Majestic Roses
I've buzzed around my mother and father trying to make up for the separation from their home, like a desperate bee pollinating meaning into their days to make up for the loss.
I wanted to share this excerpt on the Soul from Ram Dass's book, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying. I read five to ten pages each night before bed under the auspices of my desk lamp.
Ram Dass wrote like he spoke. His thoughts are long and uninterrupted, like free verse poetry. I've introduced paragraph breaks during natural points of reflection.
While I prefer his long sentences, I've revisited this and other excerpts so many times as a meditations, that these breaks have given me the space to pause.
The Soul, we discover, seeks no meaning; its "meaning," to borrow from that Ego-concept, is self-evident.
A flower does not question its meaning or right to exist; it simply is, and its purpose is joy.
In one of his most exquisite essays, Emerson compares our human attachment to meaning, and to history, thus:
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
While this may seem too simple—we are not flowers, after all—it contains a profound truth as well that we tend to forget in our complex lives.
Before we are parents, executives, or neighborhood activists, and after we have ceased to be those things; before the Ego begins its work of attaching meaning to itself, clothing itself in identity, we simply are, full stop.
Behind the machinations of our brilliant, undependable minds is an essence that is not conditional, a being that aging does not alter, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing is taken away.
The more we become aware of this being, which is our soul and source of strength, the less we will prey to the illusion of meaninglessness.
This passage helps me reframe how I think about both myself and my parents.
The Self
As a creative person, I often feel as though as I have a multitude of sometimes-opposing identities.
I am a daughter with family responsibilities, yet I long to be on my own and carefree.
I am a public person who works with youth in the community and am involved in various organizations, yet I long for the completely private life of a craftswoman and writer.
This dualism in particular – the desire to be out there and do things, but simultaneously hide – is something I wrestle with daily.
As I toil and continuously spin myself up in these ideas, tripping over all of the vessels I've thrown and cast, Ram Dass's words free me.
They remind me that that all of my endeavors are mere garbs of ego and that I can take any of them off or put them back on as I please.
I don't have to discard them outright, but I don't have to cling or obsess over them because ultimately they have no meaning.
And while this may sound reductive, it is liberating. It actually lets my activities stand on their own more as useful contributions to society as opposed to being all mucked up with my "me-ness."
What outlives all of these preoccupations is my unfettered Soul, brought into this form by my beloved mother and father, along with my sister.
My Parents
Lately we've all suffered in our individual forms and their collision in this business of life.
We've struggled with our mortal questions—how and where should my parents age? Where should they spend their last years and ultimately die?
Do we need to replant these majestic roses?
These preoccupations have come at the expense of letting my parents simply be and for their souls to decide.
In reading this book by Ram Dass, I've discovered the most fruitful exercise would have been for all of us to read it together rather than embark on any change.
But that's not what we did. Instead, we moved Mom and Dad to a community of elders a few weeks ago.
It is a beautiful place, but I am not sure it is right for them because it has separated them from nature.
I've buzzed around my mother and father trying to make up for the separation from their home, like a desperate bee pollinating meaning into their days to make up for the loss.
I have come to see them as flowers as Ram Dass intended, their forms slightly wilted, but their souls still blooming with desire for a reunion with their source.
Useful Treasure
My father radically invests in things he believes in, like me. And these bits of junk he's relentlessly saved for a finest hour which may or may not come.
Today we were at The Big House and my dad was looking around at the things he's collected in the backyard.
His formal and informal tools, pots my mother had abandoned, and bunches of assorted wires, pieces of string, and small bits of chain tucked away in handy places for when he's tying up plants.
I'm ashamed to say I referred to some of it as garbage. My father didn't argue. He just stated what the things were.
He picked up the stainless steel bottom of a pressure cooker missing the handle and lid and thumped it with his big worn hand.
This is useful.
Sometimes I poke my dad by calling him a miser.
This is another thing I am ashamed of because the truth is that my father radically invests in things he believes in, like me.
And these bits of junk he's relentlessly saved for a finest hour which may or may not come.
What is visible in this habit of my father's to collect and save?
A deep commitment to the earth and not thrusting into it something that can be used instead of it becoming eternal waste.
A desire to take care of us all. To save us some money and time perhaps. To share both his wares and wisdom.
There is so much hope and kindness embedded in these tiny acts of saving. So much intelligence to treasure.
I pray that next time my words are not hasty, that my eyes are unclouded, and that these moments to love and affirm are not lost.
Collaborating With Aging
According to Parker J. Palmer
"I don't want to fight the gravity of aging. It's nature's way. I want to collaborate with it as best I can, in hopes of going down with something like the grace of that setting sun. For all the wrinkles and worry lines, it's a lovely thing simply to be one of those who's lived long enough to say, 'I'm getting old.'"