An Ode to My Sister (The Line in the Sand)

I am going to rant here – spill my thoughts as they come and leave them uncensored. Sorry if this rambles, but I don’t think it will.

In the two weeks since my sister’s passing, two quotes have been inundating my mediations. Two quotes that fail to sum up my feelings but come as close as any.

The first is from one of my favorite poets, Rumi. It is derived from the middle verse of his poem, A Great Wagon

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. ~Rumi

My sister, how I wish I could have met you there! How I wish we could have smelled the fragrance of our happy times, mended broken stems of flowers crushed by our ideas, and tended to the fertile soil of what could have been. How I wish whatever nonsense that kept you there and me here mattered less than the fields were we once played. Sometimes, I guess, when two warriors from the same clan draw lines in the sand, the fields of truth become battlefields. In that battle, some things are just never meant to be.

The poem goes on.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.

Thus, we remain forever parted even as we remain forever bound. I guess we had too many words, too many ideas, to surrender to a place where “each other” cannot exist. You and I are at fault for our eternal parting. You and I are at fault for not tending to our field.

The second quote is from Jack Kornfield’s Buddha’s Little Instruction Book. 

The trouble is, you think you have time.

This one is always the kicker, always the one we seem to ignore when we need its wisdom the most. I may think I have time, but I also know better. Time is the one commodity I cannot replenish, and all of those things we should have paid attention to can never gain our attention again. The seeds we failed to sow will remain unplanted. The water we neglected to drink will remain in the well. Regret, it seems, will be our legacy. Nancy, we should have known better.

Great wisdom, though, can spring from great tragedy. Where I cannot mend a flower torn apart by a storm, I can plant a new one. I still have breath in me, so I will till the fields where I will both meet the living and the dead. While I have no idea when my end shall come, I still have life in me, so I plan to use that life and the regret I carry in your name to be a good steward of this space.

Perhaps that is the best I can do for you. I can remember our laughter and I can remember our tears. I can see you trying not to laugh at my jokes and I can see the wounds we inflicted on one another. Perhaps the memory of who we were as brother and sister is the field where we will finally meet. Let’s make something good of it. Let’s laugh again.

So it is goodbye, for I don’t give any credence to the “we’ll see each other again” stuff. We had that chance and we blew it. Instead, I will move on, doing my best to not make that mistake again. I will find love and nurture it. I will seek peace and live in it, and when war comes and battles much be waged I will fight hard and then let that shit go.

It just occurred to me that greatest sin we can inflict on those we love is drawing that line in the sand. We will always have battles and battlefields, but when we fail to make peace we fail to be worthy warriors. When we fail to find that field that exists outside of right and wrong we fail to be worthy lovers. We must do better, even if that means erasing the lines we’ve drawn once they begin to do harm. The battle cannot last for eternity.