Standing In The Doorway

I lie enveloped in velvet darkness with no place to be but right where I am.  The chorus of crows outside tells me it’s morning but it could be the evening or the middle of the afternoon. My body clock’s hands of time are frozen just like those of my rundown bedside alarm which gave up the ghost while we were away. The jet lag which didn’t come for us during our trip to France swims around us here like a tide of relentless sleep. My daughter shifts slightly next to me her hair rumpled with dreams and the dog slumbers on peacefully at my feet.

It’s been a startlingly dreamy week of reinsertion into the Los Angeles matrix. I finally closed up our empty suitcases yesterday. Despite my best intentions the visible reminder of our recent travels remained clearly on display. One dream bled into the next, giving the lie to the abrupt change of scene we had apparently moved through.

Rain showered briefly on Wednesday, the day on which we celebrated our son’s sixteenth birthday. As if I had dropped through a puddle into another dimension I found myself back in the midst of a long ago day in London. Like the ghost whom nobody can see or hear, I watched my husband and I walking home from the hospital in the misting summer rain. We carried our newborn son swaddled in a yellow blanket and passed through that doorway of life into parenthood. Back in time present just as suddenly as I had inhabited time past, we celebrated with a picaresque LA evening of last minute restaurant bookings, crazy mid-city driving, valet parking and ridiculously flavourful Italian cuisine served with that confident panache so customary of a certain type of restaurant.

Outside of time travel, birthdays and jetplanes there has been the usual business of gathering the pieces of oneself back together and turning to face the land we call home. After the structured comfort and certainty of Europe it takes a minute to readjust one’s gaze to the vast untethered spaces, driving roads and horizons of endless openness that rush up to meet one here. Worn with an air of lightness this experience opens a doorway to the contemplation of impermanence and the illusory nature of all the extremes which we humans cling to in our ceaseless quest to assert our identity.

Around this time of year impermanence and death are much on my mind as it happens. Not merely because of the seasonal changes, the vestigial traces of which are visible even here, but because we are coming close to the time where a dear friend of mine Charlotte Easton left us far too soon, several years ago now. She was ferociously brave and cheerful throughout her long, long battle with cancer and was a shining example of the courage with which it is possible to behave in such situations of unbearable difficulty.  A day or so before she died, she posted a farewell to all of us; her well wishers and friends were just too numerous to reach individually by that point. ‘To the organised mind death is the next big adventure’ she wrote. 

I often think of this when I am reciting my dharma texts on the inevitability of our death or reflecting on the instructions concerning correct preparations and mental attitude. It occurs to me, as I walk our dog by the fountain this afternoon, that I should be truly grateful for any experience which allows even a tiny glimpse of the awesome and unimaginable vastness which will arise when we gaze into the eyes of the end of this current life. Whether the place is dearly beloved or a territory that can, on dark days, seem heartrendingly alien and just plain wrong, in the end all will be left behind.

And so we continue with our meander, Duke and I. The afternoon sun is warm and I listen to all the strands of light which weave themselves through the air. I hear snatches of song, a poet singing of death standing in the doorway of life and I hear the words of a Tibetan text that generations of men and women, living lives filled with reflection and positive action have committed to memory:

‘Long term friends will have to separate

Wealth accumulated with much effort will be left behind

And the visiting mind will depart the guesthouse of the body

So abandon the things of this life

This is the practice of a Buddha’s child’ (The 37 Practices of a Buddha’s Child by Gyaltse Thogme Zhangpo)