Over and over in the Turning of the Wheel one is afforded the opportunity to digest and integrate our experiences. For me it is the Solstices and the Equinoxes that big things get integrated.
Little over a year ago, after a trip of a lifetime, I shaved my head. I felt like I was discarding a lifetime of old programming, beliefs, emotions and patterns. This is the original post. Two days later my dad died. He was born on Halloween (a cross quarter day in the Wheel of the Seasons indicated as a time of dying) and he died on the Spring Equinox. A day that generally represents new cycles of growth and evolution. For me his death caused me to confront many things. As a child, because of my mom’s depression, I depended on my father for emotional survival. In spite of his anger, (especially when he was hungry or tired) he provided me with love and security that I didn’t feel with my mom. My biggest fear as a child and a young adult was that he was going to die.
So when he actually died, though my body went into shock for a bit, I knew I was going to be okay and so was he. We had had some rocky points in our relationship and for the most part we had worked through them. There were conversations I couldn’t have with him, because he did everything to avoid conflict. Whenever he was uncomfortable with a conversation, it was like he would disassociate and start humming. As a yogi, I understand that vibration whether chants, songs or sounds can be comforting. I understood that he was self-soothing. But it did limit honest, open truthful conversations.
I noticed in my grieving process, though I was grateful to him for his presence in my life, I did feel a lot of resentment towards what I perceived as the institutions that “radicalized” him. I grew up with guns and he always had a passion for guns, which I have no problem with, but I observed him become more closed minded and dogmatic, and fearful that the government was going to take his guns. The nra and his allegiance to it turned him from a independent thinker into a fearful anti-government republican.
Though he wasn’t religious when I was a child, I also saw him get pulled into a religion that preached politics and made him more fearful of people who thought and believed differently than his religion. In some ways that was more shocking to me than when he actually died.
After a few days after his death, when I was meditating he came to me and he told me he was afraid. When I asked him what he was afraid of he told me he was afraid to go on because he thought he was going to hell. I told him how I didn’t believe in the hell of the christians and that in my opinion his big open heart was the key to help him move on. All the love he showed and his generosity of spirit way outweighed any “sins” he may have thought he committed. I told him that when he allowed his life review he would see that. A few days later, he showed up again and he was full of love and light. He told me I was right and that he was going to go on. I thanked him for everything and I didn’t see him for a while.
A few months later he showed up in my meditation again and he told me “You were right.”
“About what?” I asked
‘About God and Guns being a contradiction. God is about love and Guns are about fear.” He responded.
He seemed at peace. Since that time, he pops in every now and again. I am at peace as far as our relationship is concerned but I am still not quite at peace about the institutions that shanghaied my father. That is my work.
BUDDHISM:RIGHT THOUGHT
INTERBEING: ‘If you are a poet, you will see that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees can’t grow, and without trees we can’t make paper. The sunshine is also here, the logger, wheat for the logger. As a reader your mind is here as well as mine. Everything is here in this sheet of paper. When you look deeply you will find that you can’t point to one thing that is not here- time, space, earth, rain, minerals, sun, cloud, river, heat.’ Thich Nhat Hanh
‘In a real sense all life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.’
Martin Luther King Jr. / Written in a letter from Birmingham Jail.
Astrophysicist Neal Degrasse Tyson explains that when a star or a supernova explodes, when it disintegrates, all the elements of the Periodic Table- i.e. all the elements that form our planet and therefore, us, are released. So we are not just metaphorically, but literally made of stardust.
We are stardust.
Billion year old carbon-
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Garden……… Joni Mitchell ‘Woodstock’.
Well, it takes a long time for spring to arrive in Canada. But all the robins are back and the Canada geese. And it has made me wish I had a garden. I love gardening and have no place to dig and plant.
‘Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Marcel Proust
‘In life, a person can take one of two attitudes: to build or to plant. The builders might take years over their tasks, but one day, they finish what they’re doing. Then they find that they’re hemmed in by their own walls and life loses its meaning when the building stops.
Then there are those who plant. They endure storms and all the vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the garden’s attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.’ Coehlo
Kind hearts are the garden
Kind thoughts are the roots
Kind words are the blossoms
Kind deeds are the fruits. John Ruskin
‘Anything that grows is always more beautiful to look at than anything which is built.’ Lin Yu Tang