My hands smell like oregano from crushing dehydrated leaves. I sink into the rhythmic crunch of my fingertips, the grainy sensation of fistfuls of leaves pressing into my palm as I ball it into a fist, crushing and crushing the leaves that were bright green and fresh just yesterday into tinier and tinier pieces. Today they are dry and compressed. They fall apart. I tuck them away, stored for a winter day when they will flavor a pot of wild mushroom soup or homemade spaghetti and offer sustenance. What is living, dies, and will offer life again.
If I put any stock in predicted due dates (which I don’t), I have nineteen days until this life wriggling around inside me joins me in a dance to bring it forth into the world. Skin to skin, instead of skin within skin. It could be tomorrow. It could be four weeks from now. Either way, the days are limited before our family shifts to integrate another human being into our space and rhythm of life. As I number the days, each one seems like it should be important, that I shouldn’t squander any of them.
What does it mean to squander a day?
My mind first goes to my to-do list. All the things that will be more difficult (or even impossible for a time) to do once I am caring for an infant. There are pump parts and a stack of bottles pulled out of storage that need washed, a curtain could be altered and hung in my guest room, herbs to dry, pesto to make, freezer meals to store, diaper elastic to finish re-threading, books to finish reading, parent homework for my daughter’s school, a memoir I once thought I would finish by this season yet still remains in a messy state of process.
But what good is measuring life by a to-do list? They seem always to inevitably be there, shrinking and growing. Am I the measure of my productivity? So many days I reach the end and am tempted to rate my worth or success that day based on what I managed to check off my list. What did I do? But it’s a futile game to play.
Eckhart Tolle writes, “You are a human being. What does that mean? Mastery of life is not a question of control, but of finding a balance between human and Being. Mother, father, husband, wife, young, old, the roles you play, the functions you fulfill, whatever you do—all that belongs to the human dimension. It has its place and needs to be honored, but in itself it is not enough for a fulfilled, truly meaningful relationship or life. Human alone is never enough, no matter how hard you try or what you achieve. Then there is Being. It is found in the still, alert presence of Consciousness itself, the Consciousness that you are. Human is form. Being is formless. Human and Being are not separate but interwoven” (A New Earth, 104-5).
At moments in these precious dwindling days before the birth, I also sometimes just want to be. Screw the to-do list. I want to sit on the couch or the porch and just soak, to find a moment of quiet. Yes, yes, the to-do list will happen. Probably. And what goes undone will not be as urgent as I supposed. No one will die if I don’t get the freezer meals put away. We just might have to eat more take-out than I would prefer. I savor each quiet morning I have left when my girls are at school, knowing that soon they will be broken up with sleep exhaustion and intermittent cries, my schedule no longer my own to control. Some mornings I am tempted to feel guilt if I don’t write or do something “meaningful” with those hours. But there is also value in sitting in my comfy armchair and sensing the quiet and sinking into the tired ache of my body rather than resisting it. Choosing just to be. Maybe I’ll read. Maybe I’ll journal. Maybe I’ll reach out for conscious awareness of the Divine. Maybe I’ll just fall asleep.
It’s a thin place I walk towards, this birth.
The moments when life enters the world and the moments when it leaves the world in a form we recognize, the space between the realm of form and the realm of the imaginal grows thin. Birth is a type of death and death is a type of birth. We tend to think of a life on a linear timeline, birth at one end and death as far from it as possible on the other. But if you place life on a circle, the two endpoints touch and meet, intertwined—perhaps one and the same.
I recently finished The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter. The chapter that stuck with me the most details his trip to the country of Bhutan where he discovers the secret behind why they are among the world’s twenty happiest countries despite their lower economic status. Part of the answer: they consider their death every day.
A lama tells Easter, “Those who have thought of their death and prepared for it, they do not have those regrets [of not living in the moment, working too often, and living a life the person thinks they should rather than the one they truly want to]. Because they have often not fallen into those delusions. They have lived in the moment. Maybe they have accomplished a lot, maybe they have not. But regardless it has not affected their happiness as much” (201). Later he continues, “[Impermanence] is the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings. It’s the idea that everything is, well, impermanent. Nothing lasts and, therefore, nothing can be held on to. By trying to hold on to that which is changing, like our life itself, we ultimately end up suffering” (201).
My life is changing.
The birth of a child will shift my physiology, my schedule, my hormones, my emotions, even my spirituality. It will change the rhythm of our family life. The family we have had to this point as four will never be that way again. I cannot hold onto to what it has been so far. I must lean and stretch and die and come to life in a new version of what is, and even that will be temporary and changeable. Some days I fear I will not be strong enough or wide enough to encompass the needs and love of three children. It will ask too much of me. Will it break me? Yes. And no. There it is again. Death and life, intermingled. I will not be enough. I already know this. And yet I trust that I will rise and find myself met with strength and capacity beyond myself, a way of being that will be good enough.
On the days when I’m already tired and my daughters are being loud or irritable and a part of me just wants them to temporarily go away so I can enjoy some peace and quiet, I find myself reaching for thoughts of death—not just my own death but theirs as well. If my daughter ran out in the street tomorrow and got hit by a car and ceased to breath the air of this world, how much would I long for these noisy, overstimulated moments again? I think of a woman in the news this past week whose husband never came home, and when her three-year-old daughter kept asking when daddy was going to be home from his trip, the answer was going to be never. If I ponder these things, it isn’t to cling to what I have with anxiety and be fearful every time my children play outside or my husband leaves for work, but it is a reminder that no future moments are ever guaranteed. We only have the one we are experiencing now. Am I experiencing it consciously? Am I staying present to the joy of what is? Or am I largely missing it while I’m preoccupied with my to-do list?
Last night I lit a candle during a compline service. As I dipped the wick into flame and settled the new light in the sand, I uttered a wordless prayer to be met in this upcoming transition. All my fears and anxieties about what I can’t control, all my yearnings to know and sense it as the thin place I know it to be. Will you be with me? I wanted to know as I lifted my eyes in the candlelit cathedral. Will I be met? I have to trust the answer is yes. It may not feel the way I want it feel, or be known the way I want it to be known, but I have to trust that in the end I will be held, that the smell of oregano on my hands will ground me in what is, that I will find embodiment as both human and Being. That death will breed life and life will breed death, and “all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” (Julian of Norwich).
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Shalom.
Danielle Klafter 