Returned to the River Unbroken
Mono no aware: The Movement of a Prayer
Photo by David Edelstein on Unsplash
Photo by David Edelstein on Unsplash
Breathing Again After a Long Time Underwater
Reaching my hands into the late afternoon light
glowing on the river's final curve, I didn't believe
I was beautiful,
like the valley's wild horses hiding in high ferns
I parted with my hands like
lace curtains as air closed behind me
without a ripple.
I came to a clearing. Light streamed down.
From the far side a mare rose from crushed ferns.
She watched me with the liquid eyes of one
who can see in the dark without stumbling.
I wanted to come closer, but her foal
still in its slick caul, stood on shaky legs,
fell back onto ferns slippery with birth blood.
For a few moments I forgot I was a human
who could kill what I loved.
At dusk I bathed at the river's edge
where the horses came out of the ironwoods
to face the river's mouth. Sharks waited there
for pig carcasses to wash down,
jaws hacked out by hunters to mount.
People disappeared all the time in that valley.
I was just a girl at the edge of a clearing.
I don't need to tell the story of how I was
broken anymore.
Now I can speak
of how a wild horse watched me from the ironwoods
and of how warm the river was when I knelt
to lift late afternoon light out of the water.
How I
poured it over my head, how it flowed
down my hair and shoulders, gilding my skin,
returned to river unbroken.
“Jen, there is a sadness in you. I wish you would just let it go,”
Mishka said after we’d spent a few minutes soul gazing at the share circle. Normally I don’t enjoy this practice of staring into another’s eyes so popular in the spiritual community and decline to participate, but I trusted Mishka and was willing to be seen by him so I met his gaze and held it and let my inner being pour forth from my eyes.
Would he reject what he saw? This had happened to before through soul gazing. I’d been told I was too intense verbally, people had cried and run from me. This time I didn’t care. Willing to be seen, I waited to see what Mishka had to say.
After we broke the gaze he told me some truths about myself I thought no one could see. That was good and satisfying.
His intentions were good-he cared about me and wished I would relieve myself of what he saw as a burden, and he had every right to wish for whatever he wanted, but if I let go of that sadness (he was right that I do carry it) I would be letting go of my essence, what makes me, although perhaps denying it is a better word, for we can’t let go of our essence. If we try we end up delusional and we all know where that leads. The dammed river always breaks.
For a few minutes after our gaze I was tempted. Yes, let the sadness go! More therapy, ecstatic dance, yoga, aguahara, dolphin dance, brainspotting, somatic exploration, ceremony, share circles, psychedelics, family constellations, journaling, whatever it takes-I can do it!
But I didn’t do any of those things. I went to my room and slept and read and wrote things I didn’t understand and continued cultivating my quietness in a loud world that insisted I needed to be constantly improving myself.
Yesterday in a ceremony with the fern Ka’ape’ape, Divine Emotional Grace, I was asked to make contact with the essence of my being as a prayer. (Ka’ape’ape is the moment of a prayer.) We were asked to describe this essence in one word. As usual, my imagistic mind refused to cooperate by pinning me down to one word. The word came to me as a feeling. The feeling moved through my whole body and I was soon in tears. This was my prayer? And then I felt the beauty of my sadness. Yes, this was my prayer.
English is not good with paradox. Beauty and sadness in one word? English, rooted in Anglo-Saxon, tends to limit definition, prefers the chiseled and linear. I couldn’t think of a word to describe my prayer in my native tongue.
But I have another native tongue. I don’t speak it, but I heard it when I was born and for the first year of my life. I was born in Japan and spent the first year of my life in a small house on an army base with a view of Mt. Fuji. My parents were in the military and I was born in the hospital at Tachikawa Airforce base in Tokorozawa outside Japan. (Later I delighted in discovering that my birthplace was the hometown of the great animator Miyazaki whose film “My Neighbor Totoro” is an account of the wonders of growing up there.)
This fact reminded me of another concept lacking in the English language, what the French call terroir, the environmental conditions, especially soil and climate, in which grapes are grown and that give a wine its unique flavor and aroma. Lying in my crib in Tokorozawa, Mt. Fuji in the distance, did I absorb the pollen of ephemeral pollen of cherry blossoms carried on a nearly invisible breeze through the open window? Was my terroir grounded in Japanese aesthetics who so value awareness of the impermanence of life they have a name for it, mono no aware?
I would say yes. Mono no aware. That is my essence.
Mono no aware (物の哀れ) means “the pathos of things” and is also translated as “an empathy toward things” or “a sensitivity to ephemera.” The concept arose during the Heian period in Japan and has been a characteristic of Japanese art and literature ever since. I first heard of it when I read Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, “Beaty and Sadness” at age 21. That was long before I had the ability to reflect on my own nature, but I do remember merging with the book on the hot summer DC nights when I read it, nights that would probably seem lonely to most others, but were just right for me. Mono no aware is something that separates you from the pack and the everyday solace of companionship. Although I know many, I have spent most of my life in solitude.
My favorite writers share my essence. Linda Gregg comes to mind. I think of her walking out from the deep shade of a stone house on a mountain top on a Greek island toward a well where she raises water from a bucket disappearing into the dark like a snake. She pours the water on herself. It slides down her skin. Some drops remain whole for a moment and then pop in an instant, return to the invisible. There is a heaviness despite the coolness of the water as she walks back to the house.
This is the “sadness” Mishka witnessed. It’s heavy. That doesn't mean it’s a burden.
Go back to the poem that begins this essay. Read it slowly. Imagine me at the bottom of Waipi’o Valley with immeasurable amounts of water pouring down on me. The pressure should have broken me.
It didn’t. It made me beautiful. Now I know. Now I believe.
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Jen