sangha stone & huckleberry

My dears,

A small sweet house in SE Portland has been turned into a meditation center, a sangha. Val used to meditate there, and when she couldn’t travel easily, her meditation group came to her at home.

Nelly (Val’s meditation teacher) and the rest of the group wanted to plant something in her memory in the sangha’s lovely little garden. They consulted with me and we settled on a huckleberry, which is a plant both native to this area and laden with meaning for Val, who grew up huckleberrying in the Montana mountains with her family. Huckleberries grow sparse and high and they are seriously dee-licious. (And a precious commodity – last year pickers were selling them for $75 a gallon out of the backs of their pickups.) I consider it a measure of their esteem for Val that her family shared huck jam with us every year, even the years we weren’t able to help pick. It was Val’s Top Favorite.

Nelly had time to ask Val if she’d like to have a Val-plant in the sangha garden. It makes me happy to think that Val knew we’d be growing something for her. Later, Nelly and the others decided they’d like a stone for Val, too. It arrived this week and has been placed under the huckleberry.

There are so many ways to hold each other near.

Love,

D