You are the wave
My friend Lynn introduced me to the phrase “dying time.” We were talking about someone, about how they were dying, and she said “this is a dying time.” She said this very plainly. She said this matter-of-fact. “This is a dying time.” And I did what I always do with words and phrases that resonate with me: I stole it and started using it.
I know it comes from Buddha or Jesus or The Bible or Grimms Fairytales or the back of a CrackerJack box or whatever, but Lynn was the first person to use it in order for me to hear it and understand it, and so now I use this phrase: “dying time.”
There are laughing times, eating times, music times, party times, and there are dying times.
Sometimes, with all the changes happening in and around me, I feel like parts of who I used to be are in a dying time. I am dying to some stories I used to tell myself, or the stories themselves are dying. I am dying to some things I used to believe or obstinately refuse-to-believe. I am dying to my own arrogance, my own selfishness, my own assumptions.
This week was fast and intense. Every week in k-12, I imagine, is fast and intense no matter where you are teaching, subbing, administrating . . .
One thing I’m noticing about the age group I now work with (11–14) is that they require a lot more of my attention than my high school juniors and seniors or college freshman of yore. I wear two strings of malas around my neck. 116 beads, total. This number grows if I am entering into a particularly stressful situation. Like, the day I saw my oncologist to get my PET scan results, I had probably 50 pounds of beads on my body (exaggerating, and not by much). Traditionally, though, I have 116 beads around my neck. 108 if I’m feeling particularly at ease. My young students have taken to using my beads, some days, as a “lead” or a “leash” they take in their hands to demand my attention.
Some students will literally muscle their way through a crowd of students who are flocking me with questions, requests for attention, jokes, and will grab my beads off my chest and say, “Gruber. Listen.”
Old school educators might think, “What?! You let the children grab items on your person?! Without consequence?!”
Yes. Yes I do. In fact, I’ve come to accept this from my students. When they really want/need my attention, they take me by the beads. Never roughly. Never rudely. Never menacingly. They have already long since asked me about the beads. They know they are my meditation beads, that they are special to me, important to me, and that they must be gentle with the malas if they come to me and use the beads to gain my attention.
If they were any older, I probably would not allow this. Reader, if you see me out in the streets of The Dirty T, you are not allowed to grab my beads. Only kids, my kids, can do this. Sorry.
Back in the midwest, where I originated, one of my favorite relatives is in his dying time. This man, my Uncle Al, is a good man. This man was one of the few men in my girl-childhood who enriched my life rather than warped it. He taught me many things — never didactically.
Moreover, Uncle Al, is the greatest storyteller I will ever know. I recognized this even as a child. He could make the simplest, most mundane events into hilarious, often profane, strange, fascinating epics. I loved Uncle Al’s stories, even into adulthood. Couldn’t get enough. Never got enough, and so I am so very sad, reader, that he is leaving this life.
I have so many stories to share from my times with Uncle Al. I will save them for later because right now I am too raw to reflect on happier, easier, simpler times. Right now, I still don’t want my uncle to be in his dying time because I love him and selfishly want him to be there, always.
The hardest part of moving to Arizona, eight years ago, was leaving behind almost everyone I ever knew, leaving behind so many people I loved deeply. Among them some family members in Iowa, like Uncle Al. Oh, how it ripped me up to go without everyone in the midwest I loved. But I had to go. I know that now. The going saved my life. I could not have healed in the midwest. I could not have gotten sober in the midwest. I could not have discovered that one of my greatest loves in this life is working with children.
I had to go in order to learn these necessary things, in order to heal and save my own life, in order to save myself from myself.
And still, knowing this, knowing that my move to Arizona — while brutally difficult in spots — has been utterly necessary for my development as a human being.
Children love my Uncle Al. Before this time in his life, he had a wonderful capacity for absurdity, silliness, wildness. There’s a picture I cannot bear to look at right now but will someday share with you, reader, where my uncle is basically holding court with my cousins and I and everyone of our little faces is bright and beaming and fixed on him. In another dimension, my Uncle Al would have made a tremendously good teacher given his ability to command the attention of children (and adults). He was a teacher in many other ways, though. And I can only speak for myself, but my life is so much better for having had Uncle Al as a part.
I wish I had told him these things, of course, but such conversations were not common with Uncle Al. Sometimes we talked “serious stuff,” but usually not. Life was so serious without us fixating on the seriousness of it all, and so when I saw my Uncle Al, our interactions were usually light, hilarious, wild.
As some readers may have noticed, I’ve been dropping the following word more and more into my writing: “God.”
When I say “God,” I don’t know if I mean what you mean when you say “God.” Doesn’t matter. There’s your truth, my truth, and somewhere in the middle is God as God is. For me, this concept has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with love, with life force (which, I suspect, is just love).
I know God, as I understand God, has got my uncle’s back. God has got my uncle’s back, my back, and the back of that great big Prickly Pear growing up the chainlink fence at the back of our yard.
I say this not to persuade you, reader. What you believe or don’t is yours to believe or not. God does not come easily to me. A history of Catholic indoctrination, watching religious wars (literal and proverbial) play out here and abroad, watching organized religions protect bad men . . . I’m not a fan of organized religion. I ascribe to no religion. I do enjoy Buddhist teachings, and have dedicated a great deal of my spiritual pursuits to exploring these teachings. When all other religions fail, Buddhism makes perfect sense to me.
I sleep with one set of wooden beads around my neck. In the night when I wake up feeling scared, confused, worried, I pinch a bead between my fingers and begin saying mantras. Sometimes whatever nonsense jumps to mind first, and usually “nam myoho renge kyo.” I have said this chant so many times it rolls right off my tongue. I can feel this mantra. So I say this mantra for all things.
This morning, as I did my prayers, I said my repetitions for my uncle, and for my family back in the midwest who are caring for him now. I asked for nothing. There is nothing to be asked for, just that the universe sees this man I love through this stretch of time with a modicum of grace, a modicum of ease, plenty of mercy because I know his life, his story, and he deserves all the mercy available to us in our dying time.
The Buddhists tell me I must acknowledge that all life is suffering. Inescapable. The primary problem: suffering. And the Buddhists teach me how to examine the nature of my suffering, the Buddhists have taught me how to put some of my suffering down, or at least see the suffering for what it is rather than for the fiction I want to encase the suffering in.
This morning, I said my prayers, had my coffee, reflected a bit on the school week. I smiled thinking about getting new glasses (that process starts this afternoon — first new glasses in almost 2.5 years). I cried thinking about my uncle. I wrote this blog post. I drank more coffee.
Thich Nhat Hanh has been a real teacher for me in the past month or so. This morning, I was looking at How to Walk — a mindfulness guide that is a collection of Master Hanh’s teachings.
Today, I read this from How to Walk, “A wave’s physical body lasts five, ten, or twenty seconds. But the wave has her ocean body, because she comes from the ocean and she will go back to the ocean.”
I get it. Maybe you do, too, reader.
You are the wave, I am the wave, Uncle Al is the wave.
We come from the ocean, and “will go back to the ocean.”
Everything will be okay. That doesn’t mean everything will go my way.
That doesn’t mean everything will turn out in my favor (or yours’), only that everything will return, rightly, to the big cosmic ocean, as it should, and it will be okay. Stop worrying so much. This is your life. Go enjoy something.
