I find myself in a cross roads this entire year - having lost a long-time, deeply loved friend who, as I reflect upon it, was sort of a mother to me and our relationship was just about as complicated. I met her just after my mother died and after her husband died. My other best friend, my husband, had died several years before. We formed a widows friendship and, of course, grieving the loss of my mother was part of that. We could meet in the kitchen at one or another of the many social gatherings she would hold and acknowledge that the sadness was there in the midst of the gaiety. She was my person and I was hers, in that regard.
Since her death, I have had to grapple anew with the fact of death, the immediacy, the finality. I was with her the second to last night of her life. I had hoped to give her comfort and to keep watch/vigil. At one point toward morning, when I thought she was sleeping and heavily sedated, her eyes opened to slits and she looked at me. I looked into complete lucidity, burning knowledge glowing in embers of suffering. I felt the energy of her leaving this world weighing heavily upon me. I thought I should go home but could only stand in the middle of the room. Eventually I lay down on a sofa and fell into a deep sleep. When I awoke 2 hours later, I felt completely rested. I also felt confused. Part of me felt like Peter who couldn’t stay awake until the cock crew. Another part of me felt relieved and alive - the weariness and heaviness of the night was gone. I wondered whether the heaviness I had felt was our living bonds having to separate - hers to follow her path out of this world and I to remain behind. For now.
These 10 months since have been a bit of wandering in the desert. As I approached and passed a milestone birthday, I was acutely aware of time running short. My own parents lived only a few years beyond this age. I felt the effects of time on my body and on my will to resist. I felt the futility of lifelong efforts to be in control, to stave off aging, to shape my destiny to my desires. I felt in short that I was at a turning point of some kind - able to see that the old world would never go back to the way it was. This applied to my body, to my interests, to my energy, but also to the community I lived in, the country I loved, and the world I depended upon. Change had been happening all along but suddenly it felt accelerated. The periods of stasis or denial were over for the time being and there was a hurtling through movement, change, one thing turning into another, desires, resentments, division, love, hope, energy. It was all swirling around and through events and weather and everything we have depended upon and still grasp on to.
I found myself fulfilling a half promise to my mother 28 years ago to gather her memoirs and publish them. I thought there were only 15 that family hadn’t seen but then I realized I had to gather them all together - all 74 plus of them - in a single document. It came in at 175 pages, included some pictures, and few other writings and documents that support her preservation in memoir form of her Quaker upbringing in a small farming community. Just outside of Washington, DC., ancestors came from William Penn’s Pennsylvania 8 generations ago and remained passing houses and farms down to generation after generation shaping their lives and destinies in place. Her life began without electricity, at the end of the era of horse and buggies. They were dairy farmers, born in the same farm house generations before had been born in, into a community that believed so strongly in education that they build their own high school. That education stood them in good stead in the transition into the modern world.
I finished the first edition in July and shared it with family at a gathering that month. I also looked at retirement communities and wondered if that would be a workable support for aging, sickness, and death.
During this time I took two at-home courses that were developed and offered by Venerable Analayo - The Four Foundations of Mindfulness (The Satipatthana Sutta) and Mindfulness of Breathing (the Anapanasati Sutta). With each course, I was able to enter into a space of retreat in my own home - defined more by the time of day than by the location. Mornings were devoted to practice and reflection of the teachings offered. Some of these teachings I have shared with you.
This last month has a culmination of sorts that is still unfolding. We have gone through a primary season in the political sphere with the midterms coming up. The rhetoric has increased, the insanity has revealed itself, war and depletion of our resources rage. Desperation and ignorance seem in control with flashes of hope like points of light coming from all around us. We are unsettled in one moment, encouraged in another, confused and uncertain as to the outcome. And perhaps we are questioning how do we hold our ground during these upheavals?
During that time I was unexpectedly invited to join a study/retreat on Encountering the Buddha as Teacher. The highest form of learning is learning for self and others with learning for self alone the next highest form. That sounded about right to me. I learn more from teaching and from students than I learn on my own although learning as a student has been a rich and enriching experience. Co-learning, co-teaching - we are each others teachers. We are each others students.
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 has come round and we are reminded of how the forces of catastrophic events have impacted our country and our world. We have barely emerged from the worse pandemic any of us personally have lived through only to see our systems of health and public safety eroded or destroyed. We have watched our forests burn, our very air turn against us, our summers sustain withering heat. We have witnessed the creation of ICE and the unloosing of dark energies into communities all across this country. And yet we have seen our communities rise up in resistance, our elected leaders begin to leave behind passive cooperation and search for more effective responses to the designed chaos and destruction of a way of life. Yet the suffering intensifies. The struggle, once engaged, escalates.
And we come to the very last teaching of the Satipatthana - The Four Noble Truths, the first of which, that there is suffering. Suffering exists. This is what drove the young man who became the Buddha from the comforts of his father’s palace out into the world in search of a way to understand, relate to, and finally free himself from the ravages of this truth. There is suffering - in the body through aging, sickness, and death. There is suffering of the emotions as we find we cannot hold onto any relationship we hold dear, any ideal that sustains us. Even our physical world shifts, groans, gives up vast habitats, animal life, diversity.
We are told in the second noble truth that craving and attachment are the root causes of this suffering. We suffer because we love, because we want, because we acquire, accumulate, possess. Some of the ways in which we are attached seem more noble, more right, more just. We are attached to ideals and values, as well as the well-being of family, friends, community. And this is a complicated truth to understand. How is it wrong to love, we ask? To care about the preciousness of human and animal life? To hold to values and ideals that are worthy?
An article in Lion’s Roar (https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/four-noble-truths/) says we suffer because we see ourselves as separate, independent, solid. We think we can posses things, hold onto people and relationships. We think that our attainment of things, people, relationships will bring us lasting happiness. The article concludes this truth in this way, “The painful and futile struggle to maintain this delusion of ego is known as samsara or cyclic existence."
Then we are told there is an end to suffering, a way out of this cycle of craving and loss. And that the way out of this morass of misery is the Noble Eightfold Path - Wise Intention, Wise Resolve, Wise Speech, Wise Action, Wise Livelihood, Wise Effort, Wise Mindfulness, and Wise Concentration.
And out of our own glimmerings of wise intention, resolve, action, effort, we come to mindfulness and concentration. And we learn that the first instructions for mindfulness and concentration, begin this way, “Here gone to a forest or to the root of a tree or an empty hut, one sits down; having folded the legs crosswise, keeping the body erect, and having established mindfulness to the fore mindful one breathes in and mindful one breathes out.”
From that simple beginning, all things flow - we learn to find peace in the center, to release all our grasping, our wants and desires, to hold our caring for others in a different light - at least for a time. We learn that we will grieve the loss of a family member, of a friend, of our animal companions and fellow travelers, of the natural world. But we will grieve differently - knowing that what was lost was impermanent, ephemeral, a gift for a time but not forever. We learn compassion for ourselves and our frailties and for the suffering of all. And we learn that we will still be moved to action but perhaps in a more sustainable way because we learn to offer our hearts without knowing or expecting results to be any particular way. We learn to give without expectation but knowing the giving, the showing up is necessary, is our journey.
And just as we learn to return to our breath over and over again whenever our minds wander and to do this without chastising ourselves, understanding that this is just the ways things are, we also learn that we can be called to put one foot in front of the other over and over again, to make efforts to relieve the suffering of others, to see and bear witness to the inevitable and increasing losses in our world, without giving up hope and without losing our resolve to do what we can when we can. We learn that while we have life and breath in our bodies, we can practice for our benefit and the benefit of others.
There are several different directions I am called to share in this space in the coming weeks. I don’t know which will dominate and when but I list the two main ones here just briefly as a guide post for myself and for those of you who are still reading. One is the fuller teaching of Mindfulness of Breathing. This was the teaching the Buddha offered because it was the practice that led to his enlightenment. Having taken Venerable Analayo’s course this summer on Mindfulness of Breathing, I now have a greater understanding why that was so, how that is possible.
The other is women in Buddhism, beginning with the first woman who importuned the Buddha to allow women to learn the teachings, engage in the practice, take robes and follow him. That woman was the Buddha’s step-mother, the one who took the newborn from her dying sister, the Buddha’s mother, and raised him as her own. Another is Roshi Joan Halifax, 84, the first woman to found her own center, who is a medical anthropologist, and a teacher of the dharma and of compassionate care to chaplain trainees, who worked with the dying, who mounted and traveled to Nepal on annual Nomad journeys to help the people in the high country of the Himalayans with their medical needs. These journeys took 5 or 6 weeks, all on foot or horseback, with a solid week or two of walking just to reach the first villages. A third was a bhikkuni, a Buddhist nun, I met last week who had left her home monastery in a highly respected tradition to join a tradition that offered ordination to bhikkunis. The ordination of nuns has been a controversial subject in Buddhism for many years with many holding that the line of ordination had been broken and couldn’t be repaired. Venerable Analayo put his scholarship skills to work to prove an unbroken line through China that restored ordination to nuns in the west. Not all monasteries accepted this. This nun had swiftly chosen ordination over security and started her own monastery for bhikkunis in Washington state with two other nuns. Her courage and also her grief were palpable - for the gains the Buddhist women had made during the Buddha’s lifetime were lost after his death until this ordination was restored.
But for now, we pause and consider how life and practice has been during these last weeks of summer - what we aspire to, how our longings and reflections manifest in our lives, what trail our footsteps have been following step by step, what trail forward…