By Ava Stanton
Amid losses that bewilder our counting and our hearts, and without an end date certain, we know that the pandemic will end, and we hope the institutions of democracy hold. Yet for now, we are in a moment of deep uncertainty.
Like you, I am constrained by quarantine. In our own ways, each of us is constrained, tripped up by conditions we assumed and used to count on. I wonder, what is sacred in my forced retreat from the world? What practice offers itself to me? How from my position of privilege (I can work at home) do I support the world?
While the Buddha has been my source of inspiration for many years, it’s now his wife, Yasodhara, with whom I feel a deep kinship.
She was a single mother left with her in-laws after the Buddha departed on his quest, and other than that, we know nothing. There is no sutra, not a word. This is a first way I feel invited into her mystery. What word actually captures your experience, or mine? Isn’t the utter silence of Yasodhara the perfect complement to the thousands of pages of words the Buddha is reported to have spoken?
I can guess: She parented, most likely failing and succeeding in meeting her young son’s need for reassurance. She sorted her possessions. She managed her relations with her in-laws. She looked in a mirror. Perhaps she lived through a plague. She has been called “The One Who Stayed.” These private moments – we have them too. Can we stay with them? How can these be our field of practice?
How about the practice of looking in the mirror? Here’s another way I look for Yasodhara. What courage does it take to stay with the moment, not excluding or being controlled by our memories and embodied reactions to our face in the mirror? What is alive and unknowable about this moment? How do we find our footing when we lose the moment to shame, to pride, to fear? Didn’t she do this too?
Making my bed, pulling on clothes, pulling myself from my computer, moments that feel private and unseen – can I be “The One Who Stays”? These practices feel the most real to me as I face an unknowable future.
I know I need a spiritual community, as well as guidance and encouragement from teachers on the path. Then there are the ways to know my own private moments through an unfolding present. In this effort that I make on my own, I feel the mystery of Yasodhara’s silence, her breathing in and out. Without words, with the pain or lack of resolution of the moment. This is the unrecorded path of the house-holder.
May we join her in this ever-present. May we stay with the tasks at hand: our democracy, the end of white violence, taking action for the climate, or those whose lives are destroyed by COVID and it’s consequences, our in-breath and out-breath. Let’s stay without a sutra, in the privacy of this moment.
Ava