Dragon

A great green dragon lies to the West, watching over the town. I look up at her ruffled spine, the green and gold of her flanks, and see her dragon breath drifting down from above. It looks like the mist above Chinese mountain peaks.

But no, it’s smoke from the Colorado fires, beyond the Rocky Mountains at the edge of town.

I’m standing outside the Whole Foods Market on Pearl Street in Boulder. What has brought me here, so far from Richard and our Paris home?

Love and health. Health and love.

On July 4, 2012, great news came from physicists at CERN in Geneva about the Higgs boson particle: the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. It is responsible for life on earth, human beings, the stars—everything in the universe, and the forces that work between them. Without this miracle, we would have no weight, would be ricocheting around at the speed of light.

This energy field that physicists have been predicting since 1964 can be seen from other perspectives, too. The perspective of love, for instance. The power of love to transform someone’s health, for instance, my sister, Jane’s.

Here are a few of the elements in Jane’s energy field:

Her daughter, Rachel, helping her to get to medical appointments and being vigilantly protective of her health.

Her daughter, Bayu, flying in from Wellington, New Zealand for a month and planning to return this fall when she has completed her art and design studies.

Her mother and four siblings ready to help in whatever ways we can.

A caring, expert Western medical team.

A brilliant acupuncturist and sage, Dr. Maoshing Ni, prescribing Chinese herbal teas and Eastern healing.

A gifted local acupuncturist.

A friend, Liza, flying in for several days.

Friends in Boulder and beyond.

Friend, Susan, connecting Jane to a healing group who are meditating on her health.

Jane’s own excellent health habits: yoga, walking and eating well.

A town where, for an entire month, I didn’t encounter a single surly or obstructive attitude (although the motorcyclist who honked at me as I fumbled for my ringing phone while driving was entirely justified).

A town that’s so wholesome—5,430 feet high (great for the lungs and heart), with clean air, open protected space, cycling, hiking, mountain climbing, free yoga classes, healthy food, people drunk on endorphins—that it might be the healthiest town in the U. S.

A town where the restaurant food is astonishingly good: the scallops and truffles at Riffs, the paella at the Mediterranean, the chicken salad at Brasserie Ten Ten, the vegetable omelette at Tangerine, the Coquilles St.-Jacques at Arugula, the vegetable tempura and beer at Hapa Sushi Grill, the guacamole and enchiladas Veracruz at Cantina Laredo. I haven’t had a bad meal yet. Even the gourmet cheeseburger at Salt the Bistro I ate with Rachel and Brandon (the first such meal I’ve had in some twenty years, making me feel like a real American again) was delicious.

Jane seems healthier by the day, surrounded as she is by an energy field of healing and love.

All this in a larger context that’s frightening: the fires in Colorado were so extreme this year that half the fire fighters in the nation were brought in to fight them. They have resulted in the loss of 346 homes, 32,000 people evacuated from their homes, and are the most destructive in Colorado history. When I last checked on July 13, they were still not contained.

A map of weather conditions across the U. S. showed an alarming degree of heat, dryness, high winds and out-of-control fires in western states.

We know there is an energy field all around us which affects us and which we affect.

Can we extend this force of love and healing beyond our families and friends, and offer it to the whole planet?

How?

How can we do this?