I am terrified of loss. It seems odd to me since I have experienced a lot of loss in my life, and because it is part of the human experience. I have heard that when trees die, there is sadness in the forest, but the sadness is magnified when the dead tree’s trunk is removed. This is because the trees stay connected to the stump by their roots. And those intertwined roots continue to provide connection and nourishment.
Shortly after I moved to a beautiful place to start a new life, my spiritual teacher died. I hadn’t seen him since prior to the pandemic, and when I heard the news of his death, it felt like the ground beneath me was removed. In this chaotic world, simply knowing that he was alive and that I was connected to him was enough to sustain my sanity no matter what I encountered in life. I couldn’t imagine starting a new life without him. But I had forgotten that life and death are not that simple. After my teacher’s death, I had a phone conversation with one of my spirit sisters and we were exchanging stories and teachings from him. He had a remarkable way of teaching thorough mundane experience. I remember once when I was cooking dinner in his kitchen, I noticed that he had no labels on his spice containers. I was looking for specific spices for the soup that I was making, and I was struggling to find them. My teacher came into the kitchen, and I told him of my dilemma. He smiled and suggested that I smell them. “Is this coriander?” I asked him. “Maybe,” he said. “But either way it smells like it would be good in soup.” My spirit sister shared some of the teachings that he had given to her and some of them I had not heard before. She spoke teachings of his that were perfect for the moment of time that I was in, and I started to realize that my teacher was still alive through my spirit sister and others that he encountered. He, and we, are much bigger than the birth and death of our bodies and even bigger than time.
A Methodist pastor once told me that love and pain are one. At the moment, his statement confused me, but as we talked about it more, I started realizing the connection. To love is perhaps the deepest expression of life. But loving also means that we will suffer because change happens, and things end or transform for one reason or another. The only way that we can escape this suffering is to not love at all, but that would be a greater tragedy.
I have committed to transcribe a recorded teaching by Khenchen Konchok Gyaltsen Rinpoche that I have been struggling to complete. I attended the teaching some years ago, and in it he told a story about a woman who had just lost her baby. The woman brought the dead body of her baby to the Buddha to ask that he revive the child. The Buddha had compassion for her and told her that he would help. He asked her to leave the body of her baby with him and he asked her to go into the village and knock on the doors of the people who lived there. He told her to ask the people if they had lost someone in their home due to death; if they had not, she should ask them for a grain of rice. The Buddha asked the woman to return to him with the grains of rice that she collected. As the woman went door to door, asking people about the loss of their loved ones, she heard stories about their loved ones and their pain in losing them. When she returned to the Buddha, she only had a few grains of rice.
Because we love, we suffer loss. But, like the trees, we remain connected through our roots and the stories and teachings that nourish them. And both our love and our loss connect us all in our human experience as a source of compassion.
©Cardinal Speaks
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