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Life is Relative

Everything you feel is relative to everything and everyone else.

I went outside to look at the moon on purpose

Small thing, but I'd never actually done it before. Not glanced at it from the car. Went outside, on purpose, to look. Phone stayed on the kitchen counter. I stood at the end of the driveway in my socks for maybe ten minutes while it climbed over the roof across the street, almost full, a little orange at first and then very white. A dog two yards over barked at it, or at me. Hard to say. I didn't think anything profound. Mostly I noticed how long it's been since I stood still outdoors for no reason. Reading this place, I keep finding the same instruction in a dozen different traditions: pay attention. This was me trying it. Feet were freezing. Doing it again tomorrow.

The garden got tucked in today. Cut back the mint before it plots another invasion, pulled the spent beans, and packed straw around the rosemary with firm instructions to survive one more Vermont winter. It has heard this speech eleven times. What I don't cut anymore: the coneflower and black-eyed Susan heads. The goldfinches need them more than I need tidy. Forty years ago I'd have had every stem down and bagged. Forty years ago I was in a hurry. The johnny-jump-ups have seeded themselves into the cracks of the path again, right along the beds Walt built. I've stopped fighting them. Some blessings arrive where they please, and the best thing you can do is not step on them.

Nobody asks who you are at the sink

Home for four days, so I did a shift at the gurdwara washing steel plates after langar. Hundreds of them. You stand at the big sink with whoever turned up: a retired doctor, two university kids, a man who came in off the street for a meal and stayed to help. Nobody asks who you are at the sink. Nobody asks what you believe. You scrub, you pass, you rinse, you stack. Somebody makes a bad joke and everyone laughs anyway. That's seva. Three provinces of highway behind me, and this was the most rested I've felt all month.

The botanica owner who said 'not this one, mija'

Went into a botanica last week for candles and picked up a beaded necklace I thought was beautiful. The owner, a woman in her seventies, gently took it out of my hand. 'Not this one, mija. This one you receive, you don't buy.' Then she walked me over to the saint candles and the herbs and showed me what was there for anyone. I could have felt embarrassed. Instead I felt taught. Eclectic doesn't mean everything is mine. Some practices are open, some are closed, and plenty sit in between, held by communities who get to decide. My job is to ask, listen, and admire from the doorway when the answer is no. I've also started asking my dad's sisters about the old Igbo stories. Some aunties laugh, some change the subject. One sent me a voice note that is forty minutes long. I'm on minute twelve.

The patient who wanted to hear the rain

Details changed, as always, for someone who can't speak for himself anymore. A few weeks ago I cared for a retired fisherman in his last days. He wasn't talking much by then. Mostly he slept, and when he woke he'd look toward the window. His daughter told me he'd spent his whole life listening to weather, reading it from the deck, and now the room was sealed and quiet and climate controlled. So we opened the window. Just a crack. It was raining, the soft kind that barely makes a sound, and the sound filled the room anyway. His breathing changed. His hand, which had been clenched on the blanket for two days, opened. I've been a hospice nurse for nine years and a Zen student for longer, and I still catch myself wanting to fix things. Adjust the pillow, check the line, find one more task. That afternoon there was nothing to fix. There was only rain, an old man, his daughter and me, sitting together while the weather did what it had always done. He died that night, with the window still open. Dogen says to study the self is to forget the self. I think I understood it a little better in that room than in years on the cushion. Nobody needed me to be anything. I just needed to be there, and to let the rain in.

Last Sunday my eight-year-old watched me pour mead on the offering stump and asked, very reasonably, why we give good mead to nobody. I told her it isn't nobody. It's the land-wights, the ancestors, the gods, depending on the day. But mostly I told her about gifts. The Hávamál says a gift always looks for a gift in return. Our whole way is built on that: you give, they give, you give again, and over the years it becomes a friendship. She thought about it, then poured a little of her apple juice next to the mead. 'In case the small ones don't like alcohol.' Fifteen years I've been doing this and it never once occurred to me to offer the small ones juice. We do now.

The month without gods

In Japanese the tenth month is Kannazuki, the month without gods. The story goes that the kami from all over the country travel to Izumo to meet, so they're away from their local shrines. In Izumo itself they call it Kamiarizuki, the month with gods. My grandmother said not everyone leaves. Ebisu stays behind to look after the house and the business. So every October she set an extra cup of sake on the kamidana for Ebisu, as thanks for staying home and minding things. I live in Seattle now, in an apartment where nothing about the season matches Nagano. But the extra cup went up this morning. It felt like her hand on my shoulder.

My grandmother's lakou, rebuilt on the fourth floor

Growing up, summers meant my grandmother's lakou outside Jacmel. A lakou is a family compound, a yard shared by generations: houses around the edge, a big tree in the middle, and the spirits of the family woven into all of it. My grann knew which corner the old ones liked, which tree you didn't lean on, which songs went with which work. She passed when I was twenty-two, and I thought the lakou died with her. My mother sold the land. I was in Brooklyn, in a fourth-floor walk-up with radiators that clank like a drum line. It took me years to understand the lakou was never only the land. It's the people, the remembering, the feeding of each other. Now, every few weeks, my aunties climb those four flights with foil trays of diri ak djon djon and pikliz strong enough to wake the dead (respectfully). My cousin's kids run up and down the hallway. Somebody starts a song my grann used to sing at the washbasin and we all join in, off key. There's a small table by the window with her photo, a glass of water, and a white candle in a hurricane glass, up where little hands can't reach. With Fèt Gede coming at the start of November, I've been thinking about her more. The Gede are lwa of the dead, and they love a good laugh. So did she. When the aunties are loud and the pikliz is too spicy and somebody is crying from laughing, I feel her in the room. The lakou survived. It just moved up four flights.

One kind of truth

Quakers have declined to swear oaths for more than three centuries, on the strength of 'let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay.' The reasoning is simple: swearing to tell the truth on special occasions implies a lower standard the rest of the time. So when I was a witness in a small claims case last month, I affirmed instead. The clerk didn't blink. But I've been thinking about it since. Plain speech isn't about being blunt, or about thee and thou (I only use those with my sister, mostly to annoy her). It's about having one kind of truth, for the courtroom and the garden gate and the email to the plumber. I fail at it daily. 'Fine, thanks' is my most frequent untruth. But I'm practising.

Three months of reading over your shoulders

I've been lurking here for about three months. No religion, no practice, just a lot of reading at 1am. I wanted to say thank you, and share what I've noticed from the outside. First: almost nobody here is trying to convince anyone of anything. I honestly expected to be recruited. Instead people answer questions and then go back to their gardens and their prayers and their tea. Second: on the surface the practices couldn't look more different. A Sikh truck driver reciting scripture at a truck stop before dawn. A Wiccan casting a circle in their kitchen. A Quaker sitting in silence. A rootworker sweeping her porch. But underneath, so much of it seems to come down to two things: paying attention, and saying thank you. Third: the people who've been at this for decades are the ones most comfortable saying 'I don't know.' I found that unexpectedly reassuring. My grandpa's anniversary is in a couple of weeks. For the first time, I'm thinking about doing something to mark it. No idea what yet. But I think I've learned from all of you that it doesn't have to be impressive. It just has to be sincere. Thanks for letting me read over your shoulders.

The robe stays in the closet

Year one of ceremonial magic, I spent $240 on a black robe with gold trim, a hand-painted lamen and a wand I'm still embarrassed about. Five years later the robe has been worn exactly four times. The daily work happens in sweatpants at 6:10am, between the alarm and the kettle. I don't regret the robe. It was a promise to myself that I was taking this seriously. But the promise that actually held was smaller and duller: banish every morning, write it down every night, even when nothing happens. Especially when nothing happens. If you're new and tempted by the beautiful gear, buy a cheap notebook first. If you're still filling it in a year, you've earned the robe.