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.
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.
into the park 