The Eros of Everyday Life by Susan Griffin

Author:Susan Griffin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781504012201
Publisher: Firebrand Technologies
Published: 2015-08-02T20:12:36.695000+00:00

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The Eros of Everyday Life

… the individual self is … a fleeting meeting-ground of intricately woven relations, its nature is profoundly participatory, but is, for that, no less endowed with distinctiveness, particularity.

—JOANNA MACY,

The Dharma of Natural Systems

To us, each object is imbued with invisible fibers of light that reach out into the universe.…

—ALEX JACOBS, IROQUOIS ARTIST

In the late spring of the year my mother died she came to live closer to me so that I could take care of her. She had one room and her own bathroom in a convalescent home that I could reach by driving up through the tree-covered hills in back of my house or by a hot freeway that skirted the bay for a few miles and then turned inland. My sister and I knew she had only a few months to live, but still we arranged to move a small number of her possessions up north, so that she could have them with her. The presence of these things made her feel more of a piece, as if the familiar fabric and enamel and wood of these objects formed some kind of bridge between past and present.

I would visit her in the afternoons, doing some errands for her on the way, checking to see that all her needs at the home were met, handling the paperwork that seemed to multiply itself continuously, and completing small tasks for her. On the afternoon that the moving truck arrived, I went out earlier than usual so I could help her arrange her belongings. The drawers of one chest were so covered with grime that, not wanting to release this dust into the room, I took them outdoors to clean them. But just as I set to work a strong wind whipped over the hill in back. As I held the wooden drawer up in the air, layers of dust inside, built up over several years, dispersed, and bits of the sweet-smelling hay that covered the hills were blown into it.

I was surprised and moved. I felt as if the surrounding air were helping us, mother and daughter, through this passage. I had had a difficult childhood. Troubled in her own mind, my mother had been by turns neglectful, abusive, and kind. I had forgiven her many years ago. But, like a dust that accumulates over time, remembered sorrow has many layers. Recently, during my own illness, moments of an old anger welled up in me again, and though I did not express these feelings, a silence grew up between us.

But the frailty of her body approaching death was like a strong wind. We were present to each other as never before. I liked caring for her. And she was grateful for what I did. My own experience with illness made me understand her fears, and she let me comfort her. I began to feel that the direction of caring, who was giving, who was receiving, was far less important than the intimacy of the gesture. I was losing her and gaining her in the same moments.

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