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.

Happily Ever...Now

All stories that end "happily ever after" should be amended to read "...and they lived happily IN THAT MOMENT." Leave them alone after that! Who knows what comes next? Write your own story, because NOW is the only moment in which you can be happy.

Posting from the dig

My meditation teacher said these words to close our sitting session today:

May all be happy

May all be free from pain

May all live with love and compassion

May all awaken, and be free

All those who are being born and those who are dying

Those who are peaceful and those who are violent

Those who are poor, and those who have great wealth.

And sitting there I felt the compression of those intentions into the very small space of my heart, which in the wrong conditions would be unspeakably depressing: they cannot all occur, and we are immobilized right here with our human misery. Luckily all the conditions were right: I was sitting with like-minded people in a quiet room, the clocks echoing each other in a perfectly syncopated drumbeat like musician's hearts, having delivered my children to their safe, welcoming, sweet teachers and friends, with the memory of a good day yesterday and the prospect of a good day ahead. I could take it in, and make space. Perhaps it is more accurate to say make time?

How to do this when feeling pressed? When conditions aren't ideal?

It seems to be all about time, and timing. It is not always the right time to claim my needs, my wants, my view of the way things should be. There will be time for it, though. Meanwhile there is an opportunity for there to be other ways, other's needs, other's gifts. Open, open, says my heart (and you have to do it right when you are asking your son for the three-thousandth time to hang up his clothes instead of dumping them on the floor, it adds) and allow the time for the process. The trick is knowing when the right time for the right point of connection is in relationship, isn't it? Like knowing when is the right time to swing the bat to connect with the ball. Too early or too late and I get nothin'.

That moment in meditation class was full of both sadness and joy at the same time, evenly matched. Everyone is being born, everyone is dying, everyone is peaceful and everyone is violent, everyone is poor and everyone has great wealth.

In my mind I saw the sound of the bell aerobatically leaving the metal cylinder like a stunt plane doing a sixteen point roll, and leveling out as it flew by, crossing my face at lip-level and lifting the corners of my mouth into an involuntary smile. As the bell sounded again to end the session I saw all those intentions dissolve into a fine mist that expanded in all directions, swelling my boundaries and saturating my cells.

Last night my daughter said "when I have a tooth under my pillow and I lay back on it, I feel like my pillow is magic." It seems that losing teeth is a good time for memorable life lessons from Dora, as I wrote about another one here! What's this one?-- about waiting for the right time, and not knowing when that will be, and relating in the moment as well as you can, letting rigidity go.

Good grief! It's the same, it's the same lessons over and over, yet always I feel like an archeologist unearthing something buried by hundreds of feet of lava.

And so much for facebook. That lasted about one week. I gotta connect with faces, with voices, with energy. Excuse me for being an old fart, but Facebook is indifferently crazy and crazy-making.