#3 Mourning Rituals: The Unweaving
How do I acknowledge loss? I must let go of what I thought I had. I must let go of the idea of permanence. I must let to of promise. I must let of hopes and dreams. It is about the letting go, it is also about taking in and knowing the pain. It is about entering into a prayer for the lost people and places and things. It is about attaching to the pain and acknowledging the very nature of loss—that I never had anything to begin with. It was all an illusion. How can I count the losses I have endured in the past decade, how can I parse out and create a hierarchy of each one in relation to another if I won’t allow myself to feel them? They are a thread, a necklace, a continuum of lost people and places and ideas and feelings and beliefs. The losses of these illusions belong to me but are separate from me. I must accept and embrace what I have lost. I have to feel that pain. I have to know the rending of the fabric of my experience, the destruction of the relationships and places I relied on for my safety, the irretrievability of all the lovely and precious thing that were blown up and gone like Nagasaki, in a blinding second. How do you let go of yourself, your imagined identity, your history, your belief systems, your future without loosing your entire self of your self as a person. Not much remains. What does remain? The threads of the losses. The water which provides solace. The color blue.
In Tibetan Buddhism, people sometimes do prostrations. They raise their hands to their foreheads, their throats, their chests, say a prayer, a mantra, and then they reach to the ground, keel, lie flat on the ground, and then, stepping forward, repeat the action. It is a prayer, an offering, a cleansing. Some of the devoted will do this for miles, wrapping cardboard around their hands and their knees so they can physically endure the labor without bleeding or physical harm; this is not penitence, this is not penance. I do not have the fitness to endure such devotion. But in walking 2,000 to 10,000 feet I can say a mantra each step of the way. I can think about the unweaving of the fabric of suffering, samsara, the human experience of unavoidable pain. I can think of impermanence and letting go. I can think of water, my solace, and the color blue.