So another reason I was missing in action for two weeks (even though, I say again to the empty echo-chamber of a deserted readership, I don't think anyone really noticed): a visit to Louisville for my grandfather's funeral.
Sad as this sounds—and much as the past couple of posts might, um, bring the mood down a bit—I feel that this was, in a pure, unselfish way, a happy thing. He lived nearly 95 years in comfort and amazingly good health. He left the world in his sleep, at home, in his own bed, surrounded by people who loved him. If you accept—as we all must in our own way—that this life will end at some point, you've got to be happy for someone who has it end the way it did for my grandfather.
Plus, I have been blessed with a gain to equal the loss—new information about my grandfather, things I never knew and am proud to know now. And this information, in turn, tells me things that—incredibly, gloriously, awe-inspiringly—tell me more about myself.
It has been, overall, a wonderful reminder that, even at 41 years old, even with all I've learned (some of it the hard way) over the past 18 months of having a child, I sure don't know everything there is to know about me.
Funerals and Toddlers
We arrived at the Louisville Embassy Suites just before midnight on a Monday night of exhausting, post-workday driving. My whole day had been about the practical aspects of going to a funeral—finding proper outfits for myself and Jake, making sure I packed him plenty of snacks and bottles, loading up a bag of toys for the car, running into Target for diapers and more car distractions . . . Travel With a Toddler. While exhausting and frequently nerve-wracking and surely not something about these precious years to be cherished, it does have the advantage of distracting one from the real matter at hand, the sad, awkward, end-of-an-era gathering of family you may likely never see again.
Such thoughts were far from our minds as we settled into our hotel room and entertained a freshly awakened and wide awake Jake until, oh, 2 a.m. or so. Even in the morning, there was the fun of Jake seeing his grandparents at the free breakfast buffet of greasy eggs, syrup-sweet juice, and bagels that looked okay but were apparently not tasty enough for Jake. Who knew there would be so very much for a toddler to see and do in the impersonal business of a hotel lobby—other kids and the fountain by the glass elevators you could watch go up and down and miles of muted mid-priced hotel carpeting to run across, cheered by the smiles of the people working at the front desk.
It was during this morning time in the playground of the hotel lobby that Mike found the story about my grandfather on the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal. "Jewish and civic leader Lewis D. Cole dies," the headline read. "Service in many venues spanned seven decades."
"Hmm," I thought. I had always known he gave money to various charitable organizations. But the family narrative of him in this role had been vague, little discussion given to what those organizations were and how truly involved he was in them.
I read on. About his role in the Mayor's Commission on Human Rights, working to improve racial relationships. In the 1950's. In the south. I still get teary-proud when I think about it. He served on the boards of the city's Jewish Hospital, the Kentucky Commission of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired, and Visually Impaired Pre-School Services. He worked with the ACLU and a local interfaith council. He did, in short, the sorts of things I went to law school to do and then never got around to.
But rather than feel guilty about shirking the responsibilities my grandfather embraced, I instead felt strongly and sharply more his granddaughter. I understood more deeply than ever those visits he paid me in New York when I was in law school in the early 90's. I remember walking arm-in-arm, telling him about my desire to practice public interest law, to help people who truly needed it, and how he told me he understood.
A few years later, when he gave me a cheap necklace from one of his freighter cruises to Micronesia as a graduation gift, I felt he didn't understand at all. I guess I was hoping that he would fete my commitment in a way no one else seemed prepared to do, slap me on the back and tell me what a great person I was for graduating jobless and determined not to fold to the lure of a big law firm when I had gone to law school to save the world, dammit. (One year, a surprise clerkship, and a fading economy later, I did join that law firm. But only for a couple of years. And I only represented the tobacco lobby once. Really.)
Tuesday morning, reading the tribute to my grandfather in the paper, I realized he did understand. It wasn't about what either of us did or how we did it. It was simply a recognition that his deep caring about people with difficulties heaped on them by living in the society we live in—people of color, people with disabilities, people of marginalized religious beliefs—had, by the miracle of genetics and souls and spirit, passed on to me.
I headed to the visitation—leaving Mike back at the hotel to iron his shirt and wait for Jake to awaken from his nap—with a truer sense of myself as my grandfather's granddaughter. I was thrilled and enthusiastic when I met the representatives from the ACLU, Visually Impaired Pre-School Services, Girl Scouts, Metro United Way, Jewish Hospital, come to pay their sincere respects. I was proud of my grandfather, perhaps for the first time really proud. Because I was discovering a little bit of who I am coming from him.
Mike and Jake arrived just as the services began, sliding quietly into a pew behind me. I beamed at my little boy, who has inherited this legacy of compassion and caring (and not in the lip service way of a certain lame duck administration of which my grandfather, I'm sure, disapproved as heartily as I). I had one of those moments of clarity, where nothing else from life beats at you for attention and you can simply be with a bone deep, wordless, nameless feeling of who you are.
Then the Rabbi began his affectionate, funny, and true eulogy. And Jake began to babble. Just a little bit and not in a way intended to drown out the Rabbi. He just, apparently, had a few things he wanted to add.
Later, at the burial, I thanked the Rabbi for his eulogy, and he thanked me for Jake.
"It was a perfect reminder," he said perfectly, "of the cycle of death and life."
Always Truly Learning
So much of what we call "self-discovery" these days is really about discovering a new market for selling books and tapes and someone else's idea of what will make us happy. We learn about our "pain bodies" and our emotional eating triggers, whether we have what it takes to run a marathon and what color our parachute is. It's all the kind of "learning" that our minds love: more facts, disconnected data, words and labels and goals that distract us from the essence of just being.
It seems so utterly counterintuitive that we can learn the most about ourselves by not trying to. By going to the wordless place into which I fell as I shook hands with people at my grandfather's funeral and felt different in my own skin.
Yes, there was knowledge there—information soaked into my brain about the good things my grandfather stood for in his life. But the knowledge was simply the trigger, the adrenaline-like jolt that displaced the old, unnoticed notions I had had of my grandfather and of myself. My mind had neatly placed my grandfather's philanthropy into a flat picture I fell back on without really feeling. Only when a fresh breeze of new information lifted that faded photograph, blew it aside, could my heart leap toward the simple fact of what my grandfather was. And the connection I felt, it was from the heart, not from my head.
We so rarely get these kinds of moments, where we're not even looking and everything gently shifts. And when we do get them we're so often poised to overthink them. If we think we know ourselves—the woman whose youthful idealism faded with a law degree and life and a more-important-than-anything child and who now thinks she'd be doing something pretty cool and meaningful if she volunteered for the Obama campaign, for example—we are bound to toss the new, beautiful seeds of ourselves into the proper compartment of our smugly, safely compartmentalized sense of ourselves.
But recognize and cherish that kernel of information, that new seed of discovery, let it take root where it may, water it with compassion and give it space to spread its roots, and we're blossoming to our own beauty.
What's the yoga concept to explain all of this? Practically all of them, I think. Yoga is, after all, a deep path to self-discovery, in the truest of label-less ways.
What happens when you let go and follow the path, well, that's one of the loveliest images in yoga to me: the thousand-petaled lotus, gently unfolding, on and on, opening the beauty of one's heart to be shared with the world around us.
Marichyasana, or Sage Twist: A New View and an Open Heart
My first thought of an asana to offer here was "heart opener." What better way to honor the idea of the thousand-petaled lotus flower? But then I began to think a new view, a way of shaking up how we see the world and ourselves, was in order.
Aha. Marichyasana, or sage twist, does both. It is a twist that can be as gentle as you like, opening slowly to new things in a way that is full of comfort. But put some of your focus on opening your heart, and the twist takes on a joy and glory of its own.
Plus, twists wring toxins out of our system, realign our spines, and feel really, really good. What better reminder that opening our hearts to always learning about ourselves is a lovely thing to do?
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