"I'm sorry, there's nothing that can be done"

"I'm sorry, there's nothing that can be done." These final, definitive words spoken by a tired-looking Indian man in a dusty old computer repair shop in Metairie, the second one I had been to yesterday. His words expressed the tragic poignancy of the wisdom that comes from realizing that something is lost and can never be regained. A bad travel drive; they only have a little chip in them, so if they quit working, you will never be able to get to a couple of days worth of seriously good writing.

So here is a zen koan - a young professor wrote her book every day and saved it on her travel drive. One day the travel drive quit working. Where did her writing go? AARRGHH!!! As the computer repair sage said, there is in fact nothing to be done. Nothing, except to take a deep breath, buy a portable external hard drive, and try to re-create what was. Move forward. Try to pay better attention to how you take care of what you have (like constantly back up your files).

This mysterious human lesson. This cycle of appearing and disappearing is fairly subtle and the meaning is generally lost on us most days. Sometimes it's less subtle; like a 2 by 4 upside the head. Like my friend who woke up one day last year to find her life partner had died in his sleep. We, along with tens of thousands of our closest neighbors, learned it with our house and personal belongings (books, pictures, more writings, and socks and shoes and dog toys) - lost to the Gulf of Mexico, returned to the swamp land. The first yoga book bought by my husband in the 1960s became a perfect place for a fungus to grow, a make-shift lilly pad for a resourceful frog.

But the new now becomes completely sacred. And so here is a shot of the same corner of our house a couple of years later. Nice, eh?