enthusiast like myself.   I tuned into the final game of the season this passed Wednesday and got to hear the Athletics take the game from the Rangers just before heading into a Zen Hospice Project volunteer meeting.

The announcer stated that no team had ever come from 5 games behind to advance 9 games ahead this late in the season.  Add to that the fact that the team is composed of a bunch of rookies, the infectious enthusiasm of one of my co-workers who grew up an A’s fan, and this becomes one of those sports stories cascades, not spills, over into the human story.

So lots of lives will be lived indoors today watching the first game of the playoffs while many others will be lived outdoors, poured into the streets of San Francisco for numerous options and activities.  It is fleet week and the Blue Angels will do their sky dance over the SF Bay. There’s a regatta for the America’s Cup. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is underway in GG Park and this year they will pay tribute to three founding fathers who passed since the last festival, including the financier Warren Hellman.  There’s the Castro Street Fair, and Litquake events. So many choices it is almost paralyzing, except my dance card was filled in early September by a culture vulture who snatched up some prized tickets to see the Smuin Ballet.

Chris and I will heed all of the warnings to NOT drive into SF today in favor of public transportation.  We will take BART and meander through downtown SF en route to North Beach and eventually the marina on an urban hike.  We will meet friends for dinner in the Marina/Cow Hollow neighborhood, due to the proximity to the Palace of Fine Arts, where we will attend the Smuin Ballet performance.  On the heels of this season’s debut in NYC, the SF Chronicle highlighted this show as one of the major dance picks for the fall.  Performances will be choreographed to music from The Shins Oh, Inverted World, amongst many other acclaimed contemporary musicians (Philip Glass, Paul Simon, Gipsy Kings) and some less contemporary, such as Ravel.  I was particularly thrilled by The Shins piece.  Being familiar with neither Smuin nor The Shins, when I gave Chris the details for his calendar in early September, he cleverly abbreviated the event entry as ‘the dancing shins.’

No yoga this morning, went to a kick butt class last night instead with Skeeter Barker, another master mixer of body meets mind meets spirit.  She brought in a metaphor I used recently when talking with Chris about wanting to trust the deeper flow of the river when the surface gets busy with the turbulence of swirls and eddies.  Skeeter started out the class talking about the chaos unleashed recently in the media following the first presidential debate and how easy it is to buy into the culture of fear.  She likened the fear to the turbulence at the surface of the ocean and meanwhile, way at the bottom of any body of water, there is also the deep calm that is constant.  Specifically, she mentioned the underwater lake at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, ‘a half a mile down, over 20 meters long with its own sandy shore, an oasis of life totally independent of the sun’s energy’.  A complete ecosystem and a variety of new species just like what was discovered in the canopies of the giant redwood trees circa 2006, and is wonderfully told by Richard Preston in The Wild Trees.

Skeeter invited us to be both, the chaos and the calm, present with wherever our bodies were at. That invitation stayed with me into the evening and through to this morning.  I woke with strange dreams that involved chaos and fear shrouded in the uniquely creative realm of the subconscious – antelopes masquerading as polar bears, me scrambling to the top of a hotel in Alaska using the branches of a tree to escape the perceived threat of the approaching polar bear, not able to see it was an antelope without the vantage point from the heights of the hotel, feeling trapped by a fear of heights once at the top but at least having the security of something to hold onto, losing a hotel card key and being given a new one for a different room on a higher floor with less favorable accommodations because it was a dorm style floor… getting back to the lobby and finding myself in conversation with Hillary Clinton as a familiar (!).  Waking to discover more and more dreamy details as I spoke the dream aloud to Chris before migrating to the living room for the ritual cups of morning warmth.

A few years ago I discovered a book titled ‘Everybody Needs a Rock,’ written by Byrd Baylor, illustrations by Peter Parnall.  It was so perfect I looked for more and found ‘The Way to Start a Day’ and ‘The Other Way to Listen.’  The latter two are on my coffee table prominently displayed along with recent magazines and some mainstay books.

I’d read ‘The Way to Start a Day’ a few mornings ago and picked up ‘The Other Way to Listen’ this morning, tilting the book to show Chris a page or two.  As described on this Scholastic page, ‘a girl knew an old man who had a special way of listening. He could walk by a cornfield and actually hear the corn singing, and once, he even heard wildflower seeds bursting open, beginning to grow underground. The girl asked the man to teach her to listen, but he said she had to learn how from the hills, ants, lizards, and weeds. For a long time, she tried without success, and she almost gave up. But then, one day, she began a joyous song to the hills and, without even trying, she discovered the secret of the other way to listen.’

The lake at the bottom of the ocean, the canopy 330 feet in the air at the tops of the tallest redwood trees, the other way to listen, a place of calm in the middle of things.