Surprise Wings

This morning I was finding myself sad, and feeling like I couldn’t do anything right, despite copious evidence to the contrary. I was having a hard time with a couple of things I thought I was good at, and I was sort of generalizing that to feeling like I am just failing at everything. I expect we all know that feeling. For some of us, for periods of time, it’s pervasive and persistent. There were a lot of years when I felt like this all the time.  Now I know that the feeling will pass, and that I am enough. I know that I can feel upset about not getting something just right, and not make it mean anything more about me.

Today I am also missing my grandmother. I was sad about feeling like I could not do anything right, and I was missing my grandmother, somehow, out of the blue, at the same time. I found that I was too sad to talk to other people yet, and I gave myself some time. 

But I rushed it, in my urgency to attend to all of the right now that was already in progress. I dabbed my eyes, took a shallow breath, and went to class. Somehow my head felt jumbled, like I couldn’t think of what to say. I kept bumping up against something, like an invisible wall between what I know I can do and what I could do at that moment. I saw that I was still not ready, even though it was time to be ready. I excused myself, and left class again, this time with more purpose.

I sat for a moment in meditation, asking to receive, and a message was delivered. The gift that my grandmother gave to the world was the ease with which she granted love. There was always enough, and I never had to do anything special, or achieve anything, or be the best, or even a “good girl”, to know that she loved me and had room for who I am. Once I grounded myself in her gift, I was able to come back to class and give that bottomless gift over and over, freely, with nothing in the way. The kids responded. With that wall out of my way, I was able to share connection in a way that wasn’t available to me when I was trying to just push through.

It wasn’t until I lost her that I was called to recognize that teaching my grandmother provided to me. In the absence of her moving through the world, I had to give the thing she had been giving me. Instead of feeling like a part of me was gone, what I found is that there was a part of me I had not been aware of, which now insisted upon being expressed. It was like realizing that I had been harboring a pair of surprise wings, folded flat against my back, until I grew enough to flex, unfurl them, test them slowly, unbelieving at first. Picture a just hatched butterfly, fresh and wet from chrysalis, wings moving open and shut to get the motion, but slowly, warming up to the rest of the life before it.

 I think of death as one of many transitions, and I don’t ascribe meaning to it around finality, or removal of something that belonged to me. The fact is, things keep changing, no matter how much you like them the way they are. Fruit falls from the tree, winter comes, leaves fall and return to the earth, tiny animals thrive on this perpetual process, new life springs from the rot. These bodies are ours right now, but we are here at one tiny moment in time, in the vastness of all, and for me, it feels miraculous enough to be alive and conscious, and I don’t require any additional promises about what else there may be. My grandmother’s blood runs in my veins, and in those of my children.