Bonds of Affection

I just sat down after getting the hens back into their hen house. It's an interesting way that they head back at dusk. They start scurrying towards it, then pause, scratch and peck about for a while before they get to the coop. Then they hang about the outside of the coop pecking around and one or two head in. The ones in the house start chattering and the others outside listen and slowly in fits and starts work their way in. Catherine tells me that they are not pets. She's probably right, but I find them endlessly fascinating and do think of them as pets.

Anyway the hens are in their house now and I am writing.

Being up here and away from all the people and social connections I have been a part of for over twenty years has got me thinking about those connections and what they are like when the "flesh and blood" of them are far away. Last December I gave a Friday talk at the zen center around the theme I called "bonds of affection." Perhaps this is a good time to revisit that theme.

A few days before I gave that talk I had a pretty good idea what I would talk about: my upcoming move to Oregon, what it felt like preparing to move, and the feelings about the people I have grown close to over the years. That all changed by the time I gave the talk. Rebecca's death and her cremation ceremony shifted things in a very fundamental way. The whole range of connections and attachments I felt were interwoven in a new way. When I sat up in my seat to give the talk the word "affection" came up and it is that word that opened up the theme that developed.

Then it was Rebecca having left and my remaining. In a way now I am looking at it from the other side: I've left and you remain. I was part of the group that lost a member and I was feeling the richness of being a part of that group, in the midst of the group, through the experience of the loss. Even as I feel that the bonds of affection are still there I am aware that there has been a change. I've left a home where I have done a lot of maturing. I've become a homeless monk grappling with not knowing what to do and not even knowing what is going on. I feel the urge to figure things out and come up with some new "settled" way with rules that will tell me what to do, but I will try hard not to fall into those brambles. Check where my feet are and step forward.

Two weeks after my talk I was at the SPOT training program and we had a Skype hook-up with Darlene. In silence we each went up to the laptop showing Darlene and bowed. She then bowed back. Now Darlene has left. I find myself living in this tiny speck of space and time in the middle of unknowable coming and going. Svaha!