Fog Light

Had I not gotten up in the wee hours of this morning, I would have missed the eerie glow of fog illuminated by moonlight, the sense of being in another world entirely. Everything was hushed and bright, and it seemed as if some mysterious visitation had cast a spell and transformed the earth into soft white light, with no edges or forms beneath it.

I had been dreaming that I was in a boat all by myself and didn’t have a clue how to steer or operate it, and there was water all around me, and I was bobbing around, terrified. I was very relieved to realize it was just a dream.

Then I thought, no...it’s more metaphor than dream! The hull of a flimsy craft is all that separates me from the onslaught of the sea, and I lack the knowledge and the skill—port, starboard, overboard? Where is the harbor? Where is the land? I never even learned to swim. I await rescue, which comes by waking up, in every sense.

But with the rescue of waking comes the self-battering of the update. Briefly enchanted by the magic of the fog, I return to awareness of the state of the world, and random flashbacks from the distant past.

For some reason, my mother is particularly present lately. “I was always a fraidy-cat,” she once told me. “I never learned to swim, never did anything brave. I was so timid.”

It broke my heart to hear her say that, because even then I was beginning to see that in her own way, she was incredibly brave.

She was also superstitious. When I was a child, if I fell down, she would say, “God punished you. You shouldn’t have been running.”

Decades later, in her old age, I was impatiently rushing her along, and she tripped and fell in a parking lot and said, “God punished me.” She was crying.

That too broke my heart. (Ah, my cracked and splintered heart, so many times broken.)

“No, no,” I said. “No one punished you. It was my fault. I was rushing you, and I’m sorry.” Then I took her arm and proceeded with more tenderness and care.

At least I did that.

So even now my mother is teaching me. Sometimes great courage reveals itself in quiet resilience, not dramatic deeds, in getting up in the morning and brushing your hair, in being willing again and again to make the best of things.

And every one of us is vulnerable–not because we are being singled out or punished, but because life is difficult and insoluble.

It’s like this quote from Pema Chödrön I heard yesterday on the On Being podcast: “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

When I think about my mother, the only thing that comforts me now is remembering those times when I was tender and patient and kind. (I only wish there had been more of them.) And applying this experience to the present situation–because lessons are pointless if not remembered, utilized, and built upon–all I can come up with at the moment is to try a little harder to be patient and kind. It’s simple, maybe even trite, but it’s a start.

It would be absurd to say we’re all in the same boat, since far too many have no boat at all, but we’re all weathering storms and vicissitudes on the same vast sea. So instead of imagining I am alone on a boat, I’m going to focus on our interdependence and interconnectedness, which has never been more obvious.

Notes from a previous plague: Ashes. Ashes. We all fall down. All of us, falling and faltering, but even in the fog there’s a light.