Grounded

Last Monday, I was in a hospital waiting room while my mother was having surgery on a damaged shoulder. She is ever more fragile, tough as she is, and I know many things about the rest of her life that I wish I didn't. So I was a little sad, a little anxious.

I was in good company, with all the other people waiting on news of their loved one. Good attitudes and optimism mingled with grumpy pessimism, sleepy children, nervous TV addicts and kind volunteers. I felt all of my weight in the chair, in the heart, in my day and my pathetic attempts at scheduling in my head; outside, the morning clouds wandered across windows and skybridges connecting different parts of the hospital. They were, of course, as concerned as I. And for just a minute, they rained an invisible, warm and liquid love down on me, on the rooms and the people and the thinking. I felt a total acceptance of myself-the-daughter, caregiver, child, observer, life-form, open-spaciousness contracting like a womb. It is always a novel sensation, to close the umbrella and include what I believe I am in a loving downpour!

I felt all my weight. Clouds, I heard, can weigh as much as a hundred elephants. They are much stronger than we imagine, holding our grief and joy while they touch everything so effortlessly...here and gone, like the pulse on a screen.

Mom is feeling better. I am looking forward to some dancing this weekend, feeling my feet strike the resounding earth and throwing my hands in the sky. What else to do, but feel the human gravity, and that incredible lightness of Being?