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Zen

National day on writing

Wow. There’s a national holiday to celebrate writing practice.

Earlier this month, Congress agreed to designate today, October 20th, as the National Day on Writing to officially recognize the following:

“… the social nature of writing invites people of every age, profession, and walk of life to create meaning through composing… writers continue to learn how to write for different purposes, audiences, and occasions throughout their lifetimes… the National Day on Writing encourages all Americans to write, as well as to enjoy and learn from the writing of others…”

I’m not particularly patriotic but I do feel an odd sense of pride today. What other government encourages their people to write and to enjoy and learn from the writing of others?

It’s as if Natalie Goldberg just became President of the United States! I think about who might be on her Cabinet… Katigiri Roshi, Bob Dylan, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Hampl, Rob Wilder, Thich Nhat Hahn… and other truth seekers of their time. I can see them now… slow walking across the front lawn of the White House. I see congressional members sitting in silence and doing timed writing practice on debate topics. They take turn reading their writings… no commenting… practicing non-judgement… no good, no bad.

The House of Senators and Representatives become a sangha… practicing the universal responsibility of compassion. When there’s misunderstanding, they look to Natalie’s rules on writing and reflecting: “Continue under all circumstances. Don’t be tossed away. Make positive effort for the good.”

OK, maybe a “Zen party” in our political system is too good to be true. But it is amazing that writing practice is a national agenda item for America.

I remember the feeling of “putting myself out there” when I extended my writing practice to blogging. I paced from the living room to dining room thinking, “this is just garbage. Who exactly is going to read this stuff?” And then another writer and friend sent me a message, “Just read the blog…found it quite full of space and inspiring. Keep going!”

Receiving these simple words of encouragement led me from pacing to posting my next entry. Sometimes, more than the burning desire to write, we need encouragement. In my own practice, I have realized that writing is not enough. Just like suffering is not enough. You must transform emptiness into empathy and enthusiasm. With each practice, I face the fear and find the joy in sharing my writing. In this way, I both live and die with each practice. Natalie Goldberg encourages us to see writing practice as a way of “living twice.”

The practice of writing, reading and listening to one another is a tremendous offering of compassion and kindess. It enables us each to slow down… putting pen to paper… mindfully inking our crooked paths to truth… writing what’s in front of our faces… becoming fearless and free. We begin to attain the knowledge that when we practice, we practice not just for ourselves but for others. Alone and in the aggregate, we practice believing in ourselves. Facing the fear of writing and having friends who nicely tell you to “shut up and write” is all part of the practice. Today, we are lucky to have the backing of the entire country… America, let’s pledge allegiance to the pen… pick a topic… ten minutes… go!

Natalie Goldberg / Zen / memoir — No Comments
20
Oct 09

Going Home

Husking rice,
a child squints up
to view the moon.

Forming a mantra of sorts, I recite over and over this haiku from Basho. Poetic displacement allows me to deeply ponder how I, a thirty-something year old business woman, am also a third world child. I see myself, a starry eyed child, harvesting the magic of night and imagining how many villages occupy the earth. Scattered grains of rice are glued to the night sky and tell the story of many lives, many moons. Somehow, I am casted – a displaced speck of rice – transplanted across the ocean… to a life busy with business trips, rush hour traffic and the desire to write my memoir.

It is when life gets its busiest, that I think, “I could just as easily be in a rice field.” Then the lens to life brings everything into focus with the right perspective: life is a wondrous journey. Having humble beginnings as a constant backdrop to day-to-day living is a gift. It reminds me that everything relies upon everything else. My present moment is a result of actions and inactions taken by others both known and unknown to me. This is the river of life… past, present and future flow simultaneously in one moment.

I think about my story… almost dying in an impoverished refugee camp to reliving my past with writing retreats in posh zen settings. I think about how I was a one-year old baby among four brothers, one sister and my parents. There were eight of us divided into two canoes on the Mekong River. Under the watchful eye of my aunt, who signaled us to cross when the communist guards were away, we would escape in broad daylight. As rice farmers, we were accustomed to relying on the river for living. However, on that day, it served as our life line.

I have yet to return to Laos. But day-to-day, the desire grows to “go home.”

There is a chapter entitled, “Going Home” in “Writing Down the Bones where Natalie encourages you to “go home” and return to your roots so that you can be free – so that you stop avoiding anything that you are. This doesn’t mean that we become stuck in our past but that we recognize that it has and always will shape our lives. There is oneness in our beginnings, endings, past, future and present. Acknowledging this allows us to understand ourselves, our family and our world.

I recently watched a talk on TED of Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian writer who is my age, on the danger of a single story. She encourages us to delve deeply into our own stories and to see that the story of our lives is very much like a river… filled with many contributers and tributaries. When we recognize this, we have great understanding that the present moment is backed by a rich past and serves as fertile soil for our fateful futures.

With such truth, we can “go home” in each waking moment. With thoughtful breaths, I am the baby crossing the Mekong as much as I am the busy American aching to write her memoir… to study how one soul carries the spirit of both the east and west. Hopefully, I will visit Laos soon.

To view Chimamanda’s video, click here.

Uncategorized / Zen / poetry — 1 Comment
18
Oct 09

Grooks to Ginsberg… zen with a pen

Small U-HAUL boxes line the back of the sectional sofa filled with books. Stacked in the living room corner, in between a floor lamp with rice paper shades and a three-panel shoji screen in natural wood, are books left behind by Mikael when he moved to Sweden.

On top of the stack is Piet Hein’s “Grooks 4.” It is a pocketsize poetry book with a tangerine cover published in 1973. The upper right hand corner bears a price point of $1.45 in white text. Centered under the author’s name and book title is an illustration of Charles Chaplin on top of the world, palming a peach.

The following poem sits below the picture:

TO CHARLES CHAPLIN
The well you invite us to drink of
is one that no drop may be bought of.
You think of what all of us think of
but nobody else could have thought of.

The smell of aged pages flash by my nostrils as I thumb through fifty-three poems and line drawings. The “First line index” printed on the last four pages fall out of the book but remains stitched together. I read down the list of first phrases followed by a series of dots leading to page numbers. “All we know…..31″… “If we want Peace…..8″… “If you look anew…..44″ … I tucked the loose pages into the back accordian folder of my Moleskine journal; what great writing practice topics!

Turns out Piet Hein was a Danish poet, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, writer and game designer who fiercely leveraged the pen as his weapon for peace during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. His short poems, gruks or grooks, were published in a daily newspaper and as graffiti. “Kumbel” was his alias, which means “tombstone.”

My right thumb and index finger carefully traced the edges of the book. In my hands, I held a piece of the Danish resistance movement… poetry and simple callings for peace from a spiritual scandanavian scientist. I deliberately pondered this for a few breaths. Who else turned to poetry as a form of igniting peace? Thich Nhat Hahn. Allen Ginsberg?

Yes. Allen Ginsberg. I remember Natalie Goldberg reading Howl to us in a writing workshop. I look up the first line in Howl… “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..”

Then Ginsberg wrote, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” with the first lines reading, “I’m an old man now, a lonesome man in Kansas, but not afraid…”

I think about poetry as an expression of peace. I think of these two men… in two hemispheres… protesting two wars… with a pen.

I did sitting meditation tonight… eyes closed… ears drinking down piano notes… playing the composition entitled, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” by Philip Glass.

Meditation / Zen / poetry — No Comments
17
Oct 09

A Stripped Sycamore

I walk the neighborhood tonight searching for the moon. It’s there but cannot be seen in a new moon phase. In its absence are bright dots I believe to be either Venus or Mars. Left in its void, I think about how the nature of all things is to come and go… even the moon.

At the end of Minnehaha Circle stands a sycamore under the mustard glow of a street lamp. I stopped to study its features: flaking bark, camouflage trunk, smooth almond skin, yellowing broad maple-like leaves with some brown seed balls hanging off bare branches. Beside it, squats a bottle brush tree bearing no red bristles. But hanging at the tip of its lowest branch is an empty hummingbird feeder.

In today’s timed writing practice, I listed all the trees that I could name: live oak, pin oak, norfolk pine, sycamore, southern magnolia, bottlebrush, poplar, japanese maple, japanese magnolia, dogwood, sakura, loblolly pine, ponderosa pine, cabbage palm, bald cypress, birch, crape myrtle, juniper, cottonwood, maple, ginko, aspen, fir, banyan, bodhi, elm, crabapple, redwood and weeping willow.

Somehow, in writing and reciting their names, I felt as if I was recounting my own bloodline. Thich Nhat Hahn teaches that in our former lives we were trees. By studying and naming them, we give reverence to these great beings. The lineage of every living being is completely rooted in the existence of trees. They stand and surround us… forming a sangha for us to practice the dharma at all times. They breathe out for us to breathe in. Whether we see the forest from the trees, we can learn many lessons from their being… from our interbeing.

On the cover of Thay’s book, “Being Peace,” two gold aspen leaves touch; their stems flowing toward the word peace. In the book, he provides an example of how trees teach us interbeing.

“Leaves are usually looked upon as the children of the tree. Yes, they are children of the tree, born from the tree, but they are also mothers of the tree. The leaves combine raw sap, water and minerals, with sunshine and gas, and convert it into variegated sap that can nourish the tree. In this way, the leaves become the mother of the tree… The leaves are linked to the tree by a stem. The stem is very important.”

We are incredibly linked. This is the message from the sycamore. As I sit in meditation, I see the sycamore. As I write, my eyes trace the veins of my hand and I see its branches. My feet is supported by the same ground storing its roots… we are sisters. I think about Thay’s message of how the stem is important… our link… our connection… our interbeing.

I think about my sister. Even through our estrangement, the link remains. Last fall, the two of us shared a loveseat. I listened while she put aside three years of silence to tell me stories of how our mother never measured up… of how a connection was never formed between the two of them… of how much sadness and suffering she has had to endure. I listened to her explain, more to herself than to me, that birthorder delivered a relationship between my parents and me (the baby). But she never could get there with them.

We’ve held hands and clenched kleenexes through two funerals since then. Each encounter erased the jagged edges of us being torn apart by our own judgements of one another.

I sit with the sycamore’s message. I visualize picking small pieces of brown, gray and yellow bark along with a sycamore seed and leaf and placing them into a large manila envelope… tonight’s meditation is sealed within. I send it to her from my heart.

I want to say, “Sissy, you may not feel the connection… but it is there. Just as we cannot see the moon when it does not reflect the sun, we know that it is there. We are linked. The stem is important. You, like a leaf of a tree, are the child of mother earth and father sky.”

About a year ago, I traveled to Charleston to attend Natalie Goldberg’s writing workshop on memoir. I penned a poem entitled, “A Stripped Sycamore” during the trip.

A Stripped Sycamore

A January jaunt
A memoir to jot

Gangling loblolly pines
Form pickets to an imperfect fence
Framing an elusive childhood
Guarded by the horizon of a history gathered

Mental baskets unwoven
From waves of cord grass
Bent deep in concentration
Stillness swallows the swamp in winter
Chicora carries a recall on life

A slow garden stroll
Stirs contemplation in the camellias
As tea olives sweeten the afternoon mist

At the streets of North Market and Meeting
A fiddler adds rhythm to the rush
Pen kisses paper
Inking a hush

In the glance of stain glass
A bright existence winks
A Meyer lemon, glowing with intention
Falls softly to the hanging fog
The sudden heart bursts
Bleeding color into the gray gap of time

A stripped Sycamore
Dashed by naked truths
Stands alone

Who will mourn its timber?

At the time, I did not know the root meaning of this poem. It was not until I came across a passage in Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird by Bird,” that I connected to my own poetry…”an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, who God loves unconditionally anyway.”

“Ahh… the sycamore is Sissy,” I sighed to myself. I thought about my sister’s loneliness and suffering. I thought about how she could choose to forgive an imperfect childhood to stand rooted, drawing strength, from her own personal truths. And if she continued along this angry alienated path, I worried and wondered about who would be there for her.

Anne Lamott also says, “Forgiveness is giving up all hopes of having had a better past… I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

I spoke to my sister last week. She informed me of how stressed she is with work and how her boss is unbearable. She had made the decision to quit to create the space for new opportunities. Every morning she has prayed for the strength to endure each work day. One morning she prayed for her boss as well. I listened to her last week just as I had listened to her last fall.

Tonight, I send her my meditation and my heart… forgiving our past and feeling our present connection. I trust the sycamore’s wisdom. I see myself as one of its leaves… fluttering off a branch… completely trusting that I will land with new possibilities and pathways to my own heart.

I pray that my sister chooses the path of forgiveness. Then, perhaps, we can be two gold aspen leaves touching, flowing to peace… forever connected.

Writing Practice / Zen — No Comments
8
Oct 09

Taking flight

Mourning dove nesting,
“He has flown away,” it coos
I echo its cries

A mourning dove coos from the magnolia tree outside my kitchen window. John is gone. I listen closely to the sweet echoes of his peaceful passing. The dove knows so much.

I first came across sandhill cranes on the long quiet highway between Maitland and Lakeland in the early hours of morning. On Polk Parkway sits an abandoned white semi-truck with bold and faded sans serif text reading, “Find Happiness in Polk County … We Make it Easy.” Right past this point, smooth pastures stage the sunrise. This is where I spotted them. Slowing my volvo to a crawl, I watched them walk with one exaggerated step in front of another. They marched in groups and in rhythm. Grace wobbly flowed from red mohawks to lanky necks and down stick legs. I was mesmerized by their movements.

I later read that millions of sandhill cranes gather in Nebreska along the Platte River every year, a point along their path of migration. Jane Goodall observed these cranes and was profoundly moved. She believed them to be symbols of hope and wrote, “We can view them on their great migratory journeys as peace messengers, their display along the river as a Dance of Peace. They tell us that there is hope even in darkness. They tell us there will be peace at the end. ”

Cranes are considered spiritual creatures in eastern philosophy. It is believed that souls are carried by them to higher levels of spiritual enlightenment.

On my birthday this year, three sandhill cranes casually strolled the parking lot outside my company’s building. I watched from the fourth floor boardroom, squinting to see the red dashes atop their heads. It was a week and half before John would ride upwards on their wingspan to realms unknown to me, sitting in the physical world of illusion.

I took many walks during the time of John’s sickness. I take many walks now, ten weeks after his passing.

It was on the walking path at Minnehaha Park, that Carl and I encountered Bright Eyes. Yellow orbs observed us from a low branch of a live oak, stopping us in our tracks. Dazed and amazed, we stood only a few feet away from a burrowing owl. Rotating its head in a full circle, it scanned for prey. We eventually locked eyes with the unblinking bird. I held my breath, not wanting to disrupt the feathery sage.

Somehow, the owl’s presence provided powerful perception. I remember meditating on the experience and sensing that it was perhaps a guardian of the night, of darkness, of death. Its traditional symbolism of wisdom, intellect and protection resonated brilliantly in my breathing.

I have re-walked that same path many evenings since John’s death, hoping for another meeting with Bright Eyes.

Molly often fretted over the crows that gathered on the patio during the time of John’s illness. Omens for death and darkness, their oily black bodies bothered her as she hand washed dishes; scrubbing desperately for another outcome. I remember the kitchen blinds being closed during that time.

Swans gathered on a lake the evening we moved John into room 103 at Palm Terrace Hospice House. I relayed his last sunset to him when feeding him a slice of canned mandarin oranges. The swan’s white bodies glided and glowed on watery streaks of lavender, gold, sherbert and strawberry. The lucid sunset marked the final preparation for my brother’s peaceful passing.

John took his time chewing on the fleshy, orange crescent… savoring our last conversation. His last words to me were, “I never knew how much sweetness could be in one bite.”

The next morning, I sat on a plane ready for the take off. It was going to be a connecting flight from Orlando to Charlotte; landing in Lexington, Kentucky. I had just put my carry-on luggage in the overhead bin when my PDA vibrated. It was a voicemail from Melissa. John was no longer responding.

“Come home if you can,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Popping out of my seat, I quickly spoke to the flight attendant and found myself breathing deeply, driving to the hospice house. I arrived a few hours before John took his last breath. He moaned loudly when I first entered the room. I latched onto the right side of his hospital bed and whispered all the loving words that I could utter.

As fate would have it, my brother took off the runway that day. I remained seated, as he flew into eternal skies. The doves knew this. The cranes too. The swans gathered. The owl confirmed. I accepted.

Natalie Goldberg / Writing Practice / Zen — No Comments
5
Oct 09

Contact

I sat cross-legged on a leather ottoman in the front lawn counting my breaths when two friends made contact with me through text messages.

“Wow. You have to see the moon. It’s beautiful.”

“A beacon of light to guide us through the night.”

It was low hanging, full and fuzzy with a tangerine glow. The end of the street became the edge of the galaxy where the moon looked more like Mars. My mind quieted as my eyes became transfixed on the moon’s slow rise. From the horizon, it moved behind the branches of a live oak. I sat admiring the illuminated mosaic. The cicadas ended choir practice when I noticed how high the moon hung into the night’s sky. By then, it had lost its orange hue. Bats fluttered and swooped over my head.

Remnants of the morning’s garage sale surrounded me. Two tall birch bookcases, a size seven pair of Solomon rollerblades, a computer monitor, a 14″ TV, two queen sized mattresses encased in card board boxes, a grey felt hat and other random objects that the two car garage had manage to collect.

There was also a matching leftover piece to the ottoman; a scalloped armchair tanned and stained with memories. The pair used to sit in front of a stone wall and fireplace in a house in Stone Mountain, Georgia. The same house that hosted my wedding and the divorce of Carl’s parents. Memories flashed and faded as I sat, sunken in the leather square.

I missed my dead brother. I worried about my fragile father. I listened to the non-singing cicadas. I texted back my friends. Retreating into the night, I sat with many thoughts that mirrored slow moving clouds covering and uncovering a soothing source of light. Sometimes I felt blanketed by a broad, tender connectivity of many things and people. The bright dot in the sky reflected our collective experiences: death and divorce… love and loss… pain and progress. Somehow, life’s polarities coexist within us and are in harmony like sun and moon. People are as complex as the cosmos. Our lives and bodies contain multitudes of emotions and experiences. Each one of us serves as a microcosm that could take many lifetimes to explore.

So, what keeps us moving when we feel pinned to the pains of life? What makes us hopeful in moonlight when we sit in the depths of our own darkness?

This weekend, I read a few pages of Linda Goodman’s “Love Signs,” a book that a friend loaned to me. The first few pages contained insights and perhaps answers to such questions.

“Love is man’s and woman’s deepest need. It’s not the threat of illness or poverty that crushes the human spirit, but the fear that there is no one who truly cares – no one who really understands. We all reach desperately for love, no matter how healthy, wealthy or wise we may be, because the alternative is loneliness.”

Another book that I am currently reading, “The Power of Kindness” by Piero Ferrucci, talks about the need for us to touch and be touched … to make contact with one another. The author advises that “in the contact with another, we feel naked. We are exposed, defenseless. All we have is our being.”

I think about my most recent conversations and contact with family and friends. Strong connections are felt only in real moments of honesty and vulnerability, I realize. Truth is the only way souls communicate and connect. Our relationships and friendships are the only instruments and paths for growth… for love. The alternative is distance and introversion from human kind and “human kindness” which will imprison us to our own solitude.

I remember Natalie Goldberg quoting Jack Kerouac: accept loss forever.

I think about my recent contacts with death. I sit with the emptiness it leaves. Deep emptiness and empathy form craters on my heart’s surface. I sit accepting their loss forever: my grandmother, my dogs, my brother and my nephew. I know that others simultaneously sit with me. Under the same night sky, we silently witness the transformation of our own souls. We feel deeply the poetic teachings of Ryokan, “when I think about all the sadness of others, their sadness becomes mine.”

Piero Ferrucci writes, “When nothing interferes with death, a contact full of pathos is possible, a freeing of feelings and intuition. Pain opens us. However isolated we may feel, we are still in relation to millions of others. Contact is a door through which kindness can flow.”

Meditation / Writing Practice / Zen — 1 Comment
1
Oct 09

Lavender sunset

Diced tofu lined the cutting board beside a colander of broccoli florets. Jasmine rice steamed on the counter. I drizzled olive oil in a wok when my iPhone buzzed and a text message appeared.

“Go out to see the sunset.”

I stepped out of my front door and walked down the line of square slates that connected the curb of the road to my doorstep. My eyes traced the roots of a live oak upwards until its branches touched the sky. There it was – the last sunset in September. I stood quietly and listened to the crescendo of cicadas. The world has a way of providing us great warmth in moments of solitude.

I re-entered my house and responded to my dear friend’s message.

“Oh, how Zen! I needed that today. Nothing is lovelier than lavender skies!”

Her reply: “Yes, lovely as u r”

I melted when I received this kind recognition. To not only be seen as lovely but to be considered as lovely as a sunset is so kind. Two simple text messages ended my day in such warmth. I am grateful for good friends who take pause to look upwards when the day ends.

In remembrance of the moment, I wrote a haiku:

Lavender sunset
Last September evening
Cicadas sing on

What gifts…a moment of peace…a poem…a painted sky of lavender, sherbert and gold. God had taken a rainbow, dripped in honey and stirred…creating the most moving sunset I have witnessed in a while.

I re-entered my house to finish my stir fry for dinner. I sit now with a milky cup of earl grey tea sweetened with orange blossom honey. I notice the wet ring it makes on the dining room table.

In this watery enso, I sense the fullness of a friend’s love and the emptiness of solitude all at once. Emotions from the day surface, making some sips of tea sweet and other sips sour. Somehow my feelings had colored the sky: tense red, calm blue and cheerful yellow.

I had just left a stressful meeting when a co-worker called to invite me for a quick cup of coffee. We both needed a break. We picked up a grande vanilla latte and tall hot chocolate through a Starbucks drive-thru. Instead of rushing back in the building we both sat in silence, sipping our drinks. Clouds shapeshifted and pine trees cheered with needly pom-poms. The windshield framed for us a reflection of our own minds — thoughts constantly adrift. After simmering down, we both re-entered our busy work day.

I am fortunate to have received such kindness and warmth today. How lucky I am to have good friends who sit with clouds and sunsets. I find relief and comfort to know that there are people with whom I can connect with in this manner. Sharing a sunset or a sip of tea can bring fullness to any moment. It is said that a Zen artist can only paint an enso when they are spiritually complete and mind free. The watery circle is now dotted and drying. I see myself clearly: a point traveling along a large universal circumference.

In “Illuminations on the Path to Nowhere,” Paul Ferrini writes, “all of us will awaken when we are ready…while this moment may be only one point on the circle, any point will do.”

Cheers to sunsets, friends and tea.

Uncategorized / Writing Practice / Zen — 1 Comment
28
Sep 09

I’m looking at…

I’m looking at a dozen Peruvian lilies leaning out of a tall rectangular glass vase that tapers into a square bottom. Dashed and undashed plum petals come together to quietly listen to rain. French doors cut the patio into forty fragments of the same scene. Concentric circles form on the pool’s surface as cloud droplets dive into a rectangle chlorinated pond. Trapped water on the lanai screen serve as a blurry backdrop. Bougainvillea poke through the corner edges.

I sit at the dining room table surrounded by five empty chairs. There is a lot to reconcile. An assortment of fruit nap in a fruit bowl nearby: hass avacadoes, barlett pears, a mango and a granny apple. I realize that there are no bananas. Then I remember banana trees – the ones from my grandmother’s dream. I begin to see her again… in the rain.

She loved bathing in the rain. I remember how her hair resembled an abstract painting of india ink. Thick and thin wet strokes of black and silver streaked down the smooth pearl canvas of her back. She sat on an old wooden picnic bench and faced acres of farmland in a sarong knotted tightly to her chest. I wonder if she longed for her youth in Laos. Her beauty was often spoken of in the family as my parents, aunts and uncles tried to recount her suitors and her marriage to a French man. Sitting, wet with memory, maybe brought back for her bathing in the Mekong river and a time when she was a woman wild with romance.

I sat in her hospital room during Thanksgiving break studying for the final exam of an organic chemistry class in my freshman year of college. The LCD screen of my laptop glowed and served as the only source of light in the room. Lips slightly ajar, my grandmother slept breathing softly through her mouth. Her dentures smiled through a cylinder glass of water sitting on a nightstand nearby.

My fingers stopped tap dancing on the keyboard when she moaned.

“Birdie, can you turn off the lights?”

“Thoo, the lights are off. Go back to sleep.”

“No, they’re too bright!” she insisted and then gasped in surprise, eyes still closed.

“Oh! It’s a party. They threw me a party. Oh, look at the banana trees. Oh, all of my friends are dancing and drinking. I’m in the middle of the circle.”

I quickly got up and groped for the beige switches on the wall. The lights blinked on as her eyelids opened.

“Grandma, were you dreaming?” I asked, concerned.

She smiled and nodded, “I want to go back to sleep.”

A week later, she died in the same hospital room. I wasn’t beside her but I knew that night that she was ready for the transition. She entered a dimension free of disease in order to dance again. Her diabetes infested body would be the only thing to die. A free spirit, she would be twirling and spinning… back to being the life of the party… back to being beautiful again.

I was in my dorm room when my father called to tell me that Grandma had died. I tried to swallow the news but her death got stuck in my throat. I don’t remember responding to him but I heard him repeatedly ask, “Birdie, are you there?”

I was the only one that cried at her funeral. The tears didn’t fall softly like gentle afternoon rain. Thunderstorms ripped through my eyelids. I was angry for not being by her side the moment she died. I was angry that no one else cried.

The morning before I returned to school, I sat at my parent’s dining room table staring at dried tulips. Yellow stems scratched at the sides of a glass vase. A stained line indicated where water used to be. I was empty and couldn’t cry anymore.

Now, I sit face-to-face with another vase full of crimson lilies. I realize that my grandmother never died. She is now the rain.

Writing Practice / Zen — No Comments
25
Sep 09

Becoming a larger person

The thief left it behind -
the moon
At the window.
-Ryokan

I am large. I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman

A half moon hangs tonight. I’ve come full circle.

It’s been ten weeks since my brother died. The scale has tipped. He has been dead longer than he suffered. A sense of wonderment lingers in his absence.

The world slowed and clouds paused the afternoon that John was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. Somehow, night managed to appear that day. We walked the sixth floor of Lakeland Regional Hospital in silence and stopped to gaze out the window. A half moon hung against a sky void of stars. I’m certain he focused on its fullness while I struggled for perspective.

The days blurred into one indescribable passage of time. When he could no longer walk, we practiced sitting meditation. One afternoon, we practiced Japanese brush painting. Melissa stroked a sun burst. John diligently detailed the petals of a rose. I inked a winter bird alone on a branch. We formed a painting sangha and filled the dining room with peace from our creative focus.

When he couldn’t sit, we practiced deep breathing in shivasana or the yoga posture known as corpse pose. Tracing our breaths from the toes to the tips of our heads. Body flat. Belly up. Belly down. Somehow, by breathing and interbeing, our collective suffering softened.

I remember driving to the grocery store to purchase canned mandarin oranges the day John moved into room 103 at Palm Terrace Hospice House. Somewhere between the hospice house and the Publix on Bartow Highway, I found myself sitting at a lake and witnessing an enormous gathering of swans celebrating the sunset.

One slice of orange and the swans at sunset became the last meal and mental image I shared with John. He died into a thunderstorm the next day. Pastor Huggins prayed beside him. My mother chanted mantras into his right ear. I whispered encouragement in his left ear. My father was at his feet. Carl linked the arms of my parents. Molly, Melissa and I formed a row of wife, daughter and sister. It was a beautiful death.

Now, I sit, reflecting under yet another half moon. His absence merged with my presence. I mourn peacefully.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, “Being Peace,” he teaches that before the Buddha passed away, he said, “Dear Friends, my physical body will not be here tomorrow but my teaching body will always be here to help. You can consider it as your own teacher, a teacher who never leaves you.”

I take great refuge in this teaching as I sense that my brother has become part of the Buddha’s Dharmakaya… an eternal path to love and understanding. I am grateful for his kind existence. He led a peaceful life and earned a peaceful death.

In the same book, Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us to understand that to suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. That life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects. And to meditate well, we have to smile a lot.

I sit tonight coexisting with the sadness of loss and smile at the sweet memories of my brother. Helping him transition from the physical to metaphysical state asked of me to practice deep acceptance. Death is certain. But we all make it out alive because the dead end is really a doorway.

I’m still practicing to become a larger person. One who can be kind and smile at her own contradictions. One who can fall a part in her own suffering yet can be pulled forward by her belief in the larger picture of life…that all changes occur with our deepest blessings because the soul needs growth.

Meditation / Zen — No Comments
24
Sep 09

Buddhist Stupas on Thunder Mountain in Sedona, Arizona.

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Buddhist Stupas on Thunder Mountain in Sedona, Arizona.

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Buddhist Stupas on Thunder Mountain in Sedona, Arizona.

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