The sun is warming the snow and ice that cakes the lane way and the pups are enjoying their version of a Formula 500 race around the house. It’s quiet. Well, quiet except for the music from Songza – a recent discovery I made that takes the anxiety out of choosing music for various activities in the day and evening. It also seems to render the CDs obsolete though I’m told to stash them away until I truly want to send them along to wherever CDs go when their time is up.

Speaking of which, in teaching about the first precept I’m fond of telling people that everyone has a “best before” date. (Frank often adds, “But better after!”) Embedded in the First True Reality (Peter Harvey’s term) is the painful truth that we are not meant to be around forever. When I work with individuals with a terminal disease such as cancer, I feel a bit of a hypocrite simply because in the face of what they now know, I am still blind to my own “stale date.” Death happens as it has for a number of family members and friends since I last wrote. And those of us here remain helplessly blind to our own biological last moment.

And yet. There is also life. Grandest Baby turned one year old. Born 20 minutes short of the celebrated date of the Buddha’s enlightenment, she has been a teisho on equanimity, patience, letting go and all the other goodies we’re meant to practice. Cultivating grandmother-mind – robai shin – is an interesting practice. May I live long enough to see some buds break through these hardened branches!

Such a desire for sight, seeing, sight consciousness. I’m aware of how much that plays into our interactions. “Can you see what I’m saying?” “I can’t see my way out of this.” “See?”  In a conversation with a colleague, she asked about my paternal grandmother. Did she know, my colleague asked, the impact she had on your spiritual path?

At the entrance of our home in Rangoon on one side of the door was a statue of St. Philomena, a Christian saint with a problematic relationship with the Holy See who bounced her off the liturgical calendars in 1961 but still allows devotions to continue à la St. Patrick and St. Christopher. But such news had not reached us and my aunt in particular remained spectacularly devoted to her. Well, to the statue anyway, as she walked into the house, stood in ecstatic  prayer before it and at the conclusion would touch the saint’s eyes then her own. She believed that St. Philomena would cure her encroaching blindness from cataracts and no amount to explaining that it wasn’t in Philomena’s job description would dissuade her. Blindness, especially one that offered a forewarning of things to come, was terrifying and warranted an appeal to all saints available.

My paternal grandmother would enter the house, first dousing her cheroot in an empty oyster can Dad would leave at the door for such purposes, and turn towards the window. She would sit on her haunches with hands in prayer and shi-ko three times. The prostrations were quick and efficient with no great devotional drama. My memory of her was of an ancient elder though she was likely only (only!) in her sixties. I asked her if she was doing that because she too wanted to prevent being blind. No, she said. She knew she was already blind.

Understandably it was perplexing then. Not so now.

We are already blind. Some times we remained resolutely blind. Some times we claw at the blindness hoping to peel away the cataracts. Some times we forget we are blind and assume the rest of the world is careening around, banging into us and generally making life difficult. If only they could see!

Funny isn’t it?

Frank and I and the monstrous pups wish you all a season of enlightening joy. Our metta wish for you is that you are blinded only by the light of your wisdom, that it sears off the cataracts and you lead the rest of us mundanely blinded folk with compassion and love.