There is Room for It All

Continuing on birth and death,here is the opening paragraph to a powerful post about miscarriage and afterward:

I am and am not a mother. I once believed motherhood to be a concrete state of being heralded by the birth of a child who would grow under my guidance and eventually move into the world on their own. I see now that the situation is more complicated than that. I see that motherhood is a state of mind rather than a biologically determined reality. Motherhood happens even when there is no baby to hold. I wish I didn’t know this, because the route to knowledge was rending and recovery is slow.

It's stories like this that tell me it's best to hang awhile with questions like "What is birth and death?" instead of grabbing for answers. I feel sad with along with the author, Andrea, but also happy for her because she seems to have tapped into a place beyond that which requires specific forms, like a baby. What a difficult learning though!

I've been noticing lately that a sense of having ease with the heart/mind's wrestling with the big questions of life. That thoughts and no thought can co-exist just fine. And that even intense body sensations or feelings that may or may not be connected with thoughts can also exist in the same space.

Andrea writes:

I should have been safely out of my third trimester by now, but instead I feel hollow and deeply sad. I was a mother for just over 10 weeks but my baby is gone and I have no way to prove that I once held a life within my body. And while my arms remain empty for the time being the change has been irrevocable. I was a mother for 10 weeks and I will remain a mother in some way, even if I never manage to bring a child into the world. It was the dream for the future that made me a mother, the hope and love for my unborn child. Nothing can take that away, not even death.

She's doing this work as well. I feel a profound respect for her, being able to hang with the pain and the ambiguity, and to offer others a glimpse into the process of working with it all. It's not just about acceptance, although acceptance of what is, breath by breath, is essential. I think we have to come to love not only the questions, and the often simple, beautiful answers our spiritual traditions offer, but also the flopping about, the intellectual curiosity, and the flailing in grief and bitterness.

There's room for it all.

Birth and Death

As the focus of our two week intensive practice experiment at the zen center - not a full retreat, but 2 or more hours of group practice six out of seven days - we are studying two small teachings from Dogen. It's funny. Having written awhile back about how us Soto folks seem to over-emphasize the founder at times, it seems I've been swamped with Dogen almost ever since. I can almost hear The Zennist's shit talking turning up a notch.

Seriously, though, there's room for questioning any teacher or teachings, while also deeply appreciating the jewels within the offering. And so the eclectic spirit I have always had, as well as a love of discovering forgotten or marginalized wise folks, gets to take a back seat for a few weeks in favor of good old Dogen.

One of the pieces we're studying is Shoji, or "birth and death." And as I sat in zazen this morning, the question came to me "What is birth and death?" It was interesting that it came as "is" and not "are" - and when I rephrased the question as "what are birth and death?" it didn't feel right. So, I left it as "is."

A few minutes after the question came, I heard water run through a nearby pipe. After it had gone, I thought "Is the sound dead now that I can't hear it? Can a sound be born and die? Does it even matter if "I" hear it or not?" Perhaps these questions seem silly. Maybe they are.

But consider human birth and death. When is a person born? How do you know? When is a person dead? How do you know? Even if you just consider the fluctuations of the physical body, it's pretty hard to determine a fixed birth point and a death point. Taking a last breath is a convention marker that helps us navigate death territory, but I think it might be foolish to say "that's it."

What is birth and death? There's your question for the day (or for life). Enjoy!

"Land Hurricane"

What a wild night. We've have such strange weather here in Minnesota. The temperature dropped. The winds are blowing everything all over the place. I saw the first snowflakes of the season this morning. A local news outlet called the storm a "land hurricane," which is a bit much, but still it made for tough sleeping.

I woke up at 4:45 am and walked out into the living room and looked over at my phone. All was quiet, so I went back to sleep. About an hour later, I woke up again, and did the same thing. This time, I saw the message light blinking. Half awake, I listened to the message. The baby had come, a few days early, to the surprise of almost everyone. I'm now an uncle!

At 3 am, my sister and her boyfriend had been at home, awake for most of the previous day. They knew it was close, but I guess it didn't feel as close as it really was. Yes, it is their first child, but both had been preparing for months, doing everything they could to learn about babies and the birthing process. So, it was surprising to say the least to wake up to that phone message, and find out that they had made it the hospital maybe 45 minutes before the birth happened.

I have never been much of a baby person. In fact, I've often worried about getting girlfriends pregnant in the past, feeling like having a kid wasn't part of the script I had about my life. Maybe it still isn't, however, holding my nephew this afternoon, I felt some of that baby angst slide away, and realized to some degree why it is that most people gush over the little ones. There aren't really words for it. But it's truly amazing that the kid in my arms had been in my sister's stomach just eight hours earlier.

And that he came during a wild storm, appearing after a wild rush across town to the hospital in the middle of the night, makes it that much more amazing.

May he be happy, healthy, and joyful!

*Photo of a house in St. Paul, MN after Tuesday's storm.