Parable of a fern

I felt like this little fern was greeting me. It makes me smile.

When I look at these tender green fronds rising through the grate of the storm sewer, I see how tenacious and full of hope this young plant is. It grows without any worry about whether it "can" grow, or will somebody run over it, or what will it do in winter. 

It does what it knows how to do, what it must do, without thought for the future, like all beings that are wild. 

I think about how akin we are, all living beings. How we recognize our struggle in that of another species. 

The fern is doing no more and no less than what every being tries to do: live, grow and leave seeds behind — whether they be baby ferns or a highly inconspicuous blog.  

Ferns and writers: struggling to flourish under less than ideal conditions. 

Fern strategy says that, if we are open to it, we will find opportunities we did not expect, at times and in places we would never imagine we would, if we are not too proud or too inflexible to inhabit a small, humble niche. 

And our lives are not any less beautiful or worthy or useful because they are quiet, green, underfoot, largely unnoticed. 

Some of us may tell ourselves we can only thrive, or create, or surprise ourselves at all under narrow or idiosyncratic "ideal conditions." 

But what if we don't even know what our own ideal conditions are? What if they are myriad, far more broad and varied than we think? 

And what if even the whole idea of ideal conditions at all is a false construct, just another way to hold ourselves back and to avoid trying at all?

The parable of the fern encourages me a little bit. It has been a lonely and strange two years. I've been hanging on in my dim niche under the grate. Sometimes a little sunlight peeks in. Sometimes I poke my head out through the bars, and try to remember what it feels like, that green feeling; when life pours through my veins. 

When thought is overtaken by living. 

When we stand together

Black wings of crows against a dimensionless gray sky. Long chains of Canada geese flying wing to wing, navigating south now in earnest by sun, stars and internal compass.

Making we wonder: what and where is home? Do we think of home as our city, our nation or our planet? How much of our sense of home is rooted in the people around us, and our shared humanity?

Do we think of our fellow citizens as only the people like us—the same ethnic make-up, beliefs and politics? Or do we think of all humans as our fellow citizens of this one planet?

Now as the darkness of November has descended, courage has been at its ebb in my heart. In the dark hours it feels absolutely crushing—after a spring so full of hope, promise and progressive energy for real reform to address the huge economic and social injustices in America—that this is the winter of our reality:

A society systematically reshaped over decades to benefit the ultra-wealthy and to disenfranchise 99 percent of the people.

Militarized police forces who kill our black and brown brothers and sisters, and who do the bidding of corporations in attacking peaceful protestors as criminals.

An authoritarian demagogue and his kleptocracy, wrong-headedly elected by people fed up with a government that is not working, who are soon to be dismantling protections and selling off our beloved land for parts while enriching themselves and their cronies.

These represent the blindest segment of humanity—the one bent on racing as quickly as possible toward the destruction of planet and our species. For gain.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Humanity's shadow is on full display right now in America, and it is frightening. It seems about to swallow us whole.

It has always been there, but we do have to look at it and see it now, in all its wounded-ness and brokenness. I do not know what our chance of healing humanity's brokenness is. But without seeing it, we surely cannot heal it. So we have been given a clear choice, a chance to do something other than despise it, repress it and turn our eyes away.

We have an opportunity at this moment, all people of goodwill and open heart, of compassion and kindness, to stand together. To speak loudly for and protect what is right. To organize and mobilize and to spread peace and beauty in every way we can.

It is clear that pushing back against humanity's shadow with compassion is the only hope we have to survive as a species, and that NOW is the time we need to act.

This has been a year of great highs and sickening lows, a year of revelations. A year of stripping bare the illusions we've harbored, peeling back our comforting surface narratives to reveal that which is bleeding, wounded, neglected and ugliest about humanity. A year of challenge to ourselves to become more than we may have thought we needed to become.

It is a time when all feels upended, a time when I especially envy those with strong extended families, and close networks of friends to sustain them. Because in spring, summer and fall I am mostly content to wander in community with no one other than the trees, birds, grasses and sky.

But in winter, all ease and illusions are gone, along with nature's reassuring sense of becoming that I can pretend is my own. Winter strips it all away, and exposes how frail and important for our well-being are the human connections that hold us together.

.

All is far from lost. We (I) must take heart and take action. Here is what is encouraging: The progressives are mobilizing all across our country, galvanized by the stark challenges before us. What Bernie Sanders said before the primaries is as true now as it was then:

Our job is not to divide, our job is to bring people together. If we do not allow them to divide us up by race, by sexual orientation, by gender...by not allowing them to divide us up by whether or not we were born in America or whether we're immigrants...when we stand together, as white and black and hispanic and gay and straight, woman and man...when we stand together, and demand that this country work for all of us, rather than the few...we will transform America.

The challenge for a quiet, introverted homebody is to make a conscious and sustained effort (and it is a real effort) to reach out and connect with others, instead of retreating even further into books. Books are important for reaffirming what is best about humanity, for reminding us of what is wise, beautiful and true. Books are even community, of a kind. But even books (and I speak as a lifelong bookworm) cannot always take the place of connecting with real live humans.

Those of us who usually choose to go our own way—often disappointed idealists masquerading as misanthropes—do actually need a community made up of people...especially during times when despair threatens to sap our energy and spirits. Let's draw heart from each other.

Mycology

On the day I took this photo, I was using my new smartphone. Taking it on a test run before a big trip coming up. 

  

As you see, the sun was bright (unlike today, which began with rain and then stopped raining and began to sullenly "gray" at us instead).  

But the screen was so reflective and dark that I couldn't even see the image in it. I just hoped I was framing this sole oak leaf caught in a net of pale grass. 

That's what much of life is like—like those blind photos I was taking, I mean—you can't see ahead of time what the outcome will be. You just line up your shot, click the shutter and hope for the best. 

Look at that moss growing greenly! It does my curmudgeon heart good to consider it today, even at a remove, through such a poor simulacrum of life as a digital image. 

As usual, the spring rode in on the wings of red-winged blackbirds, and is unfolding in the woodlands, where bloodroot and skunk cabbage now grow. I know because I see others' photos and posts in my Facebook stream, tracing their botanical wanderings. 

I, however, have been indoors all week. Struggling with technology, glued to screens following primaries and caucuses, Netflixing, reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (a novel that's especially interesting now, in light of the stark competition for the soul of America playing out in our national campaigns and among Americans overall). 

This is how I'm feeling: Unsettled, fragmented, restless, dull. Discontented, bored, exasperated, excited, intermittently hopeful; ready to surprise myself. 

Magic's happening somewhere. Maybe like those bloodroots, buried deep beneath the soil, only shyly and slowly emerging into this inhospitable grayness. 

Why do I suddenly have the image of a mushroom in my head? 

I feel more a sort of humble fungi than that invisible leaf caught in grasses. 

Moving toward Betelgeuse

Everybody has chore goals: clean the house/mow the grass/scoop the litterbox.

And more complex, multi-step goals. Like "plant more native flowers this spring," "get rid of 30 years' worth of accumulated possessions," or "find a new place to live that meets the requirements of two people who want very different things" (to name a few of mine).

But sometimes progressing toward some ideal is not exactly a goal. Not in the sense of analysis, problem-solving, list-making, or even about taking action...at least, not in a linear sort of way.

 Can we talk about that?

You encounter moments when you overlap your past with your present, and see the differential. Somehow you've managed to expand your view of the world or yourself. Not because you've cleverly delineated a goal and a plan to reach it; but because you grew toward it all unknowing, like it was the sun.

Over many days or years, you chose to embrace an idea: a way of thinking or experiencing the world that moved you, imprinted itself on your impressionable heart. And you don't realize until your Current Self unexpectedly collides with your Past Self that these selves are no longer the same.

How does this happen?

It's like you're traveling along a spiral, where you come around to some version of yourself every so often and give a nod to the person you were the last time you traveled this path. Maybe you're a star on this cosmic spiral I'm envisioning, and you notice that the luminosity you're emitting has leveled up. Maybe you had been as bright as red Antares, the heart of the Scorpion...and now you're even brighter, moving toward Betelgeuse.

But you realize this only when you juxtapose where you began with where you are now.

The idea that made me think about these encounters with oneself in the first place is the way that some indigenous peoples define "persons," and how that is broadening my circle of compassion and relatives.

All humans are persons, but not all persons are human. All living things are considered persons; and the definition of "living" is wide and deep, encompassing mountains, mosses, waterfalls, lakes, winds, clouds, the animate Earth itself. All our relations.

I am still thinking about ancestors, the land and their relationship to one another, you see.

How much wonder does such a personed world hold, how much sacredness and magic? This way of seeing wanted me to claim it. I know this because I encountered it many times, was on its trail in books, poems, articles, interviews, art, the leaves along the pathway stirring in its wake.

I've thought of animals as persons for a very long time—but not mountains.

I've thought of birds as persons for a long time—but only more recently bees.

What I'm saying is that if I can't see a fish as a kind of person, then I am the one lacking, not the fish.

So good news for people like me who are not planful. Who don't have words for what they're seeking until it shows up like a gift. Some part of you may be mysteriously working away at finding that thing and making you a better person, through an underground process that neatly bypasses your tendency to get stuck in your head.

Well played, Evolving Self.

Acts of man

A couple of days ago, a friend posted a photo of a rhinoceros on Facebook. There was a bloody stump where its horn had been and it was sinking to its knees, dying from an unspeakable act of cruelty.

My friend wrote a poem to express his rage toward the poachers who killed the rhino for its horn. Punched in the gut with grief and sickened by a glimpse of this horror, I voiced my sadness on the thread of comments. 

Later that day, a wildlife rehab organization posted a photo of a bald eagle in Alaska caught in a leg hold trap. A woman found and tried to rescue the eagle. She was charged with interfering with legal trapping. 

The magnificent wildling, who had broken both of its wings trying to escape, was beyond healing and was put down.  

Two days earlier, I’d finished a book with several excruciating scenes of animal cruelty that seemed to be a commentary on how much damage that deadened humans wreak on all around them.

Sadness sticks to sadness. It accreted into a mass that day. A heaviness, an injury no one could see. Probably everyone who saw those photos felt injured by them. What did they do with that injury, I wondered? How do we carry such sights, such knowledge? 

Sometimes we are afraid that we can’t. We look away. Not many look away with indifference…we look away in sorrow. 

We look away, with a grief so keen we are afraid to give ourselves over to it, lest we sink into it whole, never to rise again. 

We feel rage, like my friend, or are nearly crippled by the pity of it, how helpless we feel, how appalled and shamed by our species’ atrocities.

The only way out is through, though. 

Maybe our compassion, even an ocean and a continent away, helps heal the wounds suffered by that rhinoceros, that eagle, our planet. It certainly helps our own humanity. If we look away too much, we are only pretending evil doesn’t exist, and help no one at all. It is right to feel pain. But it is still hard. 

I begin to think that the fall of man really did happen, and keeps happening. Not with God and the serpent, but when humanity chose this path that views the earth and everything on it as a “resource,” i.e. a commodity, with no spirit, sentience or intrinsic worth beyond the money for which it can be sold.

That evening, I sat down with my Native Gardener’s Companion. 

I began to plan the new gardens I am going to plant come spring, and all the caterpillars, bees, butterflies and birds they will feed, and my heavy heart began to ease. Helping, the only cure I know. 

The steward of small things

THE LOVELY, WILD SCENT OF RAIN is wafting in the window on a south wind.

Rain. Lots of it. The rainiest year on record. Mosquitoes attack in wispy swarms. Even in full sun! I'm marked with welts, even a couple of kid-like scabs on my ankles (bony spots are usually itchiest).

Scratching insect bites: An ancient summer ritual.

(Just now, a tiny red spider crawls in wavering circles across my screen, searching for a smell, a texture, an object she recognizes. I lose her for a second when I look away but eventually find her on the table. She is escorted to a leaf outside.)

In April, I brought home two native chokecherries, knowing they're beloved by birds. Then I learned that chokecherry's leaves, stems, bark and seeds—every part but its fruit—contain cyanide. Poison to mammals, like my little cat, who is allowed in the back yard. So the seedlings stayed in their containers on my back porch as I fostered them, pondering where their true home should be.

In a wild field not far away, in the sun in an open spot amid the flowering clovers, trefoil, daisies and fleabane, I planted them today. 

I cleared the stones from around their roots, but they're on their own now. My wish is that they send their roots deep into that long-ago prairie soil and thrive, growing fruit for hungry feathered creatures to feast upon, making their home again on lands where they once grew.

Full summer snuck up on me. It was a surprise, like rounding a curve the other day and catching sight of a doe lit by morning sunlight, grazing in grasses high as her back, in the place above the river where the wild turkeys like to strut.

Driving to work. Rounding a curve. Ordinary. But then: heart-singing beauty. 

Like that. 

This moment was shaped like a bowl, as a bowl is shaped like a lake and a lake reflects the sky, and in its it hollow it held a handful of exquisitely ripe raspberries, with raspberry ice cream. Juicy with all that rain, sugared by rare days of hot sun, throbbing with life and summer. 

A body-shivering deliciousness: this is living. 

An overpowering feeling: this is a gift. 

Earth our home, let me thank you for the care you take of me. With such generosity and love you feed us, sustain us, delight us and fill us with joy. 

In reciprocity, I make this offering into your rich, dark, life-giving hands: Two small chokecherries. 

I commend these green spirits to you and place them in your care. 

Make them to flourish upon your breast, let them be part of the unending tale of wonder you tell. 

Of how you provide for all, for free. 

Of how each creature and each growing thing depends on your generosity. 

Of how there is a difference between taking what has been offered and taking what has not. And that the difference begins with gratitude.

With this offering, I give thanks. 

An abundance of gifts come your way.

Towers of bright clouds piled high in a blue sky. 

The glowing red of ripe raspberries, halfway between crimson and rose petal.  

The flashing flight of a blackbird past your window. 

Five bronze bells ringing noon from high on the hill every day—until one day, the chords suddenly cast soft white petals over your heart. 

Midsummer.

It's like this: So many things that matter can't be planned or scheduled. Can't be corralled or orchestrated, dissected or predicted or codified. 

You may just look up, or listen, or sniff the wind, and there it is. 

Freely given.

Please recognize and accept these gifts.

Yes, they're intentional.

They were made for you. 

The singing cardinal of winter

THIS LONG WINTER has been hard. Winter is a hardship.

Hard for our wild relations, who struggle to find food and stay warm.

Hard for bloggers (weather woes are widespread, from California to Canada to Devon).

Hard for lovers of the outdoors who are not equipped with high-tech cold weather gear and must retreat too quickly into dry, furnace-fired, unwild air.

Hard for homeowners who live on corner lots and must shovel out their walkways and driveways by hand, in a winter of 50+ inches of snow (ahem). The frost line has crept down so far into the earth that even in the southern half of the state, underground water pipes have frozen and burst.

Hard for the roads--which, after months of warming, refreezing, chemicals and plow blades, have given up holding themselves together and have already disintegrated, leaving potholes of epic dimensions--and the drivers who must negotiate them during blizzards, Winter Storm Warnings, Snowmageddons and Snowpocalypses.

In previous winters, I would have been whining about winter with the best of them.

I don't know what has happened, or how it's happened, but my inner kaleidoscope has shifted and all the colored shards have lined up in a less pointy and jagged configuration. After decades of living here, finally I accept that winter is a time of hardship.

A sensible position--but one I've mostly managed to avoid up to this point.

Anyway, how ridiculous is it to resist winter? It is a fact impossible to ignore or wage battle on. Resistance does nothing to make it go away--it just puts one at odds with what is beyond our power to change, with what is ever-so-emphatically-real and HERE.

And resistance to reality just makes it impossible to love your life and where you are in it every day, doesn't it?

So, thinking of winter as a time of hardship feels right to me. If a person isn't experiencing this season's hardships, then she isn't being present to it at all. And I want to be here, not constantly living a life wishing I were elsewhere.

The paradox is, as I let go of resistance to the hardships of winter, these things became something to just get on with and negotiate, without drama or martyrdom.

Hardships are hard; but it doesn't follow that "hard" equals "bad." (I make this distinction to myself because for most of my life I have been exactly the kind of person who sees "hard" as "bad.")

But the hard-not-bad hardship is not the only thing to notice about this winter.

Just as much, more than anything maybe, is the beauty: A balm, and a blessing, and a long, cold, strange song of north wind.

And oh my love, my shining white ice palace of a home, with your snow-heaped silences, your singing cardinal at dawn, your white radiance flooding through every window and your utter and exquisite loveliness from dawn to dusk, you bring tears to my eyes. You fill up my heart as never before, and I am grateful.

Kindredness & kindness

I've been applying for a lot of jobs lately. But in my heart, I want my life to be branching like a tree, silhouetted in bare grace against the winter sky. No more trammeling myself into spaces that feel small. No trying to impress, convince, persuade. Trees, stones, water, birds...nothing on this earth ever tries or wants to be other than itself, except for us. They just are.

I mean, look at the trees, stripped to the bone. That essential being-ness of trunk and branch is like a song traced against the sky, a quiet refrain repeated from tree to tree. Each a living being, and also a branching map of its own life. Like a human, specific to itself in its particulars; and again like a human, akin to others of its kind. Unique...yet not alone.

Along with the job seeking, one of the things I've been doing rather than writing blog posts is gathering photos of crones. Over and over, I am struck by how so many of their faces shine with joy and radiate such love and acceptance. I feel wrapped in an embrace just by looking upon their beautiful faces. How diminished we would be without the grandmothers and their wisdom--a cauldron of power that has distilled over the course of many-years-lived into its bare-branches-against-the-sky essence.

By looking at photo after photo of women who are wholly who they are, I hope to honor that essence in others and nurture it in myself. It's a kind of choosing. A kind of reminding, envisioning, invoking: This is the kind of woman I want to be, how I want to grow old. Like a grand, twisting tree, like a wrinkled and happy and lovely old woman, enough in myself.

I've been thinking what a gift to the world that kindness is. How powerfully it affects us when we are touched by another's kindness, and how we long to be accepted and to belong. That longing must always be there, underlying surface-dwelling things, like a tender nourishing stream beneath the tangle of tree roots.

It is never so clear that the longing exists as when a stranger unexpectedly smiles at you, or a small child you do not know reaches out her arms toward you and laughs, just at the sight of you. Suddenly, you feel yourself light up from within, a welling of joy and gratitude for being seen for who you are: Nothing more and nothing less than a human person walking in this world, over this ground, under these stars and these clouds, following a path and singing a sometimes-brave, sometimes-wavering tune as you go.

Mary Oliver wrote, "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." And "When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included?"

It takes such a small act of kindness to ourselves or others to swell that small, unseen, tree-rooted stream, and to feel its nourishment. Then compassion arises feeding healing tears, as we accept ourselves and are accepted by others, at the root. That is how our hearts expand, sending out tendrils and branches toward others, like a beautiful tree during the crone-time of winter, still swelling buds and green with life within.

Popes, planets and politics

Last night, we headed to our local second-run movie theater to watch Elysium, described thusly:

"In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. The people of Earth are desperate to escape the planet's crime and poverty, and they critically need the state-of-the-art medical care available on Elysium -- but some in Elysium will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve their citizens' luxurious lifestyle."

Generally, I avoid films and books that present bleak visions of the earth's future. The premise that humanity and the planet are doomed, that we are fated to be victims of the worst parts of ourselves...this overall seems to encourage us to be powerless and passive in response to this perceived inevitability.

And in that way, it seems to me such creations may enable these grim futures even as they decry them. Surely we can imagine and create a more positive, hopeful scenario for humanity to strive for? What is this unhealthy fascination with violence, cynicism and darkness? (I do believe I've become a Pronoia-ist without even realizing it. I thank Rob Brezsny.)

In any case, the injustices and inequalities portrayed in Elysium are all too real. Money rules in a capitalist society. The government, the economy, our cultural beliefs and values, the way hundreds of millions of us live our lives--all based on a socio-economic system that puts money at the center and marginalizes humans and the earth our home.

Of course we each can try to live and act from different values. But the systems in which we function are themselves based on a fundamentally flawed relationship to the earth and other peoples--the culmination of centuries of conquering, consuming, destroying and discarding.

Not only are lives and our humanity diminished by these impoverished and destructive systems; most horrifying to me is that they are systematically destroying the life of this planet. But it doesn't need to be this way; for thousands upon thousands of years, human societies were human- and earth-centered.

And that is why I am so inspired and moved by Pope Francis's powerful denouncement of our morally bankrupt financial system. Even on the page, his words ring with Truth, compassion and righteousness.

I am not a Catholic, but this is not a matter of religion; it is a matter of that which no religion owns: ethics, morality, compassion, justice. Humanity. In our most positive sense, not our least.

Pope Francis writes:

"Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.....
The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule."

YES to that a thousand times. When righteousness speaks with such a powerful voice, it makes us feel part of something larger, unites us in a joint cause...we have suffered so many losses, yet perhaps all is not lost. Humanity is so close to overthrowing the current paradigm, and we need words like these to lend support and shape our thoughts and actions.

Read the apostolic exhortation in its entirety here.

This, too, came floating across my screen today. The first commandment really encompasses all the rest; but ten makes for a nice symmetry.

Earth's Ten Commandments

1. Thou shalt love and honor the Earth, for it blesses thy life and governs thy survival.

2. Thou shalt keep each day sacred to the Earth and celebrate the turning of its seasons.

3. Thou shalt not hold thyself above other living things nor drive them to extinction.

4. Thou shalt give thanks for thy food to the creatures and plants that nourish thee.

5. Thou shalt limit thy offspring for multitudes of people are a burden unto the Earth.

6. Thou shalt not kill nor waste Earth's riches upon weapons of war.

7. Thou shalt not pursue profit at the Earth's expense, but strive to restore its damaged majesty.

8. Thou shalt not hide from thyself or others the consequences of thy actions upon the Earth.

9. Thou shalt not steal from future generations by impoverishing or poisoning the Earth.

10. Thou shalt consume material goods in moderation so all may share Earth's bounty.


And here is a slightly different version, enhanced by music and visuals of our beautiful planet:

True sight

WHEN I WAS small, I would lie in bed at night and gaze at a street light that shone through the filmy curtain draping my bedroom window.

I found that if I looked at it a certain way through my lashes, one light would become two lights. Gazed at another way, the light haloed and danced around its original boundaries.

And if I squinted at it, sudden silver rays would flash forth from two sides--street light reborn as a gleaming blue-white star, flickering just like the real thing in response to minute tilts of my head.

In winters, the street light and moonlight embraced, casting their silver nets over deep blankets of snow, setting it afire with starry glints in their thousands, dazzling along the edges of ice flowers blooming on the window pane.

My distance vision shifted as I grew, so gradually I did not notice. I had become used to seeing a soft and dreamy sort of world...one where details, like the sand on the kitchen floor that I had been asked to sweep up, were simply unseen.

When I got my first pair of eyeglasses, how suddenly clear and crisp the world that sprang into view! In my amazement, I saw freckles sprinkled across my mother's cheeks. I hadn't seen them in years, maybe since I was too young to pay them any mind.

Before eyeglasses: everything a lovely, though sometimes inconvenient, blur.

Afterward: the world's beauties and imperfections visible in equal measure.

Of course, most anyone would choose the latter over the former. You would think that casting a blur on reality banishes unpleasant things from sight...but in actuality, it makes it more likely that you will stumble over them, like the proverbial elephant in the room.

Still, blur does beguile. Blur is the Impressionist painting of sight. On Pinterest, there are whole pinboards dedicated to lovely, blurry photography. It is one reason why filters and plug-ins and effects exist...to modify reality, suggest ambiguity, evoke mystery.

And maybe also because it is almost like having a new pair of eyes through which to experience the world. Lucky for me, Blur World is a place I can visit any time with my natural, unaided, streetlights-into-stars vision, no equipment required...all I need to do is take off my glasses, and be very careful not to step on a cat.

Good deeds

Every morning I pick up a copy of the free Metro* tabloid newspaper at the Tube stop and read it on the way to that day's adventure.

Amid the news stories, which tend toward the lurid, is a feature of which I have grown fond: "Good Deed Feed." (I also read "Pet of the Day" and "Rush-Hour Crush" but that has nothing to do with the plot of this post—I just mention it to give you a deeper insight into my character. Heh.)

"Good Deed Feed" passes along brief thank-you messages from grateful Brits to various good samaritans they've encountered. A lot of them have to do with people returning lost items, paying fares for hapless commuters who unexpectedly find themselves without cash, or helping those who have fallen down, are sick, or are lost.

Not only is it pleasant to read about happy outcomes to everyday disasters, I like it because it reminds me that I have been the beneficiary of Good Deeds myself. At the risk of sounding like Zuzu from It's a Wonderful Life, I'll bet that every person who experiences a kindness like this passes it along in some way to another person. And it's wonderful for this recovering misanthrope to have my fellow humans watching my back:

There are several kind London Underground employees who have refunded money to my Oyster Card on various occasions, when I lost it by improperly "touching in" on the card readers. (Trickier than you'd think.)

And more kind people who pointed me in the right direction or even let me tag along with them when I didn't know how to get somewhere—including the lovely British couple on their way to the Isabella Plantation at Richmond Park, who had just spent two weeks on a road trip from Mississippi to Nashville.

Young men who have given up their seats for me on the Tube a couple of times—not because I'm less able to stand, just out of kindness. (I'm not even a "Super Adult," as they call senior citizens here.)

And many other Londoners who have gone out of their way to be polite, helpful and friendly, from people I've met during walking tours to the hospitable couple from whom I'm subletting my flat.

London, I've tried to do a few good deeds of my own in thanks. And even though you won't see this printed in Metro, I send out little angels of gratitude, winging from my heart to cast blessings on each of you. 

I am also grateful to all of you who have kept me company on this journey by following my adventures here on whatever level. Posting a lot of photos and integrating them with text is just plain difficult on an iPad, so I'm not always satisfied with the results; but that's one of those First World problems I can't complain too much about. So thank you for slogging through it all with me, my friends.

*Things I've learned from reading Metro: "Toby" in England is the sort of name that suggests a person who is an accountant, and even actors think that HBO overdoes the nudity on The Game of Thrones.

Photos taken in Regent's Park and other locations the week of May 5.