I am a spiritual seeker, a seeker who has "taken a drink from many cups." I love to accompany others on the deeper journey to witness to their True Self. Now a writer, photographer and poet, I have retired from full-time ministry as a pastor in downtown Oakland, CA.
One day, a teacher and her disciples were walking.This was in the initial days. While they were traveling, they happened to pass a lake. They stopped there and the teacher told one of her disciples, “I am thirsty. Do get me some water from the lake.”
The disciple walked up to the lake. When he reached it, he noticed that some people were washing clothes in the water and, right at that moment, a bullock cart started crossing through the lake. As a result, the water became very muddy, very turbid. The disciple thought, “How can I give this muddy water to my teacher to drink!” So he came back and told the teacher, “The water in there is very muddy. I don’t think it is fit to drink.”
After about half an hour, again the teacher asked the same disciple to go back to the lake to get some water to drink. The disciple obediently went back to the lake. This time he found that the lake had absolutely clear water in it. The mud had settled down and the water above it looked fit to be had. So he collected some water in a pot and brought it to his teacher.
The teacher looked at the water, and then looked at the disciple and said, “See what you did to make the water clean. You let it be … and the mud settled down on its own – and you got clear water… Life is also like that. When it is disturbed, just let it be. Give it a little time. It will settle down on its own. You don’t have to put in any effort to calm it down. It will happen.”
Peace from my window – in Oakland. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 11/2025
It’s hard to remember what we thought about COVID-19 when we first heard about the virus in early 2020, and even when we ourselves were subject to a “sheltering in place” order, an order that changed our lives dramatically and for a long time.
How did we do it? A vivid memory of mine is listening to the new on NPR Radio at 3 pm, day after day. And I listened as each Friday, after recounting the news of the day, Judy Woodruff spent a few moments remembering in a few sentences the lives of five people who had lost their lives early in the pandemic, which swept across New York City before it reached across the rest of the country. We listened carefully to the wisdom and knowledge of Anthony Fauci as he gave us simple but extreme guidelines that would shape our lives for many months.
Jeff and I live in the Bay Area, which has a Mediterranean climate, and for that, we could be very grateful. We took to walking together early in the morning after rising and drinking our first cups of coffee even earlier – 5:30 am – in one of the two cemeteries that stretch for acres into the hills of the East Bay, just a block away from our house. We made new friends from the neighborhood as we saw some folks each day and others once or twice a week. We hosted gatherings with our friends as we sat huddled together in a circle in our yard in our down jackets. We ate our meals with friends on paper plates. For several months, I had our groceries delivered to our door by the brave and kind folks who did that work on our behalf, until I began to shop at the local supermarket early in the morning; I still like to shop early in the day, a habit formed during that time. Jeff was serving a church in downtown Oakland as interim pastor, and he preached each week as he sat in our yard and as I taped his sermon on his phone to be sent to the church secretary who put worship together for everyone in the parish.
Even so, the days and weeks and then months stretched on and on before us. Ugh. How did we do it?
Early in the evenings, Jeff and I would get into one of our cars and drive along Broadway in Oakland, through downtown, and to the Bay, where the ferries to Alameda and San Francisco left the dock, still on schedule, during the day. We would park along the narrow streets at Brooklyn Basin, a new development in Oakland, and walk along the shore of the Bay. Young people roller-skated on the pavement along the shore and loud music formed the background for all of us.
These memories came to mind – I’m certain there will be other memories – when Jeff and I drove into San Francisco – the City – on Saturday to attend a fall gathering at California College of the Arts. We parked our car a few blocks away and walked up some steep hills before we attended a luncheon on the campus. We remembered how we hiked in many places in the Bay Area, on Mount Diablo, at Martinez – and how we walked in San Francisco before the months of sheltering gave way to our getting vaccines. We sat outside on folding chairs carefully spaced safely apart at Kaiser in San Francisco as we waited to receive our first shot. We haven’t counted, but we’re sure we walked up and down those hills in at least 15 neighborhoods in the City over the months that stretched into years. Early on, traffic was light; as the months went on and as each one of us stretched our limits, tested our limits – traffic increased. Things were returning to normal.
Mary greets us each morning as we walk – up hills and down – in St. Mary’s cemetery, Oakland, 2020.
Life is the color of things: of places, of thoughts, of people I have loved, of sky and trees. I know gray well, and I have taken from gray a gift: the gift of gray is to know – for the first time – the color of things.
Life is the color of things and it is good to breathe in the riches of sky, of earth, of shadows across the sky, of green grass that carries the fragrance of earth, of long orange autumns, bright maples, of gray and darkened days of winter, of spring, snow banks melting, of a navy-blue awakening, dawn.
The color of things lives in the eyes of friends, places where sadness lurks, where pain is not covered by dull happiness.
Life is the color of things: this gift, earth, all that is in it, the heart, the heart, full:
And all that is in it.
Life is the color of things. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, Oakland, View Place, 2025
One of the pleasures in my life is the pleasure of having lived in one place for many years. In 1995, Jeff and I moved to Oakland and we have stayed in Oakland, and moved into our 1915 Craftsman Home about 2005. Over those years, Jeff has worked hard to steward a beautiful garden – a garden which we enjoy every day. We have hosted many gatherings and dinners with friends here in the house – often in the garden. I expect those times of hosting have attached us even more to this place. And having lived in one place for so many years, and having seen the seasons – slow and sacred in the Bay Area – pass to us and away again all those years since 2005, I have come to know very well the passage of time in one place.
In the yard of our home are several trees that I see from one of the windows: the listing birch outside the living room, the apple tree whose trunk and branches seem to greet us – bowing – when we sit at the dining room table, the maple that shines into our bedroom window in the autumn.
I have a refrain that I say to myself often about the birch: “I love that tree and that tree loves me”. And if saying it often makes it so, then it is true: that tree loves me. Silently and with grace the tree stands and waits for me as I lounge facing the window with my morning coffee. Silently and with grace the tree has sparked my mind as I sit on the couch, writing a sermon, reading a book from the local library, chatting with Jeff. The tree is a steady and beautiful companion to my life. I’m grateful for the tree.
And if gratitude is a poem, then that tree has sparked whatever poems are resting inside me, waiting for the right time to come out.
And it’s autumn again. The slender maple outside our bedroom window is shining with the light of autumn. And the slender maple is so beautiful: a beautiful, silent, stalwart companion.
My stalwart companion in autumn. photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2024
