Last night, my Buddhist love dropped by my house to say hello, then later, my boyfriend stopped by on his way home, just for a hug. He only had a few minutes to spare. Long enough for a hug. I leave town soon, and it will be a long time before I see them again. I thought about how much I would miss them, and I curled up and cried.
I picked up the book beside my bed, When Fear Falls Away, by Jan Frazier, and opened to a random page. Here is what it said:
Gurumayi said, I am going away now for awhile. Months, she meant. To the other side of the world, to the mother ashram in her beloved India. I cried. I thought I would not be able to bear it. In those days, my first days with her, the first few years, she had been so within reach, deliciously available. I was with her a lot. Physically, I mean.
When she left, she might as well have carved my beating heart out of my chest and taken it with her.
She was so understanding, so compassionate about our missing her. She knew the terrible longing for the presence of the beloved teacher. I had heard her tell of missing Baba when she was apart from him, during his life–and then the great missing, when he left it. Seeing our wet faces, as she was telling us farewell, she said she remembered well her own tears.
Little did I suppose that she left to teach us something. She always said, I do not leave you. [This was the sentence I found myself pointing at when I opened the book.] I wrote anguished poems about how I ached to go with her, stay with her. Yet she kept saying that: I do not leave you, not really. Over the years, through her times of being physically absent, she crept bit by bit into my soul.
The words soothed my heart. My Buddhist love has always been a spiritual partner, from the very beginning. The love and attachment I feel for him is like that of Jan for Gurumayi, or Gurumayi for Jan, or both. How easily I forget… everyone we love is continuously present. Physical interaction is just one small part of that.
I rolled over and placed my hand on the pillow next to me. I imagined him there, and I just… noticed… that sense, that almost background sense, that he was there, and I just sat with him, so to speak. Breathing. Silent. No need for conversation. No need for anything to be different. Like lying in the grass on some misty day and just, just noticing that a breeze is touching your forehead very lightly and softly, and it feels so tranquil and so utterly un-about anything, that you don’t think anything. You could almost miss it, but when you just notice it, it’s the simplest, plainest, and most gratifying thing. Just… presence.
I fell asleep that way. I woke up about an hour later with my pillow in my arms feeling no grief at all. The presence that began as my Buddhist love had bled out into everything, and I felt something far more vast. Whatever it was, It had its arms around me too.
