Bodhichitta

Pacific Ocean

Sometimes, when the suffering is great, I call on the names of those who've helped me (us) most. Names come to mind and lips in a stream Carrie Anna Stephanie Bonni Cindy Allison Mary Dr. Frymann Jody Sandra and on and on and more.

I think help is on the way.

Pema Chodron this morning after seizures and tears and Mary cards.

In the process of discovering bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up. It's as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky, instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability  of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.

Reflections

I can't get enough of my new dining room set-up. A lot is changed around here. Oliver gave me that sitting Buddha with the pot that holds incense. I don't like incense, though, so it's empty which I think is more fitting. To be empty. Emptied. I remember being a little girl at church on Sunday and nearly fainting and certainly gagging when the priest walked down the aisle swinging that thing around with incense wafting out and around. I felt as if I were suffocating. Perhaps that's symbolic of my wrestling and then fleeing the Catholic Church. Perhaps it's just that I hate incense. When Oliver gave me the little Buddha incense holder, he included a box of cheap incense, and he lit it and immediately the house smelled like one of those stores that sells things for the spiritually materialistic. I'm actually prone to spiritual materialism -- I love mala beads around my neck and wrists, my red Buddha necklace, my turquoise Buddha ring, the Mother Mary cards, my Book of Changes, the Poet Tarot Cards. But no incense.



I took a shower tonight, and while the water beat down on me, I thought about jinxes. I thought about Sophie doing so well for the last couple of days, and maybe it'll only be the last couple of days, but it's been a good couple of days. Have we found the sweet spot with the strain (ACDC) and dosage ( a little higher)? Or is it something else? Is it the hot, dry weather and absence of pressure? Is it just -- well -- just? It occurred to me as I leaned my forehead against the tile and closed my eyes that despite the passage of nearly 21 years, I still know so very little about what makes my daughter's brain tick -- and tick too much. Despite those 21 years, and countless showers where I had very similar thoughts, where I crouched down and cried while the baby screamed in the bedroom, where I leant into the tile, exhausted, the tile perhaps like Roman stone, trod on, trod on, trod on, I still know so little. My sighs and tears and musings are always the same, an endless cycle, samsara. Suffocating. To be emptied. An empty vessel with room for gratitude.

I've posted this before***

Religious Consolation

One size fits all. The shape or coloration

of the god or high heaven matters less

than that there is one, somehow, somewhere, hearing

the hasty prayer and chalking up the mite

the widow brings to the temple,  A child

alone with horrid verities cries out

for there to be a limit, a warm wall

whose stones give back an answer, however faint.

Strange, the extravagance of it—who needs

those eighteen-armed black Kalis, those musty saints

whose bones and bleeding wounds appall good taste,

those joss sticks, houris, gilded Buddhas, books

Moroni etched in tedious detail?

We do; we need more worlds. This one will fail.

John Updike

***a sort of companion piece to my post Sunday Morning the other day where I muse on faith, gods and humans.

God-talk and other matters

I've written over and over here about my religious or spiritual beliefs, how I've largely discarded the Catholic faith of my childhood and delved more seriously and intently into Buddhism and the more mystical sides of Christianity. If you were to ask me what I believe and whether I believe in God, I might say very inadequately that I perceive God to be Love and that this Love infuses everything and everyone in the universe, that there is no end to this Love and that life is eternal, that we are all connected to one another and to all things animate and inanimate.

World without end, amen.

I have also mentioned here that god-talk makes me squirmy and that evangelism and fundamentalism -- any kind -- makes me nearly nauseous, and that when I begin to read it, I stop. When I hear it, I can quite effectively put on a bland face, shut down my mind and go elsewhere -- the poetry of Emily Dickinson, perhaps, or the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song. I recently became uncomfortable when I read a blog of someone who lives in Newtown who called for more God in schools, so uncomfortable that I removed the blog from my blogroll and decided that I couldn't read it anymore, couldn't stomach it, really. I don't know what the deep psychological underpinnings of this discomfort might be, but the older I get the more I yearn for light, for the lightness that comes with authenticity, and the older I get the more confident I feel in recognizing this authenticity. Sometimes reading and listening to god-talk is like drowning in a murky river, slick weed tendrils wrapped around you, errant branches scraping your flesh, the light above only occasionally piercing through.

A bit of that light pierced through today when I read a blog post of an 86-year old man, a retired minister and father of another friend of mine. The title of his blog is Singing the Hymns and I am grateful for this authentic blessing and so look forward to reading more of this man's thoughts and words.

"A friend to all...big and small"

When we walked into the church this morning to celebrate Gus' life, this was the card that some kind person placed into our hands, and the tears began to fall and continued to fall, off and on throughout the entire mass. Gus' graceful parents told the hundreds of bereft people in the church that even when they lost their composure around their son as he lay sick, he would always reassure them, Smile, I'm fine, he'd say.  I sat with Henry in the church for the first time in a few years, and despite my own disconnection to it, to that symbolic Catholic faith that so many present felt, I am sure, in the most authentic of ways, I felt the presence of Love. Through twinges of anger, of loneliness, of even boredom (the kind that comes when words are said over and over, years upon years, signifying nothing), I felt the presence of Love pushing up against me. My shoulders hunched against it, this Love, at first and then they dropped as love bent its way around and over and under, Love that guides and comforts and sustains despite everything.

May we feel grateful to have shared a bit of that Love through Gus. May beautiful Gus rest in peace. May his dear parents feel Love every day for the rest of their lives.