Morning

An experience of one thousand days

Returning home from the woods in early light, my dog lagging behind, I heard a bird call from somewhere above. The sound brought me back to another morning more than 10 years ago, outside a cabin in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. I hear lots of birds and they don’t always create this sense of connection through time. But the bird, the emerging light, the smell of earth and something about the air conspired to bring these two moments together. I could feel time as a sort of unfolding and looping back, rather than simple progression. It was as if these two mornings were not actually different. Life felt as if it were one long day, with this being “Morning”.

It reminded me of a day when I took one of my son’s hands, and I felt my mother’s hand taking mine. The warm, gentle feeling of her skin…I was mothering him, as she mothered me. Her mothering is in me, like the experience of so many mornings. This connection to my mom’s mothering makes me feel less alone without her, and relieves some of the disquiet of living on now that she has died.

I had a meditation teacher, Reggie, for many years. It feels strange to say that in the past tense, though we are most definitely estranged. When I was still teaching within his Buddhist organization, his wife and co-lineage holder Caroline gave a talk in one of the on-line programs about visualization practice. She explained that conjuring up really fine details of a visualization — the colors, textures, temperature, mood — was important, and I found that it really did bring the visualized scene out of my mind and into the actual stream of my life, to offer more attention to these details.

This talk from Caroline fell somewhere within the universe of Morning and Mothering, for me, in that it helped open the door to experiencing them as such.

In general, though, I was unable to connect smoothly with Caroline, when she replaced Reggie’s prior wife Lee as the feminine figurehead of the lineage. I worked closely with their new family — Reggie, Caroline and Caroline’s son — for several years and still never had an easy conversation with her. But despite the awkwardness, there were some very profound moments of her teaching where she shared something that impacted my practice, and I should say, my “non-practice”, like the moment in the woods, or holding my son’s hand.

I’ve come to Medium hoping to tell some of my story of moving away from Reggie and Caroline, and much of our sangha. Though in a way they are just the tip of the iceburg —for me, they are points in time through which to access much more.

Many American Buddhist communities, populated primarily by white converts to the religion, are struggling to reconcile egregious abuses of power with a rhetoric of compassion and egolessness. They are struggling to justify the absolute immunity of teachers and the rewriting of students’ voices by those same teachers, and those who remain devoted to them. Things are falling apart, organizations in chaos and students adrift.

What brought me to such a community? What brought that community to me?

I am an avid reader of history and find myself reminded, with each story, that there is no single explanation for what has happened in the past. Just as we do not speak in a single voice about the present. And so as the light breaks over the horizon, each voice brings a piece, containing pieces of pieces, which we can collectively call “Morning”. May I be unafraid to bring my own pieces forward, remembering the validity of each voice, by virtue of being a voice.

There is no final truth beyond the ability to listen to one another. May we continue to listen, and share, everyone from everywhere. Thank you for reading.