sangha

on compassion and impermanence:

I am wondering what to post on compassion after the awesome sharing of last week's thread that I just finally got to read but can't post to (it's closed?). I have to say, this is the kind of sangha I was looking for, ladies! And I am applauding your (our) openness, and courage in sharing. I have felt my heart open to compassion a million times over in the past few years, especially after having a child. To touch on impermanence a little, I was thinking just now that my lesson has not been in the impermanence of death, because I haven't yet experienced the physical death of a close loved one (and this feels like a great white elephant in my life) but I have experienced what felt to me as death in life in two significant instances very recently. Although my grandmother died this past year in January, I was not very close to her in life, but as soon as she passed away I found myself feeling very connected to her, and in fact now I call on her to help me often. I have had very real experiences of her being with me, and it is a comfort and real joy to actually have proof (for myself) that our loved ones live on and in the case of my grandmother are actually more present for us in death.What I speak of as death in life is somewhat a death of personality, or the "almost death" of someone which then altered and changed them forever. My husband has bipolar disorder, and when I was pregnant with my first child he had a major psychotic episode which left him in recovery for a year and a half, during which time I grappled with the breach of trust and fear and all of the confusion his transformation in mental illness had caused in me. During that time I spent my pregnancy alone, and my birth alone, and raised our son singly for his first year while my husband's health came back together. When all of this was said and done, he was a much different person, and so was I. My view of him had completely changed (though I knew when our relationship began that he had this disease, I did not ever see it firsthand until I was pregnant -- and it devastated me because I didn't have a true understanding of what the illness can do to someone, not to mention the vulnerable emotional state of pregnancy), and I didn't quite know how to continue loving him.Well, somehow we stayed together and in many ways are still picking up the pieces. I have tried to love him through all of this, what felt much like betrayal. He has tried very hard to do his best to stay healthy and remain as present as he can for our family and he is an incredible father. He is also a wonderful man. I guess our "romance" ended and we quickly got to the business of "real love". Though I have to admit I miss my illusions at times. I know this lesson is a real one for me because in September my father was in a tragic a car accident which left him severely brain injured. He is recovering very miraculously, but I have lost my father as I knew him to be. So this is somewhat a parallel experience to death, although I am so grateful he is still alive and I know we have time to create a new relationship within his "new" self. In many ways I feel his accident has liberated us from so much of the awful things of the past, but I still miss my father as the person he was. This is in many ways a new incarnation of the lessons I learned with my husband.What all of these things are teaching me is true unconditional love, and hopefully, the true nature of being. I try to readjust to loving from my heart and not my head, to loving the person and not the personality -- and letting go of who that person "was" or "is". All of this is an ongoing process for me, but I hope I have made myself understandable. So you see, I have to be compassionate towards myself as I grieve the "passing" of old personalities including my own. Of course it is more than personality, it is a whole way of being. I would appreciate anyone's thoughts on this.

One Vision

ONE VISION
Day and night, no difference.
The sun *is* the moon: an amalgam.
Their gold and silver melt together.

This is the season when
the dead branch and the green branch
are the same branch.

Nightmares fill with light like a holiday.
Humans and angels speak one language.
The elusive ones finally meet.

Good and evil, dead and alive,
everything blooms
from one natural stem.

You know this already, I'll stop.
Any direction you turn
it's one vision.

-Rumi as translated and rendered by Coleman Barks and David Ulansey

awake

Now that you are 4 months inside me
I wake each night at 4 am like clockwork
to a struggle in the belly.
Nothing calms it, nothing
soothes me back to sleep
and now I feel your flip, flip
like heavy little rocks in a tumbler.

Tonight I went to the kitchen
for two pieces of toast
and I swear I saw writing
on the kitchen wall, it spelled
death, miscarriage,
lost.

Of course, all these months,
anxiety gripping my gut,
I have wanted you so badly
my fear hides deep in this body
like a parasite nothing can cure.

I think of Jenn, her baby dead
Melissa, her baby dead
Ranee, her baby dead
and my heart screams with fear.
It seems just knowing that babies die
keeps me up at night. I wonder, why else
would I know so many women
whose baby spirits circle them?
Unless I might lose you?

Annie Dillard

" 'Spiritual path' is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape; they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why. They leave whatever they find, picking up each stone, carrying it a while, and dropping it gratefully and without regret, for it is not the absolute, though they cannot say what is. Their life's fine, impossible goal justifies the term 'spiritual.' Nothing, however, can justify the term 'path' for this bewildered and empty stumbling, this blackened vagabondage -- except one thing: They don't quit. They stick with it. Year after year they put one foot in fron of the other, though they fare nowhere. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark."
"'Only by living completely in the world can one learn to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself--even to make of oneself a righteous person.' Dietrish Bonhoeffer wrote this in a letter from prison a year before the Nazis hanged him for resisting Nazism and plotting to assasinate Hitler."

From Annie Dillard's For the Time Being