Creating a Mindfulness Bell: When Letting Go is Not an Option

A Meditation and Reflection from January, 2024

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

Much of our practice every day in the world is devoted to ways of releasing disturbances and traumas from the body; ways of allowing those small and large insults to the spirit—the pain we feel—to pass through us; ways to drop our grasping or aversion around them and the suffering they inspire. Yet another kind of entanglement engages our skill at merging with new environments and in relationship to others. The Buddha’s eight-fold path instructs us how to integrate other lives and environments into our personal root system. Now we’re leaving the realm of equanimity (letting go) and entering the kingdom of its alter ego, compassion.

Driving into the Lilacs

By Courtney Kampa

Like anything, it had traveled a distance
to get there. Careening, coming to a stop, cradled absurdly
in the tight, reddish buds. Then, as if learning something new
about itself, it kept very still.
And like anything nightgowned for a first time
in purple, it liked it

and got comfortable.
Like anything indefatigable, it was not. The wheels were tired
of being wheels. And as could be expected, the flowers had grown
so thick in their beauty they needed to be shaken
to feel anything. The white branches
freaked, arranged

across the windshield like willis
in the dark. What was crushed grew more fragrant
then dropped. The roots strained
to stay roots. Leaves deepened the headlights until its lacquer
nearly pearled. Sort of amazing,
someone decided. And someone else agreed.

“Driving into the Lilacs” was written by Courtney Kampa, who authored a single collection of poetry, Our Lady of Not Asking Why (2017), before her untimely passing in 2022. Her work is rooted in narrative, in exploring stories and relationships, sisterhoods, longings and belongings of all sorts; but this poem is lyrically Rilkean, more like a photograph, homing in on a single haunting image. It features its two humans only at the very end. It spends its time exploring, as Rilke once said, “not feelings, but things I had felt,” constructing a sculpture in which two divergent parts must meld themselves around and into each other. The language is right out of Rilke, as well: “Then, as if learning something new/about itself, it kept very still.” It reminds me of Rilke’s fantastic “New Poems” of the early 1900s, when he was working as Rodin’s secretary in Paris. The poet’s work was soon transformed by those massive, bronze figures of his employer’s art.

On the literal level, a car has parked a little too close to the lilac bushes. Kampa acknowledges, even invites a metaphorical reading of this scene. Of the car, she writes, “like anything, it had traveled a great distance…” “And like anything nightgowned…” She leaves the associations to us. Porousness expands the range of readings beyond any she could list. From a poet’s point of view, the poem could be a metaphor for content entering a fixed form. The form must bend around the content. The content has entered what I called in meditation “a perfectly good sonnet,” for instance, and the sonnet's conventions need to adjust and tool around and hold its roots. Or we could read the poem as a metaphor for different kinds of attachment. The car likes being nightgowned in purple; the lilacs “freaked” and “strained/to stay roots.” One is pushing toward anxiously; the other is resisting avoidantly. I like the relationship reading, because it involves an agreement at the end: two observers look upon this scene—driver and passenger, it suggests—and they come to share an amazement.

We could read the parts as sperm entering egg; we could read them as a fetus in the womb of the mother; we could read them as an infant come a long distance to enter the lives of her parents, as the parents try, at first, to keep things the same, but realize this strange presence now at the center of their lives demands radical change. The infant is an all-powerful angel to them. As Rilke writes,” “for there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Little matter how we choose to read the image, both parts are altered by the joining. The headlights are deepened; the lacquer pearls. It slows, but “learn[s] something new about itself.” For the lilacs, “what was crushed grew more fragrant.” What is so beautiful about the poem, to me, is the way Kampa acknowledges a sacrifice and a gain with this merging.

Since we’re interested, in this context, in more spiritual readings of the text, we can step beyond the physical world. Sometimes we must confront outside forces that enter our quiet spaces. Often these result with sacrifice and gain. Sometimes we must land in a new environment that may or may not appreciate our arrival. Can I make space for this? is the “Allow” of the RAIN practice. Can I increase my capacity for emotional discomfort? Can I step back from the purple tangle I’m currently in and look at it, even with amazement? Ram Dass used to say, “Your karma is your dharma.” He meant, whatever you are standing in right now, according to the math of the universe—the simple, nonjudging law of cause of effect—it is the very tool you have sought to do the work on yourself.

A poem is an X-ray. It’s not always medicine, but it will show you what’s roiling around inside, illumines itself around the fractures and pronounces shadows, and it shows you, too, how the bone is mending. Whatever poem you fall into is really you, something inside you, finally getting the chance to speak back to yourself.

Oars for the Boat

Identify a confrontation or a pain or condition that cannot pass through you, because it demands you digest it presently. These could include difficult co-workers, members of our own family, difficult times with children, a challenging assignment at a job you love. In the largest sense, we can step back knowing that all of this is illusion. But in the relative sense, it is painful and calls up our old wounds, our desire for better, our panic, our despair, our feelings of failure or of not having done enough. The question is: “Can I create space around this discomfort? Can I give it space?” Can I see beyond the small arrows of hurt and inconvenience into the shining, miraculous presence of another person whose life here is as temporary as mine?

One way of doing this is to create a mindfulness bell. Thich Nhat Hanh used the telephone at Plum Village. Whenever it rang, he and all the monks would stop and remember they were here. You might consider your own minor annoyances and turn one into a bell. Walking through the door into work. Something your spouse often says that gets on your nerves. A little habit of your child—laundry on the floor; an unmade bed. Whatever it is, let it be a bell to remind you to come back, and remember, soon all of this will be gone. Art is full of those bells. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the young woman Emily returns to her childhood home as a spirit and observes the forgetfulness all around her. She implores:

We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave…But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

In our mindfulness bell, we may discover the ghost of our future, older selves telling us what Emily tried to say. Come home. Remember what you are.