checking in
dear friends,
i've got my feet on the ground now. thinking about being a human being. thinking of my relative who is closer to death than anyone else i know, wondering what she lives for, has lived for these many years in a bed in a care facility. what do we breathe into when we don't have our hands for making, our relations for talking, our food for preparing? what does she live for? all i know is that every time i visit her i feel grateful to know someone as relaxed and in surrender as she. i'm grateful, then, that she has lived as long as she has so that i was able to know her and love her. great aunt, a great teacher. someone who meditates and chants everyday. or, more plainly put, someone who followed her heart to a larger perspective.
wise ones from an old woman:
it's only pain. she says this a lot.
everything can change in ten minutes. she said this last week in the emergency room.
it's so good to see you people. all of you. i just remembered that her sister said this to us weeks before her death.
and then there's the unspoken, tricky sparkle in her eye that makes me think of garlic ice cream, plants under a grow light, playing dress-up in her living room while she laughed from her wheelchair, eating only milkshakes for, um, maybe five years, how she coos when i touch her.
there's her feet, which are knobby like an old weather-worn tree. i look at the toes of a baby in my hand and i can hardly believe...it's the weather, isn't it, that shapes us? as pema chodron says so eloquently in the wisdom of no escape, inside ourselves we live through the heat and burning of fire and also its warmth and light, through the raging destruction of water and also it's nourishment, through the biting cold of air and its fresh spaciousness, and through the tumbling weight of earth and its fertile abundance. we live through all this inside and outside and our bodies are shaped as are all the beings of earth, our bodies are twisted and mangled and they lose limbs and they reach for the light.
i think of our old friend and wonder how it is for her to wake up these days. does she know? how does her heart feel? she seems so relaxed.
tomorrow i will go and kiss her and scratch her head and listen to her purr.
i've got my feet on the ground now. thinking about being a human being. thinking of my relative who is closer to death than anyone else i know, wondering what she lives for, has lived for these many years in a bed in a care facility. what do we breathe into when we don't have our hands for making, our relations for talking, our food for preparing? what does she live for? all i know is that every time i visit her i feel grateful to know someone as relaxed and in surrender as she. i'm grateful, then, that she has lived as long as she has so that i was able to know her and love her. great aunt, a great teacher. someone who meditates and chants everyday. or, more plainly put, someone who followed her heart to a larger perspective.
wise ones from an old woman:
it's only pain. she says this a lot.
everything can change in ten minutes. she said this last week in the emergency room.
it's so good to see you people. all of you. i just remembered that her sister said this to us weeks before her death.
and then there's the unspoken, tricky sparkle in her eye that makes me think of garlic ice cream, plants under a grow light, playing dress-up in her living room while she laughed from her wheelchair, eating only milkshakes for, um, maybe five years, how she coos when i touch her.
there's her feet, which are knobby like an old weather-worn tree. i look at the toes of a baby in my hand and i can hardly believe...it's the weather, isn't it, that shapes us? as pema chodron says so eloquently in the wisdom of no escape, inside ourselves we live through the heat and burning of fire and also its warmth and light, through the raging destruction of water and also it's nourishment, through the biting cold of air and its fresh spaciousness, and through the tumbling weight of earth and its fertile abundance. we live through all this inside and outside and our bodies are shaped as are all the beings of earth, our bodies are twisted and mangled and they lose limbs and they reach for the light.
i think of our old friend and wonder how it is for her to wake up these days. does she know? how does her heart feel? she seems so relaxed.
tomorrow i will go and kiss her and scratch her head and listen to her purr.
k.
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