Against Longevity

We are mistakenly under the impression that thing obtain value by lasting forever.

The earth, for instance, and the environment; we (especially us on the ‘environmental’ side of things) have a hard time feeling that this planet ball has any worth if one day, as it shall, it will explode, implode along with the universe and everything in it.

Heaven, some believe, succeeds where earth fails, and is the place we all yearn for, precisely because it is never-ending. Eternal life – the grail cup each of us dips into our secret hearts, drinking in the hope of it, quietly, secretly.

Relationships: We speak of them as “making it.” “Will we make it?” To which I say – “Make what?” Of course our love songs are peppered with the words of eternity – always, everlasting, paradise, forever and ever amen. A good relationship is defined by its length. My grandparents, for instance, married fifty or sixty-something years. Wow, impressive, right?

And then we speak of our individual lives, too – about “I’ve made it to 80 years” or a child dying as being “cut off too soon.”

I’ve got some bones in this whole ideology of longevity as-marker-of-value to pick, lick clean, and toss.

Time-Less

For instance: Encouraging people to stick with relationships for the sake of trying to achieve a certain amount of time put in – as if it were a job, a jail, a retirement fund? Criminal.

Is it not true?: A relationship can change you, challenge you, embolden you, crystalize and shape your beliefs, inspire your passions, awaken your intellectual curiosity – and last only a month, a year, a semester.

Of course, time affects and impacts the nature of a relationship, whether it’s a parent-child, teacher-student, colleague-colleague, or romantic relationship. And I believe in the value of intimacy and trust deepening over time.

But I also believe there is value in a thing in itself, not how it performs as compared to a model of fairytale endings. We certainly don’t feel college is a waste if it only takes four years to complete; why don’t we similarly perceive a four-year-romantic involvement?

And time is not always an indicator of character or a predictor of impact; to use it as the only measure of the solidity of a personality or the importance of an impression ignores the complexities and possibilities that occur in our lifetimes. I’ll never forget Jade Richardson, a girl I knew fleetingly for two years in high school, and our good friend Marcus, who died right before turning 18 and graduating. They mean more to me and affected my life much more than others I’ve known for longer.

To feel that you have failed because a relationship ended is to negate the worth of the time that was spent. So instead of leaving a marriage richer, you leave it feeling poor. Instead of appreciation for the joy of a life lived, you weep for the fact that it didn’t continue ad infinitum.

I’ve noticed about myself that I experience a twinge of social shame when recounting episodes from my first marriage, which ended in divorce. It took me a while to realize I was hesitating to say “my first husband” or “my ex-spouse,” because it was like waving a flag in front of my face: “Failure! Divorced! Unstable! Disaster Area!”

But these judgments have little to do with the sum total of that relationship, which had many positive elements and good memories within it. Why does the fact it ended cast a shadow over the length of time it endured?

Considering My Dad

My father serves as a good case in point, on many counts. He was married three times, but it’s the one that lasted 8 years, not 15, that meant the most, that surged and bubbled with love.

He canceled a lifetime commitment to his ministry, but not because he was unsteady in nature or failed to live up to a promise; he left because he was being true to an even higher duty, to truth and to his faith, which continuing in that particular ministry had started to compromise.

My father died when he was 52, certainly before anyone expected. He was too young. And yet, when I think of his life, it encompasses a full range of experience and expression. My father lived.

And after he died, we received hundreds of emails and letters from people, many who had not known him very long at all, but all of whom had been touched by his jocularity, charisma, and warmth. He had a singular ability to make people feel listened to, appreciated, and loved.

I didn’t get enough time with my dad. What I wouldn’t give to soak up hours, days, years of him.

But having lost him when I did hasn’t lessened my love for him. Death did not diminish him in my heart. Leaving marriages and a ministry did not lessen his religious conviction. He was not perfect or unwavering in all things, and he didn’t “make it” to any invisible finish line.

But oh, to watch him run! He did it with all his heart.

Death Will Ease Your Suffering (no, really, it will!)

I’ve been experiencing a great deal of grief, sadness, and loss lately, and sometimes, the loneliness feels intense.

It was pointed out to me that I seem to want others to fix it for me, comfort me, soothe my misery.

And yes, I have to say that as I walking today, exposing myself to sun, hoping to walk out the sadness, I realized that I do so want someone – my estranged mother, my dead father, my friends, anyone – to wrap themselves around me and tell me I am loved, and it will be okay.

Of course, the desire is understandable. But it is desire, and you know what that does to you, of course. And I’m trying to learn to comfort myself.

It’s not so easy.

I wandered into a cemetery – I was ambling, walking down dead end streets, not exactly lost but I couldn’t tell you where I was, exactly – one of those patches of grass and stone that feel like some kind of abandoned city with no historical texts to tell you what happened. Names and dates, but no storyline. Just a lot of silence.

My heart felt swollen, tender, like an injured foot.

I thought about dying (go figure).

And then it dawned on me, there among the ruins, that when I die, I won’t have these awful feelings anymore.

Oddly, like nothing else, the thought calmed me.

Not because I want to die – truly not looking forward to it, kind of angry about it, but that’s a whole other story – but because this suffering is indeed going to end, and life, even with this intensely acute suffering, is much preferable to feeling nothing at all.

This isn’t some earth-shattering revelation – but I truly felt it, not just as an abstract consideration, but as a solid reality.

the goddess Kali

Hope, you know, hasn’t been really possible. I can’t hope that I’ll ever have a family again, with love and comfort; even if I get it, it will go away again. Everything dies, changes. So hope has not been a comfort.

As Pema Chodron says:

If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be
exterminated, then we can have  the courage to relax with the
groundlessness of our situation.  This is the first step on the path.

My problem has been that I’ve been getting lost in the groundlessness, sinking in the quicksands of my despair.

But death has been a rope out – and lead me to remember Kali. Years ago when I first started reading about Tantra and goddesses, I had a hard time understanding the rituals surrounding worship of the goddess Kali, who is alternately the most fierce and the most loving of deities. Some Tantric practices involve digging up corpses; Kali is often portrayed having sex with the body of her dead husband, Shiva.

There’s this odd mix of comfort and utter destruction mixed into this figure, and I didn’t quite get it. She’s a mother goddess – but she represents the absolute dissolution of all things?

But I get it now. When we face death, we see life with a precision and clarity that provides the sustenance of reality, truth, — and comfort.

To confront or accept death… is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one’s mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of “adult” pretense, practicality, and rationality [from exoticindia]

As I walked home, I smelled the rosemary from someone’s garden, saw the brilliant clouds, tasted sun, hurt but alive, and glad to be so.

A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…

leaves, leaving

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away…
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
– from Rilke’s “Autumn”

This is what the leaves teach us:

To preserve is not to live.

(someone says under her breath: take a look at a mummy, dummy)

You can’t save them. They fall and fall, ignited colors, red, fuschias, oranges, golds – leaves striped and swirled and pockmarked with the handwriting of disease – my throat constricts with desire to hold them, to consume them into my body, to shallack them, to keep them, make them stay exactly as they are, so over-the-top gorgeous -

but, as a pocket in my pocketbook attests, leaves drain of their color and crumple into papery flakes. The glory cannot be saved.

The art preservationists pipe in at this point, to protest their worth, the aching hours of time they spend restoring and maintaining Great Works of Art, the air so hungry to eat away at the painted genius on the chapel ceilings…

And the monks sifting colored sand into wispy mandalas -

I am enough of a child of the Western World to want to explain why Art exists, why we want it to persist.

Word association takes me to preserves – to canning. My mother’s shelves.

And I think: certainly, nothing we attempt to Keep Forever will. However, like peaches or tomatoes, blanched and prepared to last way past their natural edible prime, we have developed the skills to keep some things for later, for when we need them. Food, of course; art as well – beauty, that is. And experience of.

Not all things. And not forever.

A picture of fallen leaves is a way to preserve their shape and color till and through and past the winter.

Still, the picture itself will fade and follow the disintegration. We all go the way of the leaves.

leaves

But that is life. That is living. Living is change, change includes dissolution, dying. We know this. The opposite of life is not death but stilled life (- a Still Life – art not life? -) preservation – Snow White in the glass case; a frozen cryogenic head; the waxed bagel. Clinging to the version of the thing we love in one form, not accepting it will become another.

Not accepting that the monk, the wind, will take a breath.

And we will feel it. Cool and sure.

And we will fall away.

Cheating at Azalea Park

We went to a different park today, and I missed having my camera with me. Brown sunflowers sullenly hanging their heads in a frozen posture of depletion; a cracked white bucket sprouting the wreckage of a garden hose.

S & M tree

It’s autumn, glorious and full of loss; always feels like the first time; always feels another layer is being pulled off, and I’m even more tender than I was the year before. The winter will come, bluntly.

Thinking about grief and sadness, I realized that there are people I have lost that I don’t mourn any longer. But if someone asked me, “How did you manage to get over your grief?” I wouldn’t have a self-help mantra or a five-step easy soul diet to share; the only agent at work on the various broken places in my heart has been good old Time.

Seriously: Time heals all wounds is one of those true cliches that describes – well, what happens.

You don’t have to DO anything about your grief; you don’t have to fix it, change it, nix it. Let your grief be what it is, and eventually, it will seep. Time will suck it out, like poison from a snakebite. Sure, you can resist this very natural process – feed off the poison, so to speak. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.

I was reminded, as we picked our way through the shambly community gardens, that I appreciate Taoism because this kind of Let it Be attitude negates the ego’s pride in human efforts without any snarky finger-wagging.

The trees will let their leaves go.

This loss is not a trauma.

Pain is not an aberration.

And so, it is easier now to think of my father, ten years’ dead this year. I will always, always miss him. Something will always feel Not Quite Right because of his absence. I still have moments of thinking that I’ve forgotten to call someone, and I wrack my brain trying to think who I’ve forgotten, only to realize it’s him.

But it has been ten years. The pain has lessened. It went of its own volition. In some ways, I did want to cling to it, because I didn’t want to let go of him, and the sadness of his loss was almost comforting, it was a way to think about him, to make him keep existing.

But he does not exist. Even his effects, his papers, notebooks, crosses, ink pens, books, the box of ashes – the physical evidence – they are scattered, and drying up. There is no cohesion. Because there is no him.

Hiking a year ago

There’s more open sky at this park; a creek; a dog park. We take it all in.

This current sadness, I wish I could take a picture of it.

But really, there’s nothing I can do about it.