Motherhood as Spiritual Practice

The morning after my ordination (Tokudo), I had an interesting vision: a wide field opened before me. Anything felt possible. I could not see into the future; it was as if my friend foresight just breathed out all chance, and the grass-grains bent in unison as an invitation to come. experience. In those days, I took it as some sort of sign that my mind had opened somehow. Not that my mind was enlightened, but more receptive.

Or, something like receptive.

A year and a month and six days after my Tokudo, I found myself at the edge of a well-worn waterway. The ancient redwoods and grandfather oaks bore witness to the child I bore in my belly, and the ring I took- and gave- to another human being. More vows, more joy; more open possibility, more open to chance. My heart felt more open, more receptive.

Or something like receptive.

Because the truth of motherhood revealed to me that I was still very much closed; still very much embroiled in all my old patterns of desire, of anger, of complete and utter cluelessness. Anything I thought I understood quickly washed away (...like a baby with the bathwater?), and everything I reached for dissolved (...like taking candy from a baby).

Slowly, so slowly, I am finding now. That now includes what I think, however misguided. That now includes all I could ever hope for, as well as what I already have. The meanness, the gorgeousness: nothing is lacking.

I am grateful for this constant shifting, this ebb and flow they call "motherhood", this Universe folding and unfolding upon itself like a shining, terrifying Mandelbrot, this constant moonlight. It is a spotlight, the most honest critique that I can't possibly evade, and ever I am brought to my knees and humbled, again and again. I said I was leaving home, and home indeed was taken away; but that wasn't the point. The home was the coziness of my own opinion. I took one step out that door, and ironically enough I found a child in my arms, a husband in my heart and a new hearth to warm my bones by.

So for this zen mother, a koan of irony: the practice of learning to embrace totality, the grace of living in its reciprocal embrace... and the gift of it, sensing that renunciation might actually look something more like reception.