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Today’s word: possibility.

Some of these photos have been sitting in my camera, waiting to be uploaded. Others, I’ve only just taken today. Daily practices are tough for me, and I still have some gaps, but I’m benefiting from the reflection and from taking a relaxed attitude.

I used to fantasize about the grass and wildflowers retaking the endless acres of asphalt, the concrete breaking up from the force of tree roots. I am a little more accepting of urban ugliness, and a little more tired and resigned now. Just the same, when I see something like this, I feel like I am seeing healing in action.

Folsom Street, San Francisco, near the place where Amilcar Perez-Lopez died at the hands of plainclothes police.

A recent autopsy has shown that he was shot four times in the back, contradicting the officers’ claims that they fired as he lunged at them. No indictment has followed yet.

Capp and 20th, San Francisco

Skipping ahead a few days to yesterday’s word, which was the 14th  of this Lent practice: creativity.

This evening while she practiced violin, my daughter said maybe she’d like to be a “music writer” when she grows up. I pointed out that she already is; she makes up songs all the time. She agreed, but maintained that she means  professionally. We will have to introduce her to some of the composers we know, some of whom she knows already too. She asked me for that music notebook we have, and as she paused to think, I took this photo.

Ah, daily practices are so hard for me! I took this a few days ago as I walked through the city thinking of some of the words for meditation. This image seemed like a metaphor for how suffering often feels: shut out from human connection, cut off from parts of oneself, trapped, fragmented.

Today’s word: fear.

A couple of years ago, I slipped going down these stairs and whacked my back, hard. The spasms and bruises that followed had me in agony for days. I was back to normal within a couple of months, but the memory of that incident whispers in my ear almost every time I go down the stairs.

Is fear always the memory of pain? What do you think?

It was already past 7:00 and well past the time to make dinner, but my daughter and I paused for a minute to watch the patterns cast on the dashboard by a rainy windshield.

How often I suppress my curiosity because there’s “something else to do.” A minute wasn’t long enough for either of us to discover what the rain had to show us.