Nocturnal devotions
A vigil kept for many reasons.
Last Friday was the two-year anniversary of my mother’s death.
While I was still in Thailand and planning my visit to the U.S., I knew I wanted to be in the north for that day. I couldn’t say why I wanted to be hundreds of miles from my family. I’d already been separated from my community of fellow mourners for so long. To be away, and especially for that day? I didn’t have any sound reasoning for it. But I listened to my gut and planned this big road trip around New England, with the anniversary smack-dab in the middle of it.
I love winter. I love woodstoves and chimney smoke and snow, how frost singes my cheeks and nose as I snowshoe through the woods. I love the feeling of thaw as I shuffle in beside a fireplace and pull off my boots, wiggling my toes back to life. The cold gives an edge to my breath and a sharpness to my brain.
I was in my first Vermont winter when I got the news about mom.
While the world was frozen, I was frozen. It was painless, in an icy way. For months, the land looked no different. The trees were bare. Snow came and went. The lake froze over, streams gurgled under layers of warped, glassy ice. Everything was still, stagnant, hard.
That winter was one of the strangest of my life. The real hurt, the deep pain and hopelessness of depression, only set in once the world thawed. When it was clear the earth was still turning, still carrying on its spiral journey around the sun. When it was clear that time was moving forward, which meant leaving her behind.
With warmer temperatures, maple sap flowed and ‘mud season’ came. Fiddlehead ferns poked their way out of the earth and ramps carpeted my favorite cross-country ski trail. I struggled. I wept. I felt buoyed and then alone, hopeful and then despairing.
Zen Buddhism buffered me, some, from the murk. I took a course that spring, “Journeying through Grief and Change with Fearlessness” with the San Francisco Zen Center.
They introduced me to my most beloved bodhisattva, Jizo. A bodhisattva committed to accompanying others in suffering and death.
Jizo is often depicted as smiling and innocent. The cartoonish monk is in almost every garden or tucked somewhere on every street in Japan. There, these smiling statues are often draped in red and pink baby clothes. Little boots and toys are spread around their feet. Jizo is the guide of children who have passed away, miscarried, or been aborted.
In one incarnation, Jizo was a young woman of great faith. She lost her mother, tragically. She worried her mother’s soul was caught in one of the Buddhist realms of hell—To find her mother and help her atone, Jizo prayed her way into hell. Jizo’s prayers were so ardent that, by the time she arrived, her mother was gone. She’d passed into a realm of peace. But Jizo bore witness to such misery in the hell realms that she dedicated all her lifetimes to accompanying others in their suffering.
After I’d sketched out a rough outline for my trip north, I found out why my instinct pushed me to come up here. Zen Mountain Monastery, the Monastery that first formally introduced me to sitting zazen, was holding a vigil. For the nights of December 2 and December 3, members of the sangha were welcome to come and meditate through the night in commemoration of the Buddha’s enlightenment.
One of my mom’s formative spiritual experiences was the “morning watch” at St. Andrew’s-Sewanee. That vigil is held in the school’s Lady Chapel, all adorned in flowers and golden flickering candlelight. Throughout the night of Mondy Thursday, a silent watch is kept under the eyes of the Blessed Mary. Before dawn, the graduating class sneaks off to the nearby quarry to take a dip as the light rises. (James Agee, who had upheld the tradition when he attended SAS, wrote his novel “The Morning Watch” based off of his experience.)
When I went to St. Andrew’s, I kept watch. I knelt and prayed in the small room, gleaming and roseate. My dying grandfather was heavy on my mind. I stole down the path of the old railroad. I swam in the quarry with my friends. The stars gave way to sunlight. A new day came, though a day of Christian mourning.
I couldn’t imagine a better way of commemorating my mother than keeping watch, albeit under the soft smile of the Buddha instead of the kind gaze of Mary.
In silence, I learned the ways of the monastery. My first time visiting in person, I felt contentedly childlike: watching closely and mimicking others without the use of words. Slowly, I accumulated the minutia of formalities. Bow when you leave the zendo, hold this mudra at this moment, lift your hands in prostration, just so.
Without the structure of a formal sesshin or retreat, the vigil allowed everyone to follow their body’s needs. I alternated between sleeping, walking, meditating, chanting, reading dharma discourse, or transcribing sutras.
Meditation isn’t easy for me. I fidget with my monkey mind and peek at the clock through squinted eyes. I spend probably 70% of my time wondering how much longer until the bell will ring. I am far from a “good” meditator.
“Students always say their meditation is only ‘so-so,’” abbot Shugen Roshi said at the close of the vigil on Sunday morning. “But that their lives are changing.”
Meditation gives me a space to notice my emotions and thoughts, without pushing them aside. I don’t try and quiet my thinking at all, actually. I spend most of my normal life trying to run away from painful emotions, avoiding discordant thoughts. Meditation is a space where I can sit and be honest with myself, even if it’s with myself in pain.
“A sadness permeates,” I wrote to myself on Saturday. “There are so many forms and flavors of sadness, and far too few words for it. Melancholy doesn’t quite fit. My heart feels like a needle pierced the bottom of it and is threaded with a string, gently tugging downward. Some jerks are gaspingly painful, while in other moments it’s just a quiet, low, pull.”
Shugen Roshi describes how his students’ lives change with their practice, though their meditation is still so-so: They become more patient, less critical, and more open to the world.
I’m (again) not the world’s best meditator. I didn’t last through either night of the vigil, instead wearily succumbing to sleep. I’m also not the world’s best daughter, friend, partner, or sister. I fuck up. A lot. But can I sit with regret and accept it? Can I sit with guilt and own it? Can I sit with that integral pull of sadness in my chest and let it be?
If I can find space for all of those things within myself, then I know that it is okay to feel those things. To be those things. Feeling all of the cracks that run through me without rushing to fix them, I no longer feel so broken.
Thank you all so much for reading my work. If you haven’t subscribed yet, feel free to below! To my regular readers, last week’s omission was (as you can now probably guess) due to the retreat. Glad to be back, thanks for your support.
Love you
Beautiful as always ❤️ 💖 🙏🙏