Finishing

            This entry isn’t about mindfulness.  It’s a little bit of the story of how I got there.  As always, my intention is that everyone who reads this will find some benefit.  But today, I am also writing directly to my lovely friend, who has just experienced a very difficult loss.

            When I was fifteen, my father became very ill, at times gravely so. At the time, his illness was a mystery.  Much later, we learned that he had been suffering from the effects of biological warfare that was waged on both sides in the Pacific Theatre of World War Two.  His illness became a backdrop to my coming of age.  At the same time that I began to taste all of the exciting, joyful and terrible things of adulthood, I watched my father gradually recede from life.

            He fought his illness with valor, suffered horribly.  By the spring of 1975, shortly after my 18^th birthday, he was getting better, and we were preparing for him to come home.  My parents were estranged at that time, so his home coming would have been to a solitary home of his own.  But we were exhilarated nonetheless that he had turned a corner and my parents, I think, were negotiating some kind of peace.  I don’t’ know for sure.  My parents didn’t talk about it.  What I did know was that my dad was coming home.

            One sunny day in June, I went to visit him at the hospital.  When I got there, he was sitting on the edge of the bed.  At previous visits, he had been laying flat, lifeless almost, barely aware of me being there, unable to speak.  This day seemed like a miracle, like something stolen from destiny.  He was smiling, laughing with me, his old self.

            He talked about a simpler life, about giving up his career in Accounting and making jewelry, which he loved to do.  He had been reading Henry David Thoreau, and he recommended it to me, holding up a paperback book to show me.  Collected works.

            In my childhood, my father never said good bye to me.  Whenever we parted he always said “see you later.”  This day, I hugged him and turned to leave.  I was at the doorway when he called to me, and I turned.  I had never seen my father cry.  When I turned he was looking right into me, and his eyes were brimming.  And he said to me,

            “Good bye.”

            The next day, I was alone at home.  My mother was at the hospital, with him.  I spent the morning by the river, which was only a few feet from our house.  Mid-afternoon, I had come in to make something to eat, and the phone rang.  It was a nurse at the hospital.

            “I’m sorry to tell you,” she said, and then I was on my knees.  At 18, I had never experienced an emotion so intense it literally felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach.  Oddly, the intensity of the feeling was only half of the experience.  The other half was fear, fear that if this feeling kept going, I might not survive it.  Somehow I drove forty miles to the hospital and picked up my mother.  The only detail I really remember about that day is walking down a long, long hallway to meet my mother.  I remember white tiles on the floor, and white lights in the ceiling, passing me in rhythm.  I remember blossoms on the plum trees outside that were so brilliantly pink, they seemed un-natural.  I remember feeling insulted by their vibrancy.

            My father had an intensity, in work and play that was fun to be around, and also sometimes difficult.  He carried horror from the war, and his feelings could be explosive at times, and scary.  As I grew to adulthood while his life was ending, I began to see that soon I would experience my father as a person, not a parent.  I began to see that we would finish.  That we would process the hurt feelings and the disappointments that colored my child hood experience of him.  We were just beginning to touch that when his life here ended so suddenly, on that sunny afternoon in June of 1975.

            Had we gone forward, I’m sure I would have sat on a patio somewhere with my dad, drinking a beer and talking about work, and women, and plans, about despair and hope’s return.  About all the things friends talk about.  About past hurts, and about  forgiveness.

            I wasn’t finished with him when he left, and that seemed the cruelest part, in some ways.  In the years to come I learned that life never stops, and so when someone leaves, we are never done with them, can’t be.  But I also learned in those years that while death profoundly changes a person, it does not end a person.  I learned that we don’t have to finish.  We just continue.

            Many times, I’ve walked with my father down a busy street, or on a wooded path. The process of finishing with my father was not taken from me. I have come to know him as a person, and he is a most remarkable man.

I have also forgiven him.

Once, years after he died, I met him in a wide, flat place where lots of people were passing by, obviously on their way to somewhere, busy.  You may call it a vision if you like, but to me it seemed far more natural than that, just as if I had run into him on a street, coming out of a café, maybe, in our hometown of Beaverton, Oregon.  Perfectly mundane.

            He was his old self, thin, medium height, jet black hair.  When he saw me, his face lit up with that smile I remember from my little-boy days.  And in the next instant, he was perplexed.  How did you get here, he said.  And I knew I had stumbled into a place that, while not forbidden, was not an easy place to get to.  I told him I didn’t know, but he didn’t seem to care.  We talked and laughed, not as father and son, but as old friends who have seen the world together, many, many times.

            Then he smiled that engaging, famous smile at me, and he said, “Bob, I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”  And then he was gone.

But he wasn’t.

            Two months later, in September of that same year, I started my freshman year of college, paid for partly by a benefit my father had earned by fighting in the Great War.  I was still stumbling through the days, grieving him, but I started college because I knew what he would have said:

            “Do what’s in front of you.”

            For five years I was immersed in studying and traveling.  I thought about my dad often.  The grief mellowed and took up a residence in my Self that added a dimension to me.  In a very different form from that day in 1975, I can still touch it.  As a man of fifty, death is now familiar to me.  Always, it’s the same.  A gut-punch that brings me to my knees, then a mellowing, then a deepening, and finally a new relationship with the one who left.  The one who, it turns out, didn’t really go anywhere.

            In 1989, I was a technical writer, just past thirty, working for a dental company.  I had fallen into a life that was not very meaningful, a life that was leaving me wanting.  One day, wandering in a used a bookstore, I saw a copy of Henry David Thoreau, collected works.  Oddly, it was the very same edition my father had held up to me that day in his hospital room, the last time I saw him alive.  Same cover, same thin pages, thin as gossamer.  I paid two dollars for it, took it home, put it on a shelf.

            Weeks later, I dove in, and barely came up for food and air until I had turned the last page.  Thoreau led to Emerson, of course.  And then there was Steven Levine, Ram Dass, and the simple, insistent D.T. Suzuki.  One day, at the dental company, before my shift started at 8am, I sat on a picnic table outside my office.  I sat, simply, put my attention on the sensation of my breath as it touched the very edge of my nose, coming in and going out.

            I did it again that night.  And my life began to transform.  Now, so much later, I’m lost again, and in such terrible pain.  But last week, I sat by the river, and watched the breath go in and come out, and I began to change again.

            And in my mind’s eye, I saw my father sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, holding up a simple paperback book, thick, with gossamer pages.  And him saying to me,

            “Have you ever read any of this?”

Charley

I’ve forced myself into the Laundromat today.  After a week on the road, I need to wash everything.  Usually, I like it here, but today, I’m not feeling it.  Usually, I get the laundry going and go outside to juggle, but today I’m just sitting outside on the curb, watching the world go by, feeling some kind of funk that I can’t even identify.

As I walk into the building to check on the progress of my two loads of washing, I pass by a very blonde little girl.  She’s sitting  on one of the green, molded plastic chairs that grace the periphery of the Laundromat.  Playing a hand-held video game that makes very loud, very annoying electronic noises.  Across the room at the dryers, a worn looking woman of about fifty chastises her at regular intervals for no particular reason I can see.

            The little girl is heartbreakingly cute, her blonde hair in a little pony tail.  As I pass by her, she looks up at me and sticks out her tongue.  Seems about right for this day, I think, and I keep walking.  Behind me, the worn-out looking woman’s shrill, scolding voice is backdrop.  I check my laundry and exit through a doorway at the other end of the building, to avoid them both, and take up my former seat on the curb, by the traffic.

            Then I notice a tiny presence behind me, and I look over my shoulder.  And there is the cute little blonde girl, just standing there, looking at me.  Come by to stick out her tongue at me again, I assume.  She says something to me and smiles.  She doesn’t stick out her tongue, and she doesn’t go away.  And finally, I realize the sticking out of the tongue wasn’t aggression.  It was flirting.

Ah.

            Charley is four, by her own volunteered account (name changed her to protect her privacy).  I ask Charley if she likes juggling, but she doesn’t seem to know what that is.  Don’t go away, I say and I head for the car to get my juggling balls.  She follows me, close, curious.

            There follows a long session of me juggling for Charley, and Charley showing me what she can do with the balls.  She is particularly fond of the glitter balls, especially the pink one, and she really enjoys throwing them.  Every time she throws a ball across the parking lot, I praise her form and distance.  Older woman in the background chastises her every time, I’m not sure why.  Charley explains to me that the older woman is her grandmother, and that gram “took me, because my mom couldn’t do it.”  That explains a lot.

            Charley is taken with juggling, but she also finds glittery balls a lot of fun in themselves.  Grandma never does warm up.  She keeps on folding clothes, or just standing in front of the dryer, watching it go around and around and occasionally offering a scathing comment to four year old Charley,  who seems oblivious (a skill I wish I could learn, or buy, from her).

            Now grandma has all the clothes folded and it’s time for Charley to go.  Can you fall in love in twenty minutes?  My relationship with Charley is proof positive.  In parting, Charley holds the pink glitter ball up to me, an earnest and disarming smile on her face.  Then she runs away.

            Moments later, she is back, standing there, waiting for me to look in her direction.  When I do, she says to me,

            “Thank you.”

The One Seat

            Seven years ago, I lost my practice.  For all of those seven years, I’ve grieved the absence of my practice as one would grieve the departure of a dear friend.  Many times, I’ve “taken the one seat,” as one of my teachers called it, only to find I couldn’t sit still long enough to experience the magical and healing state of mind called Vipassana.  It has been very humbling to live with this loss.  And to see people seeing me as a person who is not the person I was.

            Today, I walk on the river path, in summer sun, sleep deprived, stressed out, but just a little bit okay, just for now.  My usual,for the last seven years.  And for the nth time, I decide to try a sit.  Even thinking of trying brings a tinge of desolation to my mind.  I’m afraid of failing, again, and of the humiliation and defeat that failure will bring to me, again.  It’s tantalizing, the state is so close, and so, so beautiful.  All you have to do is sit still for five minutes, bring your attention to the breath, to water, to your hands.  To anything, and just allow it to rest there.

            A narrow path leads off the wide, paved path, and down to a tiny clearing next to the water.  It’s an inviting place, whether I sit or not, and so I go down, picking my way carefully.  I find a wide, smooth stone to sit on, just inches from the water’s edge.   Get comfortable, sitting with back straight but relaxed.  And just look out at the water flowing by.

            There’s a little eddy current here, where the river seems to run backwards.  In reality, it’s running in a circle, upriver past my feet, then back down further out toward the main channel.  The water is slow here, and flat, in contrast to the rapids about a hundred yards away.  Ironically, I can hear the rapids in the background.  In the foreground of my attention, there are tiny lapping sounds, as the eddy current passes by next to me.  Brilliant yellow points of sunlight bounce off of tiny wavelets in an expanse of water spread before me.  At first glance, they appear to be static.

            But when I look closer I realize, they are constantly changing their location.  Just as the water flows and ripples, the sunlight flows and ripples on the water.  It has to, because it depends on the high points in the water for a reflection surface.  Both are in constant motion, and interdependent.

            Now I am aware of my breath, coming and going.  The rhythm is choppy, but I do not try to change it.  I just watch it come and go.  And I realize that for a few minutes, all of the discursive thought that usually plagues my mind is not sticking.  It’s still back there, chattering away, but I am not engaging it.  It is merely flowing by, as I watch.  And it has become the background.  My breath, the water, the sunlight, are now center stage.

            I’m there.  I’m in that most beneficial and joyous state of mind, where attention rests lightly and impartially on the events that are happening here and now.  A duck paddles by, a small female Mallard.  She looks like a baby, maybe only hatched this year.  I’m sitting so quietly, she doesn’t even notice me, only a few feet away from her. Oblivious, she paddles aimlessly by while she pulls bits of water plants from the river to eat.

            People go by in rafts way out in the channel, and from afar, I can hear them giggle as they fall down the rapid water.  I can hear them talking about their lives.  All in the background, all behind and beneath the sound and sensation of my breath as it comes and goes.

            My belly rises and falls, and I find I can literally taste the air, if I open my mouth a tiny bit on the in-breath.  In my nostrils, I can feel air go in, cool and smelling of summer.  And I can feel it go out, warm.  My mind wanders to a tense interaction I’m having with a friend and I begin to engage, thinking and planning… let me see, how shall I handle this…. How dare she do that to me… why can’t she just…

            I notice, and let go, return to the breath, the water, the sunlight.  It’s easy to let go, the moment is so pleasant.  The one that’s right here in front of me.

            I think it might be coming back, this thing I called a “practice.”  If there are more sits like this, it will be back.  They won’t all be pleasant of course.  I’ll have to sit with everything, so there will be hard ones, too.  Maybe it’s back though.

Maybe.