Returning and Re-turning

Dog in the Receding Snow

On my circuitous route to the park today, (isn’t circuitous the best word!), I passed by a sobbing car – rather, a woman burying herself into the carseats, weeping and wailing in misery. I had turned to look – she drove away – hurriedly -her cries echoing on the quiet side street – and me, full of questions, and memories – how many times I’ve been on the side of the road, alone in my car with my devastation, glassed in but somewhat on display -

Ah, suffering.

She drove away -

Suffering, so easy to itemize and analyze on either side of it – so easy to shrug it off when it’s just a memory you can hang in the closet. But when you’re in it, it feels as irreversible, as inescapable as your own skin.

Suffering or love – so easy to forget what they feel like when you’ve moved out of their grip. A similar forgetfulness that attends my sense of the seasons – when winter cold starts slapping me down, I am always stung with shock, even though it happens every year. And then the warmth that creeps over me, the hot pressing feet of the summer cat – again, the thrill of my first real sweat feels tremendous and new – though I felt it, the same heat, just the year before.

I feel somewhat like an idiot when this happens – again and again and again – except for the fact that there’s something resuscitating to my spirit and body to go through, yearly, these processes, as if I am – for I am! – a living thing.

There’s a paradox I keep getting pointed to about experience and living that has to do with being fully alive in the present moment and its feeling, whether it’s suffering or love, while at the same time holding the awareness that all things change and pass away.

This is, I believe, part of what Thomas More is alluding to in his book Care of the Soul, when he talks about love:

It isn’t necessary to make strong efforts to avoid past mistakes or to learn how to be clever about love. The advance we make after we have been devastated by love may be to be able simply to enter it freely once again, in spite of our suspicions, to draw ever closer to the darkness and hollowness that are mysteriously necessary in love.

Red Buds

Of course, it’s nicer to think about re-entering love freely – not suffering so much. Last night I was out late in the cold and complained aloud, “This is one of the moments when I feel like I should be Buddhistically just noticing how damn freezing I am, but instead all I really want to do is to shut my mind down, to not be aware of it, so I can survive.”

Shutting down certainly feels easier and more expedient, more practical and possible, than staying open and exposed, when one is experiencing suffering, physically or emotionally. The problem is that when we shut down, we don’t notice or learn anything from our experience. And there’s a difference between experiencing recurring seasons or situations with a full fresh presence and going through the cycling treadmill of the same thing over and over because we keep our eyes shut so tightly we don’t look and see that we are going nowhere…Not to mention, when we don’t fully experience our suffering at the time it occurs, it comes up later, surfacing from the lidded depths.

Watching that woman drive off in her car, I felt like I could have been witnessing myself four years ago, four months ago, fourteen years ago, driving off in my Ford, my white K-car…

And I have a feeling, I will find myself there again. The thing is, can I practice entering these moments now, openly, enough so that the next time I am there in that cold place of despair I won’t be shut off, doors locked to the experience? So that I don’t drive away from myself, trying to escape what can’t be avoided? And will I remind myself, will I look out the window and see a woman walking on the side of the road, and know that that was me, is me again, that all things change, and to let that vision – that deeply knitted knowledge of the whole – allow me the comforting sense of the larger turning and returning of the world?

Tree

To love fully, to feel fully, to suffer fully – to step out of my enclosures, my habits of being closed to the senses – to walk to the park, watch the snow returning into the earth, and make my footprints there, as if for the first time – for it is the first time this foot has touched this piece of snow, and it is an old stepping, and the new buds coming are themselves only themselves, though their coming is eternal -

Let me return to the same place that is never the same, and to know it.