Groundlessness

 

 

Through refraining, we see that there’s something between the arising of the craving – or the aggression or the loneliness or whatever it might be and whatever action we take as a result.  There’s something there in us that we don’t want to experience, and we never do experience, because we’re so quick to act.  The practice of mindfulness and refraining is a way to get in touch with basic groundlessness-by noticing how we try to avoid it.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

 

How many many things

They call to mind

These cherry blossoms!

Basho

 

When my daughter went in for surgery, I clenched my jaw tightly so I wouldn’t cry in front of her.  She had been up most of the night and looked small under her grey hoodie and sweatpants.  “See you on the other-side,” I told her not wanting to say goodbye.   I wouldn’t see her for another 14 hours.

 

It was raining outside and windy.  I spent the day praying. Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen describes praying as the precious human stance of open heartedness in the midst of unknowing and vulnerability.  We pray when there nothing else we can do but get down on our knees and weep. 

 

I prayed as I watched hours of TV and slept.  I prayed during my dreamlike walk in the rain where nothing felt real.  I prayed at the store to get food that was tasteless.  I prayed for my ancestors to be with her since I could not.  I tried not to think of what was happening to her body.  I prayed that the surgeon and nurses and the anesthetist were clear-eyed and steady, that no one had cut them off in traffic on their early drive into work. 

 

When the doctor called telling us she was fine, I prayed some more.  I prayed when I saw her on the other side a hairnet around her thick curly dark brown hair, the pressurized socks inflating and deflating around her shins and calves, the tubes running in and out.  I was afraid of what the next days would be like for her.  I worried about pain, scar tissue, grief, fevers.  Because of COVID, only one of us could visit for two hours a day.  I offered the first day to her father.  Not able to lay my eyes on her, to feel her breathing, see her eyes opening, watch her moving, hear her voice was almost as bad as when she was in surgery. I ached so much to see her so that I could know that she was alright. 

 

With nothing to do for her that day I felt pointless, bored, restless, and anxious.  At loose ends, I wasn’t sure how I would get through this empty day until a voice inside rose up to tell me that this grieving was important.  Grief for myself in my inability to take her pain away and the distance between us.  Grief for her many years of illness, the failed medicines, the tests, so young to be talking to surgeons.  I held my loneliness and vulnerability with a tender compassion and in that compassion came to feel the purpose in the emptiness and desolation.  And that was love.  Who else could hold my daughter in this way?  This mother’s grief was her birthright and it would help her to heal. When she was small, I would wrap myself around her to comfort her.  This grief broke my heart open so wide it could reach over the hospital walls to hold her.

 

On that long lonesome day I walked around the Charles River.  It was sunny and windy.  The leaves of cherry trees flickered in the wind as their branches dipped and bowed, then rose up again towards the sun.  To find purpose in suffering is sometimes what life asks of us.