I was very much in love with my darling future husband . We parted with great affection, and all week long I could feel a tremendous yearning. Was it him I sensed, pining for me? Perhaps I felt my own yearning for him. Or perhaps there was only yearning, felt by us both but possessed by neither, straining across the miles that separated us.
I was aware of practicing hard during that retreat. I sat up at night. I did not allow myself to spend the customary day or two in mental meanderings, as had been my habit and my luxury when I lived at the monastery. I knew I was at a turning point in my life. I knew I would be doing fewer long retreats. And I was determined to understand what the future ought to hold.
My chief existential dilemma had to do with whether or not lay practice--entering married life, having a household--was really as “good” as monastic practice. Was I losing out on spiritual development by getting married? Was I throwing away all those years of hard-core sitting? Was I imagining that there was something to be attained, after all? I had been happy living a simple life on my own outside the monastery, doing long retreats whenever time and money allowed. Could I really share my time and my life with another person and not lose sight of the psychological and spiritual truths I had found in monastic practice?
Daily, during that week of contemplation, we chanted the Mangala Sutra, the Buddha’s discourse on the characteristics of an ideal life. Interestingly, the Blessed One did not advocate retreat from the world, nor did he undermine social values. Instead, he described a life of quiet steadiness and kindness:
Providing for mother and father’s support
And cherishing family,
And ways of work that harm no being,
These are the highest blessings.
There, sung to a simple melody, came the answer to my question. Nowhere in those words was there mention of greatness and glory; nowhere was asceticism promoted. Instead, a life in the world, grounded in family and community, rich in respect and mutual support, a moral life in the simplest sense, was the greatest blessing. Deep down, I felt that this was right, that it was right for me.
By the end of the retreat, I knew in my bones that marriage could be a spiritually rich path, and more than that, I sensed that the life I was about to share with my husband ought to include having a family together. This was a big shift for me, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Until that week, I had never wanted children, and I had no idea that parenting be a spiritual path. But I did now! It seemed to be the way I needed to go.
Perhaps it was no coincidence that this interest in family life came when it did. Although I didn’t know it, I was not alone on my cushion. The farewell with my fiancee had planted a seed, so to speak, and as I sat that week, a tiny embryo was proliferating deep inside me. The inner and the outer worlds were changing faster, and sooner, than I knew.
At the end of the retreat, Ajahn Amaro blessed and cut lengths of white cord which he tied around our wrists as a blessing and a token of our intentions. I wore one string, and took another to tie around my husband’s wrist, to symbolized what I had learned about our new life together, as spiritual partners and parents.
Thirty-nine weeks later, I knelt over a chair in the bedroom and gave birth to our son. The cord on my wrist was stained with blood and meconium, the dark muck that fills a baby’s gut before he is born. After that, it was no longer white, but a suspicious dusky grey color.
Last Friday, I hiked uphill with the baby in a carrier. Near the waterfall where the koi slide under the water, my son grabbed for a camellia and stuffed a leaf in his mouth. I pried it out, or so I thought. At the bottom of the hill, he burst out coughing and choking. His eyes turned red; he looked extremely worried. We both did; I had never seen him that distressed, and there was little I could do. When he recovered, I took him home, put him down, and saw something in his mouth. The leaf was in there, a fragment still stuck to his cheek. Gingerly avoiding his chompy teeth, I hooked my little finger into his mouth and brought out the shard of camellia leaf.
As I pulled the leaf from the baby’s mouth, the string on my wrist fell to the floor.
I’m not sure how the string broke, or when. But in that moment of worry for my son and gratitude that he was safe, it seemed to me that the string acted as a charm, so common in Asian folktales, taking the baby’s misfortune upon itself and receiving the harm that would otherwise have come to him.
The string, and the bit of leaf, are here with me as I write this. Two unremarkable pieces of debris in what I pray will be an unremarkable, steady, and blessed life.
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