(no subject)
With all of the turmoil in my life the last week and working, sleeping, and walking around like a zombie, I almost didn't notice the anniversary of my mom's passing. I guess I have felt like she has been gone much longer. Most visits the last couple years were painful and depressing as I watched my mom become less and less the person she had been. She loved us completely to the end though. We were her whole world. What damage has been wrought by her illness upon me? My sister thinks of her almost daily. I rarely do, and it is only with sadness. I am relieved she is no longer in pain. I don't believe she has gone on to her reward, only that the short life she was given was brutal and unfair, and I hope that the love she felt for and from us was enough. It is hard for someone like me to whom romantic love and fierce independence have been everything, to imagine a life without either. She was the most humble of all of us. I also know that many times in the last years she questioned her faith, felt damned by her circumstances, and abandoned by her god, and I hope she didn't feel additionally burdened and saddened by my loss of faith.
She always trusted that I would find my way, and that has made me the strong person I am, and I am thankful every day that she recognized and encouraged my need for autonomy and respected my choices, though she worried constantly that I would end up more alone than she was, and without faith to comfort me. I am a survivor because of her love and teaching, and because she allowed me to believe in myself, to find my own path, from childhood on. She was a fantastic mother, and a beautiful person, and the bitterness and anger she expressed the last couple years were justified reactions to a fate that she did not deserve. She was, at the end, only a ruin, but still loved us deeply, and though I grieved over the gradual loss of the mother I loved over the last five years, and had let go of the person she had been long before she died, I feel her absence like a missing hand.
I think this is the dominant force in the human life. The need to fill the blank spaces. What must we do to feel intact? If only we would not deny that we are all one, the answers would be clear, and the pain of our loss and the fear of our own mortality would be mitigated through love and relationships.
Our modern world is a desert landscape, and we are socially impoverished by the distance between us all. Of course we approach the oasis with unbridled passion. Restraint only clarifies the disconnection. We must embrace that which keeps us alive with reverence and love. That must be our god. Without unity, when we cease to relate to one another as permeable and only temporarily separate manifestations of the one, we become a sterile imitation of the natural whole. Why is our culture so obsessed with artificial life? If only we could let go of pride and fear and accept that we cannot be creators ourselves, only modes of existence in the process of translation. We cannot separate ourselves from this. We are organic and constantly in flux. We absorb and excrete. We disperse and become other expressions of life. This is beautiful and divine. Denying nature is futile and psychically painful. When we strive to become the perpetual motion machines we create, we hurt ourselves, and hurt the whole. We need to replace the missing parts of ourselves with other life, and to accept the necessity of translation; instead of hating and fearing death and loss we need to humbly worship equilibrium and rebirth.
We cannot be complete in the machine. We need living community. We need living relationships and symbiosis. Our modern world resembles the robots we build, a barren network of imposed mechanical linkage. My mother's legacy to me is the knowledge that love and life are indivisible.
She always trusted that I would find my way, and that has made me the strong person I am, and I am thankful every day that she recognized and encouraged my need for autonomy and respected my choices, though she worried constantly that I would end up more alone than she was, and without faith to comfort me. I am a survivor because of her love and teaching, and because she allowed me to believe in myself, to find my own path, from childhood on. She was a fantastic mother, and a beautiful person, and the bitterness and anger she expressed the last couple years were justified reactions to a fate that she did not deserve. She was, at the end, only a ruin, but still loved us deeply, and though I grieved over the gradual loss of the mother I loved over the last five years, and had let go of the person she had been long before she died, I feel her absence like a missing hand.
I think this is the dominant force in the human life. The need to fill the blank spaces. What must we do to feel intact? If only we would not deny that we are all one, the answers would be clear, and the pain of our loss and the fear of our own mortality would be mitigated through love and relationships.
Our modern world is a desert landscape, and we are socially impoverished by the distance between us all. Of course we approach the oasis with unbridled passion. Restraint only clarifies the disconnection. We must embrace that which keeps us alive with reverence and love. That must be our god. Without unity, when we cease to relate to one another as permeable and only temporarily separate manifestations of the one, we become a sterile imitation of the natural whole. Why is our culture so obsessed with artificial life? If only we could let go of pride and fear and accept that we cannot be creators ourselves, only modes of existence in the process of translation. We cannot separate ourselves from this. We are organic and constantly in flux. We absorb and excrete. We disperse and become other expressions of life. This is beautiful and divine. Denying nature is futile and psychically painful. When we strive to become the perpetual motion machines we create, we hurt ourselves, and hurt the whole. We need to replace the missing parts of ourselves with other life, and to accept the necessity of translation; instead of hating and fearing death and loss we need to humbly worship equilibrium and rebirth.
We cannot be complete in the machine. We need living community. We need living relationships and symbiosis. Our modern world resembles the robots we build, a barren network of imposed mechanical linkage. My mother's legacy to me is the knowledge that love and life are indivisible.