duhpursuit

times, some, it’s all you can do to remember your life. the options seem too attractive. you forget about feeling safe and instead remember the thrill of looking down that unfamiliar highway and want to press down hard, flinging your past into the dark nowhere so that there is only the firm, moist wind filling the empty caravan, the neglected corners flush with attention. you are not sober. you have left restraint at fifth and are well on your way to sixteenth street, knowing at once that in the morning sunlight, the dirty laundry, the empty cat dish, and the dirty sheets, are signs to stop off at reality. you have already agreed to park here for a while longer because most of your time is spent.

“You only lose what you cling to.”–Buddhist saying

Love is a clinging thing. We hold that which we love close in order to cherish it, an attempt to resist what we know cannot endure. This is good for us. It gives of some sense of purpose, of belonging, of living a life of value. Also, clinging is good for other things, like wrapping left over food and taking spillables on a picnic. Also good for keeping pies tidy and removing pet hair from furniture.

It is not the clinging itself that causes us to suffer, but desire. We suffer because we do not know how to unhinge our desperate grasp on love, and in doing so, suffer for as long as it takes for us to release.

There’s a Buddhist saying that has made sense to me recently as I deal with allowing a certain kind of death to happen with my relationship to my mother: “You only lose what you cling to.”

This has helped me to realize that the intense feeling of loss I feel and am dealing with has to do with a clinging to an idea, a grasping for what I imagine as a “good” relationship with my mother, something that is nearly an unreality at this point. It is my clinging to this idea, a clinging to the unchanging idea of what I want our mother-daughter relationship to be, the causes me to suffer. Read the rest of this entry »