The Garden Buddha

Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen, prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers. Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers, he gazes forward to the city in the distance—always the same bountiful smile upon his portly face. Why don’t I share his one-minded happiness? The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia, filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia and yearning.  He’s laughing at me, isn’t he? The seasons wheeling despite my photographs and notes, my desire to make them pause. Is that the lesson?  That stasis, this holding on, is not life?  Now I’m smiling, too—the late cherry, its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter; the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.