Changed my hard drive yesterday, or the guy at the genius bar in the apple store did, and I uploaded my files last night.  This morning I try to get into word processing and I can't.  Yes, there is a moment of freezing.  What if . . .  Well, worst case scenario.  If it is all gone, I will deal with it.  If I have to go back to the apple store, I will deal with that too.  My equanimity surprises.

Is this a learning?

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~ David Wagoner ~

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Oh, I've listened to poems like this.  I've listened with one ear fixed on not understanding to dozens, no, hundreds of poems.  Is that the ambiguity of living the questions?  I did not understand the now of now, the not stepping into the same river twice, or how to give myself away.  With all the breathless suddenness of a cold bucket of water, I sing ‘I see, I see.’  

So there is some good, something incredible and joyful about this moment.  A breath-taking wonder at the beauty of a steel blue dawn, flannel sheets and a child’s soft snores beside me.  Breath returns in time to thank the divinities inside and out for the possibility of seeing beauty and feeling joy.  But at the same time, I know deeply that sudden understanding and vision does not replace pain.  Understanding does not provide happily ever after.  It is only . . . only, what?  Only just now, only just the point of beginning to give myself away, only the place to start the work, only the place where I step off and expect an angel catching.  Even all that is too much.  It is only now.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Oh god, this is hard.  On a new deeper level it is letting go.  It is expecting, trusting, assuming, living hope.  It is faith.  Yes, letting go is deep dependence on and trust in the unfolding of what is coming.  The absolute knowing that given the completion of today, tomorrow will come and will be a now to be lived fully.  Fully with pain and with joy.  It will come without my need to do anything but wait and accept it.  It will be, for me, the mystery of gratitude and joy.  It might be the mystery of the journey of grieving and disappointment.  Everything that I’ve been taught in these last two years about Dukkha floods in.

I am by nature an optimist.  I have always had a measure of faith in my jacket pocket but I’ve been abandoned, I’ve been disappointed, I’ve been hurt.  There is a hole in my jacket pocket and my measure of faith escaped.  I have been left with Dukkah.

I found this definition: ‘‘suffering’ is an inadequate translation of the word ‘Dukkha’, but it is the one most commonly found, lacking a better word in English. Dukkha means ‘intolerable’, ‘unsustainable’, ‘difficult to endure’, and can also mean ‘imperfect’, ‘unsatisfying’, or ‘incapable of providing perfect happiness’.” (http://viewonbuddhism.org/4_noble_truths.html)

This morning I need to celebrate and not be slightly embarassed for doing so.  I am finding joy, chasing it, even though I’ve lost the person who completed my life and the perfect child that I imagined.  The intolerable pain exists at the same time as the joy, and at the same time, it is possible to  not make either such a big deal.