My Elephant Friends

My Elephant Friends
Amboseli elephants

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Letting Go and Moving On ...

I have taken to being out in the world more these days, feeling the almost soporific effects of hanging out in my beautiful cave-like little house on White Street, and wanting to find a change.  This journey into being seventy this year feels fraught with self-reflection, hunkering down alone with my cats and my books and my addiction to NPR, and pondering, always pondering, the slowing down of my routine.  A weird and claustrophobic life, I've been thinking.  And so I sit now in one of my favorite lunch joints, at the bar looking out the open windows onto bustling Chestnut street where San Franciscans march through the 85 degree heat with apparent ease.  I don't enjoy the heat, especially in this city known for the cool sea air, the fog, the eternally unchanging temperate climate.  Yesterday I felt the city gasping under this heat, and the baking warmth coming off all the stone buildings and the sidewalk, and it seemed I was walking in a surreal universe.  I prefer this sitting iindoors at the pretty wooden bar with my IPad and recording my reflections, and finding amazing focus in all the hubbub.

About a week ago I quit a job I had been doing for over ten years, and my system - that is my mind AND my heart - is still getting used to it.  I have been a volunteer caregiver for the dying here in San Francisco at a remarkable organization called Zen Hospice Project, and it has been a journey of learning, expansion of heart, tears and laughter, more learning, and the giving and receiving of love.  Working amongst about 60 other volunteers, I have become witness to the greatest mystery of our human lives, watching people traverse the border between the living and the dead, and breathing with them as they go.  It was hard at first as I got used to the strange sounds of death rattles and sights of strange fluids and the chilling reality of the shutting down of a person's body.  And pretty soon the world of the dying became a natural and normal one, and there was no more pulling back, and I saw I was being given an incalculable gift:  intimacy with other human beings at the most momentous, and most undefinable moment of their life.  And so I showed up every Thursday to spend 5 hours in mindfulness and service.  It colored the rest of my life, for sure, and I believe helped me become a better listener, a better witness to life's strangeness, and it gave me a community that felt like home, a place where clear speaking and authentic listening prevailed, and where we were (are) guided by our understanding that we are not in control in this life.

Relationships emerged and then faded as fellow volunteers came and went, as we continued to watch the dance of impermanence.  I worked at Laguna Honda hospital, a somewhat bedraggled skilled nursing facility that a local writer has called "God's Hotel," and then moved on to serving at our small facility in an elegant old Victorian house on Page Street where we welcome only six patients at a time, and are able to help them create new homes in their rooms, and prepared homemade organic meals for them.  A rarified world this  was/is.  Our days were always punctuated by 10 minute meditations followed by thoughtful sharing of personal and hospice experiences.  Needless to say, we all got to know each other very well over time, which you can't always say for our relationships to the residents who came and went with an ephemral rhythm, some staying for a few months, some for only a few days...

Somewhere along the journey of this work of mine, I began to feel overwhelmed, or just worn out, by this living with the finiteness of mortality and impermanence at every turn, and as I saw the organization begin to define itself in a new way, I thought that my part as a player was coming to an end.  Change was coming, and I saw that I couldn't allow myself to feel a part of that.  AND, my personal life was shrinking and narrowing, which made me feel less sanguine in some ways.  Everything seemed to be pointing to the importance of a change of routine.  A little voice was murmuring at me:  get out in the world more, move away from the cave of contemplatioin and reflection...  which translates to leave the introspective world of hospice care and get out of the meditative nest of your home, and see what it's like to be a seventy year old lady in the city, complete with bum ankle and creaky joints.

So here I am on a very hot San Francisco afternoon sitting on a barstool and beginning to look outward just a bit ... consider the intoxicating world of men and women and cats and dogs and streets and rolling hills and goldfinches and hummingbirds, and ...........There is a lot to this being alive thing, I've found, and as I exit the womblike enclosure of house and hospice service, I am inspired and hopeful.  The gifts of contemplative pratice and mindful service will always be with me no matter where I land, and I will forever treasure the voices and spirits of those I helped get to the end of their lives....   We (I am) are a part of all that we have experienced, and there  something beautiful in the aging process ... sort of like the deep, velvety bouquet of an old wine.

With deep gratitude to Zen Hospice Project ...

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