Sorrow, visiting

Sometimes, like a breeze passing over you, so subtle not even the tips of leaves and fronds of ferns move, sorrow enters. It’s as if you’re a weathered tree, a gash in your bark where a little nuthatch has made a home. She’s returned and entered you.

You could ask, Why are you here? She can't answer, at least in a language you understand. There's only her fluttering, the sensed story of her solitary flight, her want for that hollowed cavern—you feel it all.

In such moments when sorrow arrives, you don’t send it away any more than you would pluck the the nuthatch from the tree and fling her into air. There’s a reason for the visit, something you need to hold inside you for awhile, get to know, welcome, foreign and familiar.

What if the body isn’t, as they say, a temple or, as I imagine, a bird-cave, but a singing bowl? The people who know you and love you anyway, are the puja, that wooden wand circling you until you sing, one reverberating tone, a complex of harmonic overtones, released.

When the puja lies down beside you, its work done, you become what you think is a bowl of silence. Ah, you are wrong.

Sound lingers, energy cycles, the body, whether copper or flesh, hums. In that almost-silence, you discover the sorrow, swirling, and in it, every hand, each wing, the low thrum of your heart, opening.