Retirement- Great Grief/ Great Freedom

Today is Thursday, June 2. On Tues. I said goodbye to my colleagues of many years. We honored our walk with each other in the compassionate life of mental health service with a rite of passage, a liturgy of speaking who we are and the gifts we have given and received from each other in the circle of work. Until that morning most of the grief had been underground. I awoke with a heavy feeling of dread and recognized it almost immediately as that old friend, Grief. As the day progressed the skin came off my humanity and I began to feel more and more naked and raw. By the end of the day I was undone and unraveled, blubbering like an idiot, immersed in the reality of what shall be no more. That's a good thing!

I have taught many workshops and classes on grief. For many years I have taught my students in meditation that the only path to joy and freedom, that indeed the essence of transformative meditation practice is to live the Mystery of Existence Itself, to live the open-handed life and cling to nothing. The hand that is open is receptive, ready to bow and receive what is offered. The hand that is open continually offers in respect and love, releasing everything. In moments such as this day we experience the profundity of the gift we have received and release from the profundity of the attachment and bonds we have formed, offering the best of ourselves in that movement. Life is, and Heart Meditation Practice actualizes, the Great Way of ceaseless bowing and ceaseless offering.

Lovely descriptions and true. It doesn't take away our humanity and the wrenching and the tears when attachments are severed. When my son died and I held his lifeless body, when I sat in meditation as his body was consumed in cremation, there was no insulation from pain. The Great Way brings us home and we are **with** this and every other both painful and happy moment of phenomenal reality anchoring and living in the numinous world of the deathless and eternal. And we live and abide in both, living the open handed life of ceaseless bowing, and ceaseless offering. And we, like the master and poet Dogen of the 12 century may say, "I travel in this limitless realm, where every step I take is home."

In my grief I have come to appreciate again, what a vulnerable soul I am and how much I warm myself in human company. I have been blessed in this life with wonderful companions. And heaven knows, good companions are to be cherished. So, my friends of work and otherwise, I cherish you all. And I do not seek to sever myself from your befriending. I am resolved even in this coming year to communicate with you. And perhaps at the end of my time of commitment to intensive practice, in the flesh or at a distance, I shall learn to be a better and truer friend in new found freedom.

The Blessings of the Way be Yours,
Bill Ryan