The Middle Way

Snowed In

I have never outgrown my love of snow. I feel the same wonder and delight today that I did as a child, watching it fall and muffle the sounds of a noisy world.

I know few share my love of snow, especially in a winter that's already seen more than usual. Here's something for those who do.

 

Shoveling Snow With Buddha
Billy Collins

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word
for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid?
Is this not implied by his serene expression,
that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?

But here we are, working our way down the driveway,
one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear
and become lost to each other
in these sudden clouds of our own making,
these fountain-bursts of snow.

This is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway
you could back the car down easily
and drive off into the vanities of the world
with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.

All morning long we work side by side,
me with my commentary
and he inside his generous pocket of silence,
until the hour is nearly noon
and the snow is piled high all around us;
then, I hear him speak.

After this, he asks,
can we go inside and play cards?

Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk
and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table
while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.

Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes
and leaning for a moment on his shovel
before he drives the thin blade again
deep into the glittering white snow.

A Poignant Lesson on Attachment and Loss

This past Monday, I left my bracelet in the locker at my gym. Taking it off in the first place was a hard habit to get into; I never remove it except when I must -- my few hospital stays, airport security checkpoints and now, when I swim.

But that day I left it behind when I gathered my things. I realized it was missing about an hour after I got home, and rushed back to retrieve it. It was gone: whoever found it did not turn it in, nor has it shown up in the days since.

There’s a story behind this bracelet, and a story behind that story. The story is this: it belonged to my grandmother, who bought it from a Native American on the side of a dirt road somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona in the 1940’s. She and her husband had moved to Colorado after the war and explored much of the American southwest and Mexico by car, camping by roadsides. The bracelet is sand-cast silver and has the signature of its maker – a small bird – on the inside.

Like me, my grandmother always wore it.  It’s one of my earliest memories of her. She gave it to me during a last, long visit I made to see her – another in a series of solace-seeking trips for some trouble or another I was going through. The bracelet had begun bruising her thinning skin and she felt it was time to pass it on. Among all her granddaughters, she chose me: the one she always felt was most like her.

The story behind the story is that of my grandmother. Born at the end of the 19^th century, she lived a fascinating life. From her early days of privilege to the cash-strapped years of her teens, she had a fierce intelligence and independence.  Before her marriage in 1918, she was a dancer in Greenwich Village and acted in plays written for her by a doting playwright. She was also a member of the Socialist Club, best known today from Warren Beatty’s film, Reds, about one of its more famous members, John Reed.

Her marriage ended abruptly in 1929 when the car she was driving collided with a train at a crossing in Nyack, New York, on a foggy April night. My grandfather and another couple were killed; my grandmother spent 3 months recuperating in the hospital. She never walked properly again.

She remarried in the 1940’s and moved to Colorado. Max was Swiss and had also lived in South Africa before moving to the U.S., and he and my grandmother took many trips together. Often their transportation was as exotic as the trips themselves – tramp steamers and cargo planes, a reflection of Max’s thriftiness. I always loved to visit them; their home was filled with African masks, Peruvian pottery, Indian cloth and Chinese paper paintings, and smelled of spices and faraway places.

Now I’ve lost the most visible connection to the grandmother I admired and adored. It’s a visible, visceral loss and I feel tears pricking my eyelids every time I think about it.

The bracelet may yet turn up. Whether it does or doesn’t, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Buddhist concept of attachment.

It’s a complex concept that’s often misinterpreted, but the explanation in this article does a reasonable job of summarizing: “Attachments are sim­ple beliefs … that have become solidified as ‘truth’ in our minds. They also partake of the energy of desire, which is based on the underlying belief that without some par­ticular person or thing, we can never be free from suffering.”

My attachment comes in equating this bracelet to my grandmother, and feeling like I’ve lost a part of myself in losing it. It comes in giving up the warm fantasy of passing it on to my own granddaughter someday, along with the stories that accompany it – my grandmother’s and my own.

In the end, it's just a thing, not a substitute for my life memories of my grandmother. I'll always carry those with me. Or so I remind myself as I once again unconsciously reach over to adjust the bracelet that's no longer around my wrist.