Annual Mother’s Day treat to myself: the Sunday 8:30 a.m. practice with my beloved teacher Kitty. The room filled with people I know and people I don’t, but they are all friends. The Dalai Lama whispering his prayers. My heart whispering them, too. Kitty’s voice like home, like remembering.
She sets a single white daisy on my mat and, gently, sweeps oil across my cheek. A blend of marigold and ylang ylang, if my nose knows. I feel her hand tremble so slightly. My heart trembles in response. I have been away for too long. Suddenly, violently, I yearn for her youth. I yearn for my own mother, too, even though she’s less than 30 miles away.
During savasana, Kitty reads a poem by Ted Kooser, as she always does on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. It’s familiar, but hits like I’m hearing it for the first time:
“Mid April already, and the wild plums
bloom at the roadside, a lacy white
against the exuberant, jubilant green
of new grass and the dusty, fading black
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,
only the delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.
You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.
The meadowlarks are back, and the finches
are turning from green to gold. Those same
two geese have come to the pond again this year,
honking in over the trees and splashing down.
They never nest, but stay a week or two
then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts,
burning in circles like birthday candles,
for this is the month of my birth, as you know,
the best month to be born in, thanks to you,
everything ready to burst with living.
There will be no more new flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked me if I would be sad when it happened
and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house
now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots
green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,
as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.
Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.”
And now, writing this, my heart trembles again. My face is wet again. I don’t have any of their irises.
Come back, Dad.
Come back.
And Mom, don’t go.
We are all, always, stepping toward the time when we will not be on this earth. We hope our will to live can outpace our destiny to die. And yet, that isn’t how it works. So we must cherish and hold gratitude for each precious moment. They are fleeting; we are fleeting. But memories are sustaining. As are new traditions.
I don’t have any of the irises my mother had taken from her grandmother’s yard, that my father had re-planted in his. But I do have a kind and special yoga student, who for years has shared with me irises and hostas and lillies that she’s dug up from her own yard. I have them at my old house, and now, a new batch planted here at the new tiny house.
We share those bits with each other – memories we keep alive – in flowers and photographs and the feel of a shaky hand stroking your cheek. This is the way we teach one another the way to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything. And, because of this, I know we will not be lonely forever.
