... detour to my writing class. It began life in a senior center, and the seniors so loved the teacher, they refused to let her go after her allotted number of weeks. That was a few years ago. The class has remained loyal and grown so that we have had to move to a larger venue in a church hall. While our teacher is barely 40, the rest of us are in our 50's, 60's, 70's. We even have an 84 year old, a lively woman with more energy than me most days, who has a paying job ("I'm their token senior") and inspires me no end. Actually all the ladies inspire me no end...
... and then I was back to the blog, all these good things to write about, one after another: Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving and Field Day - and then I came home last week from the Field Day to a terrible message on the answering machine and a new and tragic 'culminating activity': my husband's 28-year-old nephew had died in the night. No-one knew what had happened only that he wouldn't wake up. This the son of my husband's younger brother, who died suddenly of a heart attack two years ago. Too much sorrow! For the family, especially for his mother, his sister. For his grandfather, my husband's Dad, and his aunt, my husband's sister, who looked upon this boy as the son she never had.
All this is happening in Pennsylvania, on the other side of the country, in the big house in Bucks County where John's parents lived with his younger siblings, when we were married in 1978. There were six children; John is the second oldest. John's mother was the heart of the family, kindness itself. We spent every Sunday there in those early years, before we moved to California. In winter we'd go ice skating on the creek, or play Monopoly for hours with the younger brothers, while Mr Dad shouted at the football games on TV. Mrs Mom would provide hot chocolate with marshmallows, and all sorts of fattening treats throughout the day, as well as a blow-out dinner and heaping bowls of ice cream later on. This was the big easy uncomplicated family I had yearned for growing up. People with roots, who stayed put, who had built a house on land owned by a great grandfather. They were like a family out of a really good children's book.
Now the house is falling into disrepair, and only one of John's sisters remains with Mr Dad whom we now call Pop. Mrs Mom is dead, as are shockingly the two younger brothers. The nephew lived with them, grandfather and aunt, in a happy arrangement, three generations together. Now the survivors are reeling. Talking to Pop: "When you're 92 you think you've seen it all. And then this..."
How to put the pieces together? Workshop, Retreat, Thanksgiving/Field Day, Death... I've been trying to let it be. Trusting that the lesson will rise up. But being impatient to a fault, secretly worrying over the pieces like a jigsaw made of sky: you KNOW there's a pattern, you just can't see it. And then I received this quote by Malcolm Muggeridge in an email: "Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message." I believe that ours is not a random universe and that everyone's particular life is his or her own teacher. But sometimes the lessons are universal. If I didn't think that, I'd be writing all this in a diary. So here goes.
When I was first writing about Sasha's workshop, I was focused on myself and what I got out of it. But now as I have to keep working to fold each new event into my non-random universe, it's as though the camera has zoomed back to show the bigger picture. The lesson of the workshop was not simply about my own "core wound" - but more importantly, that we all have a core wound. It was about looking around that room at those strong women, and knowing - because each one 'fessed up - that every one of them has some deep buried hurt. Briefly, with the short-lived clarity of death, I saw us as the small children we once were, hiding behind our grown-up faces, doing the best we can.
The lesson of the All Day retreat was to slow down and fight against the robotic programming, the instant reaction, the thing inside us that is so quick to say "oh yes! this reminds me of that, this is that, therefore this is what we do next." No! Every situation is unique, just as every person is unique, and is changing moment by moment. Our wanting things to be this way, once and for all, is our attempt to control things that seem to make no sense. A 28 year old boy dying in his sleep makes no sense. My husband says, "28 is when I met you. My life up to that point was a bit of a disaster. It all turned around after 28. It began then." So there is deep sorrow that this boy will not have that same chance to make who knows what of his life. But even that thought is programming, is our clever minds, comparing and analyzing. Who can say about a person's life and judge it in any way?
For me, the immediate lesson to be drawn from that death, from all death, was simply this: to treat everyone in my life as if I could lose them tomorrow. Because one day I will. Either I go or they go. So at all times, make sure I am current with my friends, no smoldering resentments, nothing left unsaid, especially not the words of thanks or appreciation or love. We are all in this together, whistling past the graveyard, doing the best we can. Sometimes it is an act of supreme courage just to get out of bed in the morning. We need to recognize that in each other and be kind to one another. It is the very least we can do. It is about relentlessly living in the present, not carrying on grudges from long ago, but reaching out in dialogue, searching for truth always tempered by kindness. This was so obvious that first day. Less obvious now, when the pain the family is experiencing is so deep, it's hard not to get lost in it.
Since I heard this news, I have had an overwhelming urge to bake. I am not much of a cook, nor yet a baker, but this urge feels so right. I imagine a long long line of women stretching back into the mists of time, who when they hear some terrible news reach for the flour, the butter, the eggs. The instinctive urge to take measured heaps of raw ingredients, and by combining them just so, to create something sweet and nourishing out of one big mess. Sometimes you have to throw your hands up at the larger picture, which makes no sense from our limited view, but here in the smaller one, the one bound by a hot stove and mixing bowls and wooden spoons and cookie sheets, a tiny bit of goodness at least can prevail.
I think of my daughter and her friend, staying up till 4:30 in the morning on the day before Thanksgiving, baking pies, preparing the stuffing, putting in a huge amount of effort on their one day off just so we four could eat like kings. They had never cooked the traditional Thanksgiving feast before, and they wanted to do it right. They did, and the effort showed, and the whole thing was deeply touching in the way that things are, whenever people expend a enormous amount of energy on something that will not last. Acting as if it matters. According to the poet Linda McCarriston, it does matter. In a poem entitled "Thanksgiving," about why we bother with all the work of this big feast, she writes:
"Any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,
with an intent to make order, matters."
with an intent to make order, matters."
There is something else of course. All this jumble of stuff happening, the good, the bad, the ugly, and me trying to capture it on paper and then having to rewrite it because more stuff happens and like a turn of the kaleidoscope, there's a whole new picture, and how to make sense of that? Then I realize this. That my attempt to write this experience is an attempt to nail Life itself down and squeeze it into a box. To proclaim "and then this happened" as if there were only one this. And by fixing it with words, hope that it would remain this forever more. Then I find myself getting all hot under the collar because stuff keeps happening. Life does not go on a coffee break while you jot down what's happened up to now. It barrels along, and just when you think you know the plot and how the story ends, it throws a curve ball. Besides the big events I mentioned, in the last month a cousin of mine died unexpectedly; a friend of a friend committed suicide; I baked three batches of oatmeal raisin cookies and gave most of them away but not before I gained five pounds; I wrote a rude parody of Jingle Bells that I thought was hilarious and nobody else did, and so on. What a funny collection of events! Where's the coherent plot? Life is change, and because we want things to stay put (but only the good things, thank you!), we suffer, just like the Buddha said.
This wanting it to make sense is once again the work of our clever minds, ceaselessly looking for patterns. It is what it does, after all. It is what it is programmed to do. Take a bunch of raw data, flip through the giant rolodex in our heads that contains all of our memories of books, plays, events, people, and so on, looking for matches and extrapolating from that situation to this. Good basic survival skills. But the moment I try to fix what has happened on paper and say it was like this, something happens to throw that earlier event into a different light. It wasn't that what I had written was no longer true, but it was no longer the whole truth. It was limited, like the five blind men describing the elephant according to what part of the elephant they happened to be touching. This is probably one big yawn to everyone out there, but for me, who has been such a believer in black and white thinking all my life, it is a revelation to see in my bones that there is no such thing. Truth is changing moment by moment. Our little selves, yearning for security, try to make it otherwise by creating elaborate stories and getting it down quick before we forget. But it's not that we forget - it's that things change and what was once true is no longer wholly true. Only we don't want to believe it because it makes life utterly precarious and begs the question, "Who are we?"
So what if it's much simpler than we think? What if this ceaseless change is simply the way life is, and our task is to learn to ride it like a surfer, without falling into the troughs and drowning? What if we are much simpler than we think? What if we are not our thoughts at all? Or as Krishnamurti would say, what if we are only thought? There's an unsettling thought.
And in that case, perhaps what matters is immersing ourselves in the little things, moment by moment, as if they matter - because after all, what else is there but this very moment? Can we hold a philosophy in our hands or touch an idea? Can we get our heads around The Meaning of Life and Death, in important capitals? Do we have any answers? Perhaps a more useful question is: Why do we need answers? Why isn't it enough to be alive? I keep coming back to the Field Day in my writing class. It involved word games which we, the students, invented, covering everything we had learned over the past several months. We worked hard at our games ("Define ephrastic poetry"), played them with gusto. We brought prizes and props and good things to eat. Like my girls staying up till 4:30 a.m. to cook us a Thanksgiving feast, it is important to pay attention to the effort that went into that Field Day, because the effort is all there is. Each of these women, carrying terrible stories of their own of heartbreak and loss, understand the importance of putting story aside, of showing up and making an effort. The moment I got home and heard the message about my nephew, I got it too, that what we had shared that morning was not just a fun time. It was the stuff of life.
Here's this about the Dalai Lama by Jeffrey Hopkins : "...when the Dalai Lama went to Europe for the first time, he would arrive in a city and announce, “Everyone wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.” That's it, isn't it? What we have in common, animals, plants, human beings - all living things. So simple. So hard to grasp. I think it is brave to reach out to others, brave to make an effort, brave to enter cheerfully into the spirit of things, in a world where change, if not outright tragedy, can and does strike when you least expect it. I wrote to the writing class almost as soon as I heard the awful news:
"I wish I could hold each of your faces and tell you how dear you are to me. How touched I am for the effort that everyone put in to our Field Day. Ribbons and prizes and special paper and forfeits and so many good things to eat. I'm only sorry it takes a shock like death to wake us up and appreciate every single moment we're alive."
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| Me telling my Helen how dear she is |
I wrote this shortly after my nephew's death and meant it with all my heart. But time has passed (not even ten days!) and I am no longer that open and vulnerable. Now I just wish I were that good. And wonder sadly what it all means. And know that in a week I will read this and wonder what I was trying to say and why don't I feel it any longer - proving my very point that everything changes and nothing remains the same. Including this person I think is me.
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