We have failed our children, many of us. I did for many years. Driven by our selfish desires for things, for comfort, for what we considered to be safety and stability, we have hardened our hearts. We have been angry and judgmental and afraid. We have learned to hate other people because they are not like us. And we have been ignorant of the truth. That truth which we lost sight of is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different. In our ignorance, we began to think of ourselves as separate individuals, with no connection to each other or to this vast and wonderful earth. I don’t think that is so. You would not be here if it was not for your mother and me and we would not be here if it were not for our parents and all the ancestors that precede us.

But there are other deeper connections that we often fail to see. When we are babies, the whole universe supports us. We eat food that was grown by people we have never met. And that food could not have grown if it was not for the sun and the rain and the soil that supported it. That rain and sun and soil are all dependent on the movement of planets and galaxies and mysterious forces that none of us can really see or understand. Each little bite of baby food that we are given, on those tiny spoons, has come to us through the “interbeing” of many people and of many natural events.

As babies this is true. We are very dependent then. But do you think it is not still true? Of course not. But many of us have forgotten what we might have known as children. This morning I had some hot tea and rye toast with butter and strawberry preserves for breakfast. The tea was grown in India, under the same sun that was lighting up my backyard while you and I ate our breakfast. You had scrambled eggs and wheat toast. I wonder where that good food came from and how many people and events had to get together just to help us have a pleasant breakfast? When I can pause to really look at the food on my plate, I am struck with the way that all things are connected. You said that even movements in incomprehensibly distant solar systems affected your toast. You are right. And now we have heard of such mysteries of “dark matter” and ‘dark energy” and the universe becomes more beautiful and more mysterious yet. At every moment of every day, whatever is happening is, truly, a mystery. There are millions of causes that make up the present moment. Without any one of them, things would be different. Our struggle at times is to see that things, right now, could not be any other way. When we can see that, we can be happy.

You and I took up cross-country skiing in the winter of 2001. When we first thought of it, I thought how great it would be. I thought that you and I would get closer; that it would be healthy (I smoked cigarettes then, after 12 years off of them) and that we would get a deeper appreciation of the natural world. I had all these ideas about what the external results of going skiing together would be. And then, early one morning, after sitting in meditation, I realized that we could go skiing just to go skiing. I saw that all of my ideas of what the results “should” be could only serve to blind me to what was going on right before my eyes. I had become an “adult” and left my childlike self behind.

So we just went skiing. A modern day Buddhist sage might say, “When skiing, ski.”

Sometimes we got miserable and wet and sometimes we saw just a perfect ice covered tree. In the words of the poet, we had, in splendid moments, “The mind of winter… (Beholding) nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Two children skiing together, lost in wonder and gratitude.

Such moments are always available. All we have to do, you and I, is be awake to notice them. A great poet, T.S Eliot, once spoke of “…a condition of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything.” In this long letter, written over a year, one day at a time, I’m going to try to show you what the poet meant.

You asked me to write a book called Silver Tea many years ago. You talked with our friends about it on St. John one winter and you designed a cover for it.

Here it is, my son. One day at a time. I vow to post it on this website every day for a full year so you can read it at school in Massachusetts, at home in Florida or at home in New Jersey or wherever you are.