Simple Things

 

We who are seekers of the contemplative way can discern within ourselves this sense of reverential awe for such simple things as touching our feet to the floor.

James Finley, The Contemplative Heart

 

A friend’s husband is very frail.  After a long illness, he is no longer able to walk very far, breath or speak effortlessly. He cannot be left alone for more than an hour. They live in a state of profound uncertainty holding their breath between tests. “So much surrender,” she told me recently, “More than I could ever have imagined.”

 

She is one of the most spiritually mature people that I know and has taken her grief and loss into her yoga practice.  She speaks about what she is learning now from the yoga sutras she has been studying for decades coming into a deeper understanding of their meaning.  She is living the truth of how prakriti, the material known world, is always changing, coming into form from formlessness and then dissolving back into formlessness before transforming into something different.  She and her husband have been absorbed into a state of hyper formlessness and change.  Nothing much left to hold onto but the continuity of change and uncertainty.

 

The loss and heartbreak she shared with me was a gift. It has given me a renewed sense of awe for the magnificence of the many simple things I take for granted like swallowing, speaking, swinging my legs over the side of the bed in the morning to stand. I cannot know the intimate texture of their loss, the terrible lonesomeness of their illness, the moment-to-moment uncertainty of that existence.  I can only know what these are like in my own heart and allow their sadness to seep in and soften it.