Mountain Lamp Community
The Gift of Not Knowing
M.L., Spring 2007
As many of you know, Eileen recently concluded a stay-at-home, month long retreat. Different folks from her sanghas came and stayed varying amounts of time to support her and to practice themselves.
One woman from Idaho came for over two weeks leaving twice for drives to Seattle. On the first trip she underwent a full CT scan to see if her metastasized cancer had slowed, and on the second trip she heard the results. She has been living with cancer for some time now and had been given 3 months to live on numerous occasions over the past years. One time during her stay, she said quite factually and without hesitation - 'this is my last spring'. For some time afterward, the quince was redder, the daphne more fragrant and the sun rising over the mountains more bright and warming for the retreatants. Her life with cancer has not become more sad, but more immediate. It is more intimate and, of course, filled with more tears and sobs. During the retreat it became apparent that she offered her impending death to us as a gift. She allowed us to be more intimate and immediate. It became our last spring, too. It became the only spring as before and after gently sloughed away like old and dying skin. The spring she offered will not turn into summer. The spring she gave did not come from winter. She offered what is always right before our eyes.
While she offered her holes from ports and stints, her mangled and carved out body, her mutilations and pain; while she offered us her war ravaged landscape, she also gave us Darfur, Iraq and countless other pains and horrors. For it seems, when there is intimacy nothing can be left out or ignored. The entire world and all its facets are invited in. Yet, somehow in all this suffering, what we held most clearly, what she gave us, were our own lives to live.
She also gave us the gift of not knowing-not knowing where we come from, not knowing where we are going and really not knowing who we are in any one moment. She gave us the gift of our own deaths as hers invited ours to be closer and nearer still. And again, she gave us the gift of our lives to live, if we choose, with care, with attention and with love.
As I sit here writing this, the cherry blossoms outside are pale against the sun splashed Sound but when I walk to the sitting hall I notice the blossoms are brilliantly white against the black hemlocks just as the moon is brighter when seen through the branches. She, too, gives us that.
To ignore our own pain and the pain of others, to ignore our own sufferings and the suffering of others is to miss our own unfolding lives and the unfolding life of the universe. To ignore them is to miss the call of the eagle, the sigh of the wind and the sunrise of tomorrow's dawn. It is right here, within the conditions of our lives, where we wake up! It is here in this world of you and I, of us and them, of living and dying. It is right here in our sorrow and grief and lament that we wake up. It is here in our growing older together, or dying at too early an age, that we become intimate.
It is a rare blessing that you and I are here today. Imagine what has gone into creating such a day as this one. Millions and millions of years, trillions of events and circumstances for you, for me to arrive in this very moment. What a blessing. What a gift. What a challenge and responsibility. To avoid sickness, old age and death is to avoid this very moment, this very place.
To live in the seasons of cold and heat, to live in the seasons of rain and dry sun, in wind and stillness is to live a life of full participation. To live in the seasons of happiness and sadness, in despair and joy, in trauma and peace is to live a life of intimacy. Intimacy means the utter and complete absence of distance. Ultimately, it is that which she offered to us and now, she offers to you.