A Reflection on the Five Remembrances

 

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old.

There is no way to escape growing old. 

 

I am of the nature to have ill health.

There is no way to escape ill health. 

 

I am of the nature to die.

There is no way to escape death. 

 

All that is dear to me and everyone I love

are the nature to change.

There is no way to escape

being separated from them. 

 

My actions are my only true belongings.

I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.

My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

The Five Remembrances is my very favourite gattha. It might seem gloomy but in fact I find it very reassuring. I think for me the scariest thing is feeling like I might fail to prevent something (illness, etc.) or fail to do something important. This gattha tells me that I can't truly prevent them and so I am allowed to stop trying.

I'm really not explaining that well. Perhaps it makes better sense to say that they reassure me that all of these things are natural and not disasters to be prevented. So I can begin to accept them more. I can say that the first time I started reciting it to myself, when I was driving on a highway I didn't know and was feeling anxious, it calmed me right down. Well, not right down. But it helped. The thing I fear most in that situation is having a car crash and dying or suffering greatly. In that moment, allowing myself to accept that death is inevitable helped me let go of some of my fear in driving at that moment.

I decided when I was extremely young that since I couldn't know whether or not there was life after death there was no point in contemplating it further. It seemed like there were enough things to worry about that were more concrete. As time went on even that fell away. I just can't believe in heaven or hell or any sort of afterlife. And I'm actually fine with that.

For me, when I say goodbye to this life, and everyone and everything in it, that is final, which makes it all the more poignant. Being able even for a fraction of a moment to see my death in the context of all those other deaths, the small and vast deaths that are happening all around me every moment of the day, even the small and larger deaths that are happening inside my body every moment of the day, to see time unroll before me and after me, makes it less sad and more beautiful.

I do like the focus of taking care of yourself so that old age is as pleasant as possible. I don't manage to do all of the things I know would help me in that regard but I do keep it as a main focus, if not the main focus. Shifting more and more to that being the main focus as time goes on. Mama needs more rest!

For Sr Thuận Nghiêm's dharma talk on the Five Remembrances, click here.

Image: of Irish crane, back after 300 years of their absence on the island. From ireland.com

"You must set out now” by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin

 

You must set out now.

Gather your belongings.

Take only what you need:

A journal, a pen, water colours,

A change of clothing, warm socks,

Woollen cloak with hood.

The currach awaits you.

Show your bundle.

Climb in.

Here are the oars.

Push away from shore.

Leave what holds you.

Seek no promise of safety.

Set your face to the boundless sea,

The wind in your left eye. Go.

In the pre-dawn darkness

One light shines:

Seven pointed star.

You do not know the way.

There is no way to where you must go.

Trust your life to this star.

Here is a journey prayer:

Star of the Sea

Seven arms encircle my soul.

A body to dance

A heart to know

Inner light to guide

Inner fire to impassion

Earth to birth me

Sea to hold me

Wind to carry me Home.

From Singing the Dawn – Rebirth of the Sacred Feminine

by Anne Kathleen McLaughlin 

Image: "Sea at night” by Władysław Ślewiński.

When the Old Oak Tries to Emulate the Willow

 The sun sets on another day.🌄

It's been such a hard week and a half. I will tell you what's gotten me through: my spiritual practice, my teachers’ wisdom, which I have heard over and over again until I've integrated a tiny portion of it into myself; listening to a LOT more of it over the last few days; my friends – some of whom I didn't know before this week; reaching out for help instead of curling up into a ball and waiting to die. (I did curl up for half a day. I needed to absorb the shock before beginning to act. And then I needed help looking at everything from different perpectives till I decided what I would do. I was still more intensely stunned because the worst of this news arrived on the morning after the US election, when I was already rocked back and struggling against despair.)

I won't go into the details of what upset me so much these two weeks, but I will say that I end this week stronger and — key here — more flexible than I began it, because I got to decide from a position of wisdom, acceptance, and support whether I was going to fight a particularly hard unfairness or whether I was going to shift in myself. In this case I decided not to fight but not to lie down and be rolled over either. Not to frame choosing my mental and physical health over fighting a war with my landlord — someone who holds great power over this aged, unwell, and, most importantly, moneyless person — as submission on my part, not to frame it in a way that shamed me for “failing” to fight. That left me able to agree to some things and — !!! — to negotiate others.

It may still transpire that I “win” nothing, but at the moment some of the worst of the order is possibly withdrawn. I wrote it all up, too, in an email, and the landlord’s sheriff didn’t disagree with my summary of our agreement. Fingers crossed.

Slowly my perspective shifts until I begin to see myself as a person with choice even when it doesn't seem like it, a person with help around me even when I can't see them right away, or can’t see what they can do.

Thank you to my friends and my communities. You are good. We are good together. 🫂

Lloyd - On National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

My writing group gathered today and wrote from prompts that were to help us think about Indigenous folk on this National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. One prompt I had offered was “The First Time I Ever Met an Indian.” I chose to phrase it that way because we are all on the old side, and when we were young that is the word we used for First Nations people, so it might trigger memories. This is what I wrote. 

I'm not sure what was the first time I ever met an Indian, but I think probably my first native friend was Lloyd Gladstone. He was certainly the first gay Indian I met, and although I was not yet out of the closet as a bisexual woman, I was very grateful for that attribute in him. 

Lloyd was a lovely man. Soft-spoken, soft, self-deprecating smile, kind and gentle. Also very smart. I was 14 when I met him, and he was somewhere around twenty (with a much older man as his boyfriend). I ran away at 13 and had returned to very different circumstances than the ones I left. I had much more freedom, and I stayed over at my boyfriend's house in the West End frequently, a recently condemned house with mushrooms growing on the walls in the kitchen from the leakage down from the toilet. We were a band of hippies, only one of us working, until Lloyd appeared. I was madly in love with the beautiful Peter, his long flowing hair and his wide knowledge of literature and civilisation, his deep intelligence and terribly broken self, his habit of getting addicted to heroin. 

Lloyd told me one day that I was smarter than Peter, that I could have a better life, could value myself more deeply than I had ever guessed I might.

Many years later when a friend of mine was in rehab I visited him and to my astonishment, there was Lloyd, his mentor. Lloyd himself had suffered greatly in his youth and struggled with alcohol addiction all his life. At the time, he was several years clean and working for Together We Can. It was such a joy to reconnect with him and to see him doing so well.

I was talking with Lloyd in a park one day a few years later, when he had taken back to drink, and a First Nations woman came over to speak with him. She was much younger than him and was reverent in her approach, seeing him not just as gay and hurt and wonderful Lloyd, but a well respected and deeply loved elder.

The last time I saw Lloyd, he was living in the Downtown Eastside above the Ovaltine café. He wasn't drinking at the time, but he was wretchedly poor and his health was not good. He wasn't receiving enough money every month to feed himself, and he was ill and fragile. I bought him lunch, a bit worried about offering because I didn't want to offend him. He allowed me to give that to him, and I was very grateful. We ate at the Ovaltine and talked a long time. He could only eat half of his sandwich, and wrapped up the other half to take home. 

Lloyd was an anchor in my life, one of the very few people who had known me over so many periods of my sleeping and awakening. He never stopped being a gentle and brilliant and beautiful man and although I don't like ending on a down note, I say shame on us, shame on us for putting so little value on that man's life, on any one's life, that when they are hurt or ill and can't support themselves, we give them so little that all we are doing is letting them slowly die. Not our fault. We supported him. Where was his family? Why didn’t he work? 

For shame. For shame.

I love you, Lloyd. You are my well respected and deeply loved elder. Rest in peace.

“Fruits and Nuts” - A Poem About Vic's Death

 

My brother died almost three years ago. He was in his fifties, but he was the youngest in our family when I was growing up, so I can't help thinking of him still as my baby brother. In this season that year, I was visiting him, the first time I was able to after Covid began and the last time I ever saw him. Sadness has been coming up a lot.

I read Hugh O’Donnell's prose poem "Fruits and Nuts" this morning and the last paragraph gave me a breath of insight that made me think a little differently about my grief. Probably just for the moment. This is what came of it.

Fruits and Nuts

 

"We love the flowering stage…

But how quickly we lose interest as their petals fade"

Hugh O'Donnell

 

Or maybe look at it this way

my little brother

 

Your death not incomprehensible

not anomalous

not outrage

not shock

 

But fulfillment

bud into flower

flower stretching open    soliciting

a beetle's caress

petals falling away

and the slow unseen swelling of the fruit

 

You are the fruit which nourishes 

even as you loose your hold and drop

 

I yearn for every age of you

and every age you never reached

I yearn for the fresh return of you

renewal of you

unharmed unblemished

free to live in confidence and joy

 

You are the fruit that rests among the grasses

your sweet scent inhaled from afar

from your seeds new trees are born

from your memory new tenderness and truth

Image: A black and white picture of two little white boys. The one on the left is Guy. He has his arm around his younger brother's neck. That little one is Vic.

Poem: In My Grandmother’s Trunk I Found

Wrote a poem today.

I'm taking an online class for writing parts of our lives into story -- finding the stories in our lives. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, yet I am surprised, the prompts and discussion, and the writing itself, are invoking waves of emotion, unexpressed but unsuppressed, so my demeanour no doubt has sorrow in it.

The background to this is that sleep has been REALLY bad this week, and I’m stressed over my very complicated housing subsidy re-application. Combine that with the unexpected vulnerability in class, and you get this poem.

The prompt was "In my Grandmother’s Trunk I Found."

I like it when a poem offers itself so willingly like this. It just tumbled out, each line prompting the next, an entirely inner-audio experience. I hear the prompt, I hear the response, I write the response, I hear the response to that.

In my Grandmother’s Trunk I Found

a small and suffering sound

and when that sound awoke

I began to choke

and when that sound unfurled

it gave to me the world

and when the world I saw

it held my old gran-ma

It reminds me of an Irish poem I knew as a kid. My poem is nowhere near as magical, but the shifts are similarly odd and when I first reread mine I could feel the tempo of this Irish verse romping with the words. Here is the poem, recited to me by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem many years ago.

The Man of Double Deed

There was a man of double deed
Who sowed his garden full of seed,
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to fall,
Like birds it was upon a wall,
When the birds began to fly,
'Twas like a shipwreck in the sky.
When the sky began to crack,
'Twas like a stick upon my back.
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a pen knife in my heart.
And when my heart began to bleed,
Then I was dead, and dead indeed.

Image: of my granma, standing against snow and bushes, a white woman in a tight winter cap, short leather jacket, gloves, and bomber pants, with knee high boots. She stands with hand on a bent thigh and is a thousand times cooler than ever since. See adjoining pictures for comparison. (Two young ladies — Marie-Louise before she was Granma and her best friend, Bernadette) in baggie dresses and hats. Granma’s is a bit big and a bit floppy.) Final image is headshot of granma in her 90s.

of birds in flight: "Birds flying at sun set" by Kingaustin07, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

Joy in the Fog

I want to say something about finding joy in the midst of fairly heavy chronic fatigue.

I am rewriting the book of my life. I haven't been able to work regularly for most of my life, but I have filled the gap by learning and developing some of my interests and passions and honing my skill as a writer.

This has fed me well. But I find now that taking on even small projects is very stressful because of how long it takes me to do anything, due to fatigue, brain fog (and its many children), etc.

I’m turning 67 this year. I’ve decided I don’t want to spend the last perhaps twenty years of my life struggling from project to project and feeling like I can’t take time away for other things (and people) until I finish, so I am shifting my focus onto things that give me an immediate boost, a wee spark of joy. Such as taking up singing again.

I don’t have a teacher or a choir or anything so energy and commitment demanding. I use online videos for practicing when I am able and reclaiming my voice, and I am taking some of my old repertoire off of the shelf and relearning them. As many of the songs are in Irish, this gives me a chance to relearn a little of that, but in a gentle way.

I will soon be taking a six week online course that focusses on the inspiring, sacred songs of Hildegarde of Bingen, but which is intended for a deep awakening of our voice.

I feel very happy about all of this, after nearly losing my ability to sing at all. I am not expecting miracles from the practicing or the class. This isn’t about goals, or anything that might be achieved or happen later. This is about enjoying the moments while I sing.

I may not recover — I’ve been trying all my life — but damn it, I will have joy.

Image of goofy, older white woman posing in front of gorgeous, unlit lights in Dundalk, Ireland’s market square, hours before they were lit in celebration of Brigit. Many of the lights show images of St. Brigit’s face or symbols associated with her.