How To Catch A Mole

A feeling of belonging brings with it a desire to build something to mark one's connection, and then, having built - a garden, a house, a career, a tunnel system - one has to protect those things from intruders, violently if necessary. We try to create an illusion of permanence, but there is none.

Once you experience this feeling of simply existing you lose the need to ask why you exist.

Moles are tiny, they are cute, and like the rest of nature they do not care what we feel. They are devastating, and they always win.

Life is so full of mystery, answers are so few, I do not trust them. I prefer unanswered questions. At the end of the answers there is usually a person who enjoys the power of appearing to know.

Compassion is born at the interaction between joy and sadness. Compassion for your own life, forgiveness for your own mistakes, is the foundation.

There is always sadness. I once heard a friend, depressed, under the influence, with a broken relationship, say, 'The glass is broken, it can't be repaired.' But she was wrong. Things cannot be made as they were, but they can become something else. They can be re-made. All things are impermanent, and everything wears down to dust. Everything has its end and each thing carries the beginning of the next thing. Healing is not about re-making things as they once were, healing is about acceptance and forgiveness and love and growth and beginning again. Scar tissue is an inevitable part of life.

There is something deeply magnificent in being just ordinary

Nature doesn't care about a single individual; it is easy to just make more, billions more. Each human, mole, and dragonfly, each dandelion and blade of grass, wears out and is replaced. If a population outstrips its food supply because of a high birth rate or a drought, for instance, many die until some kind of balance is achieved.

Healing is just adapting to change, acceptance.

I cannot choose to stay the same; change is all there is - it just happens.

Not knowing is for me the best of all possible worlds; it contains a sweetness and a playful willingness to accept change and to enjoy the mutli-layered, million-petalled flower of life without having the compulsion to know what everything is.

There is a bittersweet state of existence that all natural things go through, a stage when they stop being what they were and start being something else. I think I am at that point.

Words have a different existence to the things they name: they live in different places, have different lives.

Ownership of things that appear permanent gives us a sense of permanence. We feel ourselves immortal because of our possessions and the mole coming in and damaging them, taking them away, challenges something buried deep within us.

Every small step we take on this earth has consequences

Forgetting is freedom and forgiveness but more than anything it is a process of immersing myself in what is happening now.

I USE A whetstone to hone the blades and knives I use in my work. It was engineered to be hard and perfectly flat when I bought it years ago, but now has a smooth complex curve that tells the story of how I use it. A tool responds to the way it is used. Slowly over time it just naturally changes its shape to fit in with the way I do things. I just like to look at it sometimes. To hold it in my hand. While the knife wears away the stone, the stone also wears away the knife and over time their curves become matched. People do that too: when Peggy and I met we were scratchy and brittle and fought a lot, but over the years we have worn off each other’s spines, smoothed out the roughness, and our curves now match.

The European mole is a protected species in Germany and Austria: gardeners there put up with them.

I have come to like things that are left unfinished. It’s the question that shines the light, that seeks. The answer’s often just a dim reflection of the vastness of the question. There are no answers that satisfy.