Ruminations
Submitted by daniel.budd on Wed, 05/12/2010 - 7:35pm.
Inside the Great Mystery that is,
we don't really own anything.
What is this competition we feel then,
before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?
This quatrain of Rumi's has been on my mind and heart a lot lately - since I signed up my 92 y/o father for home Hospice care two weeks ago. He and I have talked about what's going on - how the melanoma is spreading to his liver and who knows where else, how he cannot remain at home without round-the-clock assistance, how he has one foot in this world and one foot in the unknown.
Lately he's been leaning more into this world - leaning backwards as it were (no wonder he's a bit off-balance). It's difficult to give things up - your routine, the way your home looks, being able to fully care for yourself, and (of course) money. He's most reluctant to give that up, even though he saved a respectable amount of it for just this sort of occurance, this sort of rainy day. It's difficult to give things up - to give your life up. But really, what do we ever own anyway? And are we ever in as much control of our lives as we like to believe?
We know the answers to those questions...we don't like them, but we know them. And we are all fallible and fragile beings within the Great Mystery, in the embrace of the Great Mystery. Like learning to float in a pool, we can learn to give ourselves to this Great Unknown. Or not. But if we do, then it is not so much us who are floating, but the water - the Great Mystery - that embraces us, supports us, and (yes) eventually takes us back into itself.
My prayer for my father is that his passage be a gentle slipping under the water, a return to the embrace that once launched him into this world.
we don't really own anything.
What is this competition we feel then,
before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?
This quatrain of Rumi's has been on my mind and heart a lot lately - since I signed up my 92 y/o father for home Hospice care two weeks ago. He and I have talked about what's going on - how the melanoma is spreading to his liver and who knows where else, how he cannot remain at home without round-the-clock assistance, how he has one foot in this world and one foot in the unknown.
Lately he's been leaning more into this world - leaning backwards as it were (no wonder he's a bit off-balance). It's difficult to give things up - your routine, the way your home looks, being able to fully care for yourself, and (of course) money. He's most reluctant to give that up, even though he saved a respectable amount of it for just this sort of occurance, this sort of rainy day. It's difficult to give things up - to give your life up. But really, what do we ever own anyway? And are we ever in as much control of our lives as we like to believe?
We know the answers to those questions...we don't like them, but we know them. And we are all fallible and fragile beings within the Great Mystery, in the embrace of the Great Mystery. Like learning to float in a pool, we can learn to give ourselves to this Great Unknown. Or not. But if we do, then it is not so much us who are floating, but the water - the Great Mystery - that embraces us, supports us, and (yes) eventually takes us back into itself.
My prayer for my father is that his passage be a gentle slipping under the water, a return to the embrace that once launched him into this world.