Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 62

I sense I’m dropping down through another cycle of grief as the uncertainty of our global situation continues to unfold.

I’ve had another strong dream, this one feeling like it’s emerged from a layer deep within me I haven’t touched into in years.

I’m in some sort of fancy hotel. There is a room which has been sitting empty since my mother died, 27 years ago. There is a chest of drawers in the room which contains the last of her possessions. What didn’t get thrown or given away after she died.

I am frantically rummaging through the chest of drawers looking for something, anything, to give me a clue about who she was. What she was about. More information to go on. To help me understand her more deeply.

But there is nothing of any significance there. Just fragments of papers and Christmas decorations and unused cards, still in their plastic envelopes.

Distraught, I decide to sleep outside. I take all my bedding and head to a mountain top. I make my bed and lie down on my front; belly, heart and cheek pressed against the earth.

I wake up in mid-thought. I wonder if any of my mother’s sisters (she’s got four) still have any letters she would have written to them over the 20 years she lived in the States?

Almost two years ago my maternal grandmother passed away. Perhaps there was something of my mother’s amongst her things. Maybe I’ll reach out to one of my aunts to find out.

It’s a sore spot for me. After my mother died I did my whole late adolescence/early adulthood rebellion thing and faffed off to San Francisco to find myself.

I wasn’t even in good communication with my own father and siblings at that time, let alone my extended family in Chile. It was in the days before social media, no easy way to stay in touch except through phone calls and letters. Something I wasn’t that interested in doing at that age.

So I think it’s safe to say I’m pretty estranged from that side of the family. Although I did see them about ten years ago when I went back for a family reunion. I stayed with my grandmother and god-mother, one of my mother’s younger sisters.

They were very kind to me and my partner at the time. This was important, because Chile is a very homophobic country. They welcomed us into their home with open arms.

I remember my grandmother, who spoke very little English, pulling out her big, hard covered dictionary one morning, turning to the page on Buddhism and telling me she’d been reading about it, had found it very interesting and was happy I was practicing.

She was incredibly religious. In her last years she used to sleep with a life-sized statue of baby Jesus in her bed. I have no idea where she got that statue. In trying to explain herself to us she said that she felt that the adult Jesus got all the attention, but that baby Jesus was really where it was at.

I believe in total she had 11 pregnancies. She miscarried two of them. A third, a little girl, died at aged two, I don’t remember from what. The rest still live, except my mom.

I’m still cross with the younger version of myself who didn’t think to save more of my mother’s things after she died. I was so caught up in my own grief and gearing up to fly the coop.

I still have her pen, rosary beads, and a handful of jewelry. The most precious of which is a necklace of natural pearls, strung smallest from either end, to largest at the very centre. I wore it on my wedding day.

I spend the morning scrolling through Facebook, catching up on email and talking to a friend on FaceTime. She tells me her aunt has recently died of a brain aneurism.

It’s tragic. She’d been recovering from a successful hip operation and was doing really well. My friend took comfort in the fact that her death was instant and painless.

She’s been working closely with the funeral director to arrange everything. There are hard decisions to make because of coronavirus. I admire her strength and steadiness of mind and heart.

After lunch we go for a quick stroll to Stoke Newington Common. My partner’s been in the front room on Zoom all morning doing their counseling course and is itching to get outside. We make our way down Narcott Road, snapping photos of an unusually coloured mauve rose, that also smells amazing, and a rainbow coloured sign in a neighbour’s window reading:

Thank you

NHS

and

All Workers

There are a couple of patches of wildflowers growing on the edge of the common. A bee is hanging out in a big daisy. I watch him for a while, transfixed, and take a slo-mo video.

We head back home and I spend the rest of the afternoon writing. At 5pm we go for another walk, this time to Hackney Downs. It’s packed.

There are hundreds of people sitting around in big circles, more than one game of lawn bowling, kite flying, a group of young families playing duck, duck, goose, and the usual basketball games and soccer matches.

We stop to say high to a fat squirrel sat on a fence, enjoying an evening meal. He is so docile that he lets me take a video of him while he nibbles away.

We lay down in the grass in the northeast corner of the park. All of a sudden, I hear a deep rumbling in the earth beneath me. I’m momentarily perplexed before I realise it must be the overground trains which run along the western edge of the park.

I take a few photos of my partner who is looking particularly cute, bright white, fluffy clouds floating by in the background, and then we head home. I’ve got a 6pm date with a friend in California.

I grab my favourite weekend snack, a bowl of crisps and a cold beer, and jump on FaceTime with my friend. We talk around coronavirus and what we’ve been up to lately. Without realizing it we’ve both been fundraising for the same cause and leading similar practices.

She agrees to lead one of my drop-in meditation classes next month and we leave it there so she can go join an online retreat she’s doing this weekend.

While I’ve been on the phone my partner’s been making stir fry and now it’s my turn in the kitchen to make a peanut sauce. I whip up the sauce in no time and pour it over my stir fry and udon noodles. My partner, who’s on a diet, has it with kale.

After dinner we decide to watch Misbehaviour, a film about the Women’s Liberation Movement’s protest at the 1970 Miss World competition. At one point someone asks who is behind the protest and one of the main characters raises her hand and calls out her own first and last name, which are the same as my partner’s, Jo Robinson.

We start laughing and my partner says she actually knows the real Jo Robinson. Apparently they were in a Buddhist study group together for four years back in the day. They used to call themselves Jo Robinson, Sr. and Jo Robinson, Jr.

That’s the second time a Buddhist we know has been portrayed as a character in a feature length film about real life political protests. The first was the 2014 film Pride, which was about an alliance between a group called Lesbians and Gays support the Miners and the National Union of Mineworkers during a yearlong strike in the early 80s. One of the gay activists is part of our Buddhist Community and helped promote the film when it was released.

Misbehaviour is pretty good and does a decent enough job of exploring the complexities of the issue across generational and racial differences. The blatant, seemingly innocuous acts of sexism and misogyny taken as given back then are striking, made far more demoralizing from the point of view of the main characters.

We both laugh during one scene where a woman is speaking to a room full of other women, making a list of what they should be demanding, including equal pay for equal work.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.