Naming

This early morning I wake with that same feeling of unnamed dread I've had before, this time with words: there is a very great grief coming. At first it seems it could be attached to keenly experiencing the sequence of "last times of doing" in this house as it is, as we discuss our plans for rebuilding. I have not lost my very great attachment to things. A house is a big thing.

Quick leap to darker, wider reasons. In fact, a very great grief is here, can be here, every day, every moment. That disappointment, harm, even death may come to my children or others whom I love. The conflict I feel between anything I could possibly do and the great workings of the world--like the death of Bin Laden, the clash of belief and world view that caused the war machine to necessitate his death, the incredible focus and energy that was poured into readying men and materials for such an end. The death, indeed perhaps the life, of any girl and boy in Pakistan, the country in which I was born. In all countries and wrinkles that don't even belong to countries over the face of the earth. All the ways we misunderstand, misconstrue, misapprehend. All the mistakes I have made and will make. All the change that has already come and gone, always. Many of the poems I've learned by heart stream through my mind, watching woods fill up with snow, margaret's goldengrove unleaving, and especially the thrush's ecstatic song shared on the bleakest winter evening.

These are sorrows constantly in and of the world, from which I cannot protect myself or any child. There is no sufficient preparation. And yet. Sometimes I do feel joy instead. And neither the joy nor sorrow are my personal domain. They flow through all like an underground river. If I grieve more in winter did not Demeter before me? When I can't remember what it felt or smelled like to lift a sleeping baby...when I feel a widening distance from my 12 year old child, when I can't remember how to create or to whom I belong, it is winter inside.

In an opening, I can change my position: it is an exchange, not a cartoon flat on the page in which I am pinned without escape by a gravity-bound weight. This is information, this is a window, an update on the world's grief, mirrored by me in microcosm, and I am alive to feel it. It's nebulous doom is true but not the end, sharpening as it does the countering love. Light.

Sound Living Sense

In a book I read over the summer I learned how to describe what it feels like I 've been missing for so much of my life. The book is "Cutting for Stone." In it a singular character is described: someone, though exceptionally dedicated, exotically beautiful, and especially lucky, who cannot progress in her field of nursing.

"She discovered that memorization ("by-hearting," as Matron called it) was of no help to her at the bedside, where she struggled to distinguish the trivial from the life-threatening. Oh yes, she could and did recite the names of the cranial nerves as a mantra to calm her own nerves. She could rattle off the composition of mistura carminativa...But what she couldn't do, and it annoyed her to see how effortlessly her fellow probationers could, was develop the one skill Matron said she lacked: Sound Nursing Sense."

Anyone might expect to be embarrassed by ways they acted as an adolescent, unsure of their social responses and unclear about who they were. Sporadically surfacing into and through my twenties and thirties I felt a vague and then increasingly sharp disappointment with choices I'd made. Who could be comfortable when a hollowness occupies your personal space, but how do you examine what is not there to see? And if it doesn't change as you get older, then you really feel stuck.

I had the perpetual feeling of coming up with a possible answer three days after the question was asked...so often simply having to cover a blank stare with some bluster or awkward silence, almost always only having a narrow literal interpretation. Why didn't I get it all the way other people did? Aha! Maybe because I lacked Sound Living Sense!

It might not seem like so much, what I was missing--but as Stephen Cope says, "a new freedom for well-considered and appropriate action is a very wonderful thing...we become free to claim actions that express who we really are." Who am I, really? When you don't have freedom to choose, the world really is a bewildering, blurry place.

Sound Nursing Sense is more important that knowledge, though knowledge only enhances it. Sound Nursing Sense is a quality that cannot be defined, yet is invaluable when present and noticeable when absent. To paraphrase Osler, a nurse with book knowledge but without Sound Nursing Sense is like a sailor at sea in a seaworthy vessel but without map, sextant, or compass.

EXACTLY SO. Parenting, of course, opened a whole new chapter of misguided responses, a whole new understanding of the words "hot button," a whole new ocean in which to be lost without navigation tools of any kind. Amazingly, now I'm finding a whole set of possible solutions. They knock me over! With their simplicity, purity, curiosity. Like the proverbial feather, they are weightless and quiet. Hear the bickering in the back seat and remember how lucky I am to have two healthy children. See three day's worth of dirty clothing on the floor and choose to feel grateful for the creativity in the incredible drawings they've made of a float plane, a vase of flowers, a bowl of fruit, a portrait of our family.

Why was that so hard before? Why couldn't I distinguish the trivial from the life-threatening? Not to mention life-affirming? Don't think I don't still pick a fight over a sock. Maybe the day I don't even care about that I'll know I'm truly enlightened.

Channels

Yesterday my teacher pointed out the difference between having a list of things to do and inhabiting a place where your tasks are part of a meaningful living process. For a short time I left the home I've made to spend time in the home made by my parents, left my mom/spouse list behind for the daughter one, but I almost didn't recognize it. Then I came back and once again felt myself struggling to locate myself in my life.

After 10 days in the hospital and recovering from an infection and emergency surgery my 79 year old father was hard to recognize too. He is skirting the edges, not taking life for granted. He talked about different things, and in a different way. He talked more about people and relationships, and with more emotion than I've ever seen him show. He thanked me for coming to be with him and my mom. Missing home made me want to leave, but seeing this dramatic change demanded for me to stay and witness. I felt that one other intense time, when I had to hold on to a tiny being and then choose when to let go because it would be forever. Being a parent has forever changed the way I am a daughter.

Life does not feel solid and yet it feels so heavy at times. Words are light. There is so much in them, and in a body and mind. Books full of words are available to me. Stores full of clothing, furniture, ugly and beautiful things. Take take take then throw away. Pull in muscles with or without breathing. Travel with or without enjoying. Stay at home with or without hiding. Hide with or without caring. Care with or without voting. Leave with or without knowing you can return.

The difference appeared in the threads created in the grain of the wood between the knots in the yoga studio ceiling. Where I once saw smiles and then patience (described here), now I see channels. Some ways narrow, widen, narrow, go through. Some are closed off and become islands, gathering places where the density of growth allowed for a branch to shoot off in a new direction. We can make our patterns in the world: breathing with love, moving with acceptance, seeing with appreciation, locating with gratitude. It feels good to find this again, even though I am not beyond questioning it yet.

Just BEING makes it better

The last three days have set me right up on top of my precarious mountain of things to do. Sunshine! Bulbs coming up! Back into yoga, yummy! We are back to rain today, but that is OK. The mountain is still there, but it doesn't seem like I'll get buried in an avalanche, or that I have to drag myself up it, either. Celebrating return, for sure.

I haven't been meditating, but I have been trying to stay mindful. Observing has sounded a bit like this: where did that day go? did I get the pictures to Alex? why does that hurt so much? wow, I am really tired. sweetie, you make a terrific oviraptor. i can't believe i don't square dance all the time, it is so much fun! last evening swimming class, remember goggles and shampoo. what is the right school for theo next year? be the telemark turn, Martha.

Then returning to meditation this morning we did a different kind of bodyscan. Instead of starting with our feet and working up the body we started with the skin and the energy at the edges of the body and went IN. Fascia, voluntary muscles, INvoluntary muscles (can you tell I was fascinated by that one?), viscerae, blood, cells, spaces----between----cells. It gave me that additional expansion that sitting with concepts (and the breath, always the breath) can.

There is so much room for states and beings and yes, tasks, to exist! Curiosity. Creativity. Relationship. Letting go. A little window into the source of suffering: a distorted relationship with time.

Recent question from T: Mom, what is a sixth sense? and does doing yoga give you it?

Okay, back to daily BEING.

An offering

I see friends shaking hands

saying "How do you do?

They're really saying "I love you..."

--Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World

I woke up this morning thinking about my dad. I have been thinking about him a lot lately. For a week before Thanksgiving, he was with one of his best friends, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. John Paul had been through surgery and was going to start chemotherapy, his wife Barbara, also dealing with medical issues, was in the hospital, and his son Greg is not well either. My father went to see his friend, provide support for the family, and give another family member a break from caregiving.

This family was well known to us when I was younger, although as the youngest by a few years I have perhaps fewer memories than the others. We would visit them when we came back to the U.S. from overseas for summer vacations, staying with them in their fascinating house on a hilltop in beautiful West Virginia. Shaggy, wall-to-wall carpeting, the stepped up and down style of rooms, a kitchen with a spiral curving bank of cabinets, and built-in intercoms in the bedrooms all struck me as quite exotic.

My memories of the family members have been coming back, too. Greg and Lynette were like cousins to my brother and sister and I. Greg coached me on how to throw a frisbee, and made me laugh so hard I wet my pants once when we were playing a card game that involved saying "good morning, ma'am" whenever a queen turned up and "good evening, sir" whenever a king did, inevitably as the game sped up twisting the phrases into an hilarious muddle. I loved Lynette's long hair, her glamorousness, and her snappy way of talking.

John Paul and Barb's friendship with my parents cast a new dimension onto them, I suppose our life overseas meant I didn't see my parents with their friends that much, and the idea that they had a full history complete with steadfast friends and events that happened long before I was even a figment was a new idea. John Paul was a bottomless source of pun-, slapstick-, and double-entendre-ridden jokes, riddles, and stories, with an electronic marvel of a machine that, as you spoke into a microphone, repeated your sounds back to you in delayed echo, making it impossible to keep track of what you were saying. Barb seemed quietly wise, a fragile beauty with an absolutely earthbound, practical take on life.

So I was receiving updates by email about how these folks are all doing, and they were full of the logistics of when people got up and how they slept, medical appointments and medications, and the ups and downs of prognoses. They had to be detailed in this way as there will be a need for accuracy and consistency through the other caregivers that come to help. And I thought to myself, this is from the left-brain of my very left-brained father, and he does it very well. Also present in the reports, though, as I read them again, were bits and pieces stolen from the feeling world, an echoing of normality--making a cup of coffee, having a meal together, and who cleans up afterward--the effort of all concerned to take in gracefully a radical new version of daily life.

Unrelated but simultaneously I had a conversation with my father's stock broker and friend, whom I have only spoken to a double handful of times, and he responded to my question of what he was looking forward to in retirement with a statement of admiration for my father and the quality of the life after retirement that he has had. He said to me, and I can't remember the exact words--your father, both your mom and dad, love you so much. And the care that your father has taken with your financial future is rare and wonderful.

So many people we meet through life have an influence that can only be measured in looking back, and then there are those who are present throughout our lives, like our parents, whose love is offered sometimes in ways that are not fully appreciated until experiences of life open a window of understanding. I think of my father taking this time to be with his friend and his friend's family, bringing a measure of order in chaotic and challenging circumstances, as an offering of love. I think of Al the stock broker, fluent in the language of long-term investment and planning for the future, parsing the many visits and deliberations my father must have made about stocks as an offering of love.

I think of these examples and many others--the packages that I received from him that came protected by seven layers of bubble wrap (perhaps I exaggerate--but only a bit), or the times we visited museums or historical sites and he elaborated at length (it seemed to me) his detailed, arcane knowledge of art, architecture, or history, which fell on my young and unappreciative ears. I see now that his language of love was one I couldn't always interpret. So often the love people have isn't offered in the way we think we want it, or can understand it. It isn't always offered as a dialogue, or with instructions on how to assemble. So here is my insight of the moment: you just have to be interested, really curious, about what people's language of love is. It's probably different for everyone you meet. I'm going to look harder for it from now on, and try not to be distracted by the package it comes in, no matter how many layers.

And here is an offering, in my language, for my father, for John Paul, Barbara, Greg and Lynette Jones, and for anyone else who wants to receive it. This offering is for peace, beauty, comfort, and of course, love.

What if I can't hang on to it?

I was thinking the next post would happen sooner and be more about loving-kindness meditation because there's much more to say and I basically side-stepped that last time. But right now I am investigating what I am currently experiencing like a good student of vipassana: two things I bring home tonight from our last meeting of meditation class.

One from our handout:

"Celebrate returning. Meditation practice is about returning again and again. Sometimes it's about returning to the next breath, sometimes it's about returning to meditation after a lapse. We can learn to recognize our lapses and return to our breath or our practice--not with condemnation--but celebration."

One a little personal insight:

Instinctively when time is pressing and lists are growing I think moving faster is the way through. If I can really convince myself this instinct is misguided and slow down enough to regain clarity, simplifying is a natural outcome. Believe it.

I had a mystical window there for a month or so. I had time to pour myself into this class and regular practice of what I was learning, almost every day. I was more aware of myself and others moving through the day. I had time to spend with Theo and Dora. I had time to make sure there wasn't anything rotting in the fridge, I had time to see a good friend once a week or maybe every two weeks, I had time to create some paper and textile things I almost caught up on reconciling our bank account I had time to take on a new project designing interior space I adjusted to the new online signup routine for my lifeline of yoga I started working on halloween costumes way early so that I'd have plenty of time to finish them carefully I have to remember to write a note to my father's close friend diagnosed with a brain tumor I want to stay involved with the art class and the library at school but it's so much time

what has happened everything has sped up and is running together and I am right back to that struggle of how to find time to take care of everything and everyone much less to make time for the thinking and not-thinking of meditation.

what can I do to bolster up my friend who is in the middle of a terrible divorce

what about the friends I haven't had time to call or see

what was I thinking saying I could do this design work everything is needed yesterday and I am so rusty

the build up of cat hair is making my eyes itch

one of the cats has an abscess and requires antibiotics and swabbing twice a day and being enclosed in a place where she won't ooze on the furniture until she heals who bit her?

the halloween costumes--how do I make this wire-frame felt-covered pumpkin head with eyes that glow??

oh my god the floors, the toilets, the litter boxes, the laundry

what shall I plan for the next meal to nourish my family so we stay healthy

how is dora's cold she is still blowing out gobs of snot is she getting better or worse?

my wrist is so sore and does not seem to be getting stronger will it ever not hurt?

will the kids get the flu? I didn't get them to the clinic last week now they are out of vaccine again . . .

I can't stay up to work on any of this stuff now I need to go to sleep

I am definitely lapsing. I look forward to celebrating my return.