My boy left yesterday for his beloved Pacific Northwest. I accompanied him down to Penn Station and we spent a last half hour together before, abruptly, his train was boarding and our time ran out.
I came home in the rain, had a quiet evening filled with love and concern from friends via text message, phone call, Facebook. I felt buoyed by all this love -- his, our singular and overlapping circles, our families -- but even so waves of sadness have been taking me by surprise all day.
I got home a little while ago from a much-needed Lauren-dinner. It was just starting to spatter from a quickly darkening sky and I almost burst in to tears as I put my key in the lock, knowing how empty it would feel on the other side.
I could hear Llama crying disconsolately through the heavy door.
I wasn't going to meditate today, perhaps out of some juvenile shred of acting out -- let me show you how much I don't care, how little all of this means to me. But Evan's meticulously home-made meditation cushion was on the floor next to my desk, and I looked at it guiltily, and then set the meditation timer for fifteen minutes.
At first I couldn't calm my thoughts, and every little noise went careening and swirling around my head. The rain flung itself at the windows, and the refrigerator's hum turned grating, and the room felt dark and empty and vast behind my eyelids, and Llama sniffed and yowled at me, inconsolable.
But then, suddenly, the rain quieted and a bird started chirping, and then. Then there was this warm golden light behind my eyelids, a loving light that wrapped itself around me, and when those fifteen minutes were up I opened my eyes to the sun breaking through the cloud cover and a room suffused with a gorgeous west-facing evening glow. Even Llama was basking in the light, stretched out on the floor and purring, eyes heavy-lidded with sun-shiney pleasure.
Thank you, my dear, for giving this to me, and for smiling with me yesterday despite our crying a bit through all those goodbyes.
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