For Warmth
I hold my face between my hands
No, I am not crying.
I hold my face between my hands
to keep my loneliness warm
two hands protecting
two hands nourishing
two hands to prevent
my soul from leaving me
in anger.
— Zen Poems, Nhat Hanh
Loss is inevitable but unhappiness is not. My mind knows this but it tends to linger on unhappiness rather than joy. It’s expressed in my body with a heaviness in my chest around the area of my heart, a constriction in my throat and a lethargy of spirit.
Everything is always changing; there is life and there is death. Some things are not meant to be but others are. Could I open to the truth and use my pain as transformation to grow larger, wiser, and stronger when I realized I could never have a biological child? I had tried so hard, and waited so long for conditions to be right, and it was too late. I wondered how Thich Nhat Hahn maintained his equanimity after personally witnessing the tragedy of the civil war that tore apart his homeland, Vietnam, and spewed forth other atrocities such as the boat people and the rape and pillage of innocents.
Each difficult moment has the potential
to open my eyes and open my heart.
— Myla Kabat-Zinn
I had no idea at this time that my response to this loss might help prepare the way for my response seven years later when I was diagnosed with lymphoma. I did know I wanted to move through my sadness and be in harmony in body, mind and spirit.
Every year I go on retreat for at least ten days. I also love to travel. It wakes up my senses and refreshes my spirit. Plum Village in the countryside in the south of France in the Dordogne Region meets both criteria. It is in a beautiful location hidden away in an ancient village, nestled among vineyards and farmland. It is also a refuge for Vietnamese who want to maintain their culture and faith. It seemed like the perfect place to recover and renew.
At Plum Village, I discovered that I had brought my feelings of hurt and loss with me. Children flocked around Thay, the Vietnamese title for teacher, which is what everyone affectionately calls Thich Nhat Hahn. I watched, jealous, as he walked hand-in-hand with children throughout the day. He could be seen laughing with them and teaching them how to stop and notice the wonders of a leafy tree or a bird in a nest, a flower, or a small ant. When we did a walking meditation, he led it with a child on either side of him. They laughed, he laughed. I felt sad.
“Practice begins in the home,” he’d say in talk after talk, as he encouraged the whole family to meditate together. I wished I had a family. A few friends were there with their children and I envied them.
The children sat in the first few rows in the meditation hall and I sat right behind them, feeling the pang in my heart and the disappointment in my head at not having my own child. My mind was filled with longing. There was no fleeing the storm of pain and disappointment I felt in being barren. Yet, as Thay softly spoke about planting seeds of mindfulness and compassion, and as I slowly paid attention, washing the dishes with a rubber hose over the drain outside the kitchen area, or making my bed on the foam pad that rested on the floor in an old stone farmhouse, or talking with other people from Europe, Asia, and the United States, I began to open like the flowers that Thay talked about growing and being fertilized by the compost heap. My concentration increased and I began to focus more on what was occurring, rather than what was not. There was a richness of sense impressions, which Thay pointed out daily. There were trees and flowers, a flowing river, exotic tastes of Vietnamese food and smells.
The bathrooms couldn’t hold all that was being released by us yogis and the cesspool overflowed, adding to the richness of aromas surrounding us. It seemed that we were all letting go so much that collectively we clogged up the septic system and help had to be called in to flush it out. I imagined all the French soil that we might be fertilizing. Was this a lesson? A metaphor for what we were doing?
Muscular French men arrived with high black boots and giant vacuum tubes to suction out the clogged pipes. On our way to the meditation hall, we stopped to watch them, impressed and relieved. We were certainly returning to basics. How mindful and calm were we as we waited in long lines to use the few working toilets?
As I let myself be involved and absorbed by the daily life of the village, my awareness expanded and I began to take pleasure from having the children around. I realized that my life need not be empty of their joy. Everyone had lost something or had been unhappy about something. I was not the only one practicing smiling into my pain as Thay suggested.
My connection with the others at Plum Village — monks and nuns, Westerners from the United States and Europe, the Vietnamese, old and young and in between — and our connection with each other, our connection to the earth, our feet touching the soil, our noses breathing in the sweet scent of flowers and the rancid smell of the septic system, our eyes gazing beyond the hamlet over vineyards and farms, our ears hearing birdsong and flute music and Thay’s words about his pain and the compassion it evoked, all helped me bear my own pain. I began to heal.
When I went to Plum Village for a second time a few years later, I learned more about the need to let go and travel light. I arrived in Paris on my way to Plum Village following a vacation in Israel with my husband, David. David left me in Tel Aviv to return to Boston and to work. I had two more days in Israel and then planned to go on to France. In preparation, the day before I left I made a special trip to the airport in Tel Aviv to ship my bags. I hoped this would save time and avoid possible confusion at the airport the next day. All went smoothly, but when I arrived at Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris, I learned that my bags had not made the trip with me. They had been sent ahead to New York, which was my destination after Plum Village.
When I left Tel Aviv the weather had been very hot and humid. In Paris it was cold and damp. I had only the clothes on my back: shorts, a halter top, a blouse and sandals. I was cold, tired, and couldn’t speak French. I found an English-speaking airline official who assured me that my bags would be located and sent to Plum Village. Everyone was quite nice and I was given fifty dollars, a small comb, a toothbrush, and a small tube of toothpaste to tide me over until my luggage arrived. I bought sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, underwear and a pair of socks. I left Paris feeling light and unencumbered as I made the trip by train to Plum Village.
Plum Village has two hamlets, one high, overlooking vineyards, and one low, more like a delta with a river running through it. When I arrived it had been raining and the ground was very muddy and soggy. I was assigned to a room in the lower hamlet, in a barracks-like building. One side of the barracks had rooms and the other side contained the showers for the entire hamlet. It was wet — very wet. There was no escape from the mud or the dampness. I did not have a car and there was no easy transportation out. There was only one telephone in the whole lower hamlet. Because I needed to contact the airlines to see if my suitcase had arrived, and since I couldn’t speak French, I always had to find a French-speaking person to help me call the airline. Getting through to the right department and person was frustrating. It took a long time and was often unsuccessful. I was cold and I WANTED my clothes.
One friend loaned me his jacket. Another, a tall woman, lent me her nightshirt, which I wore as a dress. Days passed and not only did my suitcase not arrive, but it was very difficult to track and to get through to the proper authorities. Depending totally on others, even to make telephone calls, was challenging and frustrating. Locating my luggage became a major task. Meanwhile, the sun of southern France was not shining, the cold, damp weather continued, and it was still raining almost every day. My sandals, my sweatsuit and my one pair of socks were becoming muddier and muddier as I literally chilled out. My mantra at the time was, “Let Go.”
A friend, thinking he’d help, told me an old Zen story about a farmer who was distraught because he had lost his cows. While he was out looking for them he met a monk. The monk, seeing he is upset, asks if he can help. He learns that the farmer cannot return to his village without his cows. The two continue looking for the animals without success. The farmer is miserable, but the monk has no cows to lose or to locate. He is free to move on.
In the mud, squishing along, fed by the compassion of my friends’ loaning me their shirts, their time, and their warmth, I, too, began to let go and move on, feeling lighter and freer than I had in years. No need now to dress up. Navy blue, the color of my sweatsuit, was very unflattering. No need to look pretty. And I began to enjoy the freedom of not having to maintain any facade. No cows. No decisions about what to wear. If the weather warmed, I had my shorts. If it was cold, I wore my sweatsuit. When we finally did go to the train station in Bergerac to claim my luggage, half of it had been stolen . . . and I could smile. Less to carry.
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