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A change in the heart.
I’ve decided after two years of on and off practice and infrequent learning to actually dedicate to Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism.
Why?
This weekend was a friend’s fabulous off the wall party in Dallas (pictures here, they’re worth looking at). Just before I left here I spoke with a friend who has decided to break ties with another mutual friend. I completely understand his decision. I worry for our mutual friend because of it and because of what it indicates. On the way up to the party I chanted with our mutual friend in mind constantly. I’ve never really chanted for anyone else unless there was a pressing emergency. It has mostly been an exercise in coming to terms with my grief as well as serving to relieve some of its weight.
[skip over long garbled ramblings about a friend’s wild themed party and why you should not grapple on this kind of lawn in a bikini. Just go to the picture if you want to know.]
I was riding back the next day and just about at Waco it hit me. I don’t really have anything she kept close to her. I went thorough all her possessions and sorted out all her belongings into what to keep and what not to but it’s all packed way miles away from here. I have no physical proximity to my mother anymore. And I simply began to realize how much the end of her touch and her smell hurts. Does anything on this earth still posses her scent? How long will it take to fade from the one hat? That one shirt? Altogether? I pulled over onto the grassy shoulder of the road and started balling. My father calls at that exact moment. My first impulse is to ignore it. On second thought, I think, maybe just this once I’ll try to reach out to him in what should be a grief we both have.
“Hello Bube, how was your trip to Santa Fe?”
{I try to catch my breath}
“I’m on the side of the road in Waco.”
{traffic sounds}
“You’re what? I can’t hear you.”
“I’m on the side of the road. In Waco. Just. Crying about Mum.”
“Oh. I’ll call you back a little later then.” *click*
“GOD DAMN IT! WHAT THE FUCK! FFUCK!”
{he still hasn’t called}
I move further onto the grass median and away from the traffic noise. I call Cheryl. I feel like a kid (I am a kid). Sure I’ve got a career I’m trying to establish, trying to support myself, keep a house, have a girlfriend, living on my own, making new friends. It doesn’t matter though. I still feel like a little kid who’d much rather have the comfort of laying my confused and frustrated head in my mother’s lap but quite obviously I might as well consider myself an orphan. I start to doubt if I told her everything I could have before she died, if I hugged her enough. I know I couldn’t on both accounts and I couldn’t have known how much I would miss her.
Every relationship we have with a person has its own communication by action- that which we can’t possibly express in words. I will never have that communication I had with her with anyone else again. I realized that there are better ways I could have treated Cheryl by my actions. For whatever reason, I’ve been selfish in ways that I don’t find acceptable with her. That isn’t what I want. I want my actions to show that much care to those I know or at least care in what we are interacting over if it’s a complete stranger.
I spent all my free time as a teenager trying to mentally dissect the world. As soon as I was legally free of my parents, I went to a place based on just that where I could spend as much time thinking as possible. I’m done with academics now and my life is truly much more action than it ever has been before. I know logically how I want to treat people and how I should treat them but this does not mean I actually do it or am prompted to. There is a disconnect between the purity of the thought and the action that can not be bridged by more thought or simply more attempts at action. I have to first want it. Then it must became manifest inside myself. I thought of the people I admire most and they all have this quality. I tried to think of what it is that they do in their everyday lives to support this. In the end, the only way that I can think to do this for myself, to activate this care for others and desire for their and my own happiness, is to chant.
Basically, I’ve already been doing what a Nichiren Buddhist would so why not bring that forward, focus it a bit, and acknowledge just how much my practice can help my life? This isn’t really an organized religion as much it is one based off of practice. I won’t join an organized religion and accept things I don’t believe in simply to belong to the religion. In this case though, Do therefore Is and I want to be because being is better than believing.
last modified Aug 7, 2007 at 14:32
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