Haiku & Tarot

A pair of dead foal
stare with eyes full of dry, clear,
& keen vacancy.

...

I wrote this on Twitter yesterday and I am still lingering on it. Perhaps it lingers on me. That is the way of things sometimes: we think we get to be the center with our thoughts and our friends and our places orbiting us. Then we get to be jarred by how we are in orbit ourselves, moving like moons round the beautiful and terrible objects of the world.

Well, I am orbiting around the pair of young dead deer I saw as I walked away from the county buildings where I intern. Why this is... there are many possible reasons, but I have latched onto one (I recall Sherwood Anderson's grotesques at the beginning of Winesburg, Ohio). I consider the Tarot, it's collection of symbols and roles that, for some, can be so filled with meaning. Divination is a hit or miss sort of game, but I think the deer force me to realize how we are always encountering the symbols of the Tarot and they are full of meaning even in our ignorance and arrogance and distraction.

The Death card, so often figuring into stories, can represent change, decision, loss, and novelty. I have been exposed or brushed along death more than usual and my life has taken on certain dynamic qualities of late. My mother's heart was stopped, her brain nurtured by machines, her digestion augmented by tubes, and her sternum sundered. In other times, in other cultures, with other technological situations there would be no question that she would not be alive now with all of that behind her. Of course, that was done intentionally, knowing that it might very well extend her life for ten years or more.

On the opposite end, I am blessed to be an uncle today. Oddly, little Vivie's birth came the day my mother was released from they hospital. Like my mother's condition, Erin giving birth was mediated by medicine and treatment. As a result, Vivie was a month early and remarkably small, though she has put on weight and increasingly adorable. Birth represents another sort of death, an inverse of dying and a departure from the comfort of the womb to the harshness of the world. Like my mither's chest, birth represents a sundering of a whole--the pregnant woman--into two--mother and daughter. In the Mountains and Waters Sūtra, Dōgen writes:

"You should understand the meaning of giving birth to a child. At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child. This is the actualization of giving birth in practice-realization. You should study and investigate this thoroughly."

The tension that remains for me is how my mother's life was mediated by mechanical and pharmaceutical means. Before her surgery, we drove to the hospital and I could see the anxiety rising in her already. I was tired from a late night and the sky was still dim when we left, but she wore those minute wounds of strained nerves. She had been up late, unable to sleep and determined to compete various tasks before surgery laid her low. At the hospital, the nurses and anesthesiologist poked and prodded to prepare her with an IV and the appropriate pre-surgery meds. The doctor ran late due to an early surgery at another hospital. The outlook was frustrating to say the least.

When I came back to the room, Mom was accompanied by a woman, the two speaking freely. This was a nurse with whom Mom had spoken on the phone often over the past week. She had provided information about the surgery and had spoken with a kind frankness that bolstered Mom despite various frustrations that seemed to stack inexorably on one another. We stayed with my mom for an hour and a half or more waiting for the tardy doctor and comforting my mom. When they took her to the OR, it was an immense relief. Later, I would learn that my mother was medicated such that all of that comforting and conversing had been strictly short-term and had been wiped from her thoughts by the end of the surgery.

Of course, with surgery such as hers, a little lost memory is not the only marking. All the same, my mother was going through all the stress that she would if unmedicated and I could not shake the absurdity of that experience seemingly snatched--if appreciatively so--from her. The way I saw her body sunken, sapped, and fundamentally infiltrated remains with me. Recovery was a process of liberating her from these life-sustaining, if horribly uncomfortable, paraphernalia. She was both herself and not herself, her body undergoing the radical change of initial violation and eventual liberation.

My mother was close to death, though not in a traditional way. Rather, her life brushed near the edges of what was tolerable. I was not struck with fear for her survival--though the possibility of complications had come up and been discussed--but I continue to be alarmed by how she cannot be the same person she was before. Of course she is my mother, but how her perception of self, the sensation of her body as the center of who and what she is has been radically upended. It is easy to think of ourselves as whole, as one solid being composed of bone, sinew, muscle, and flesh; electricity, hormones, and neurotransmitters; blood, thought, and relationships. With such moments as my mother's surgery, some of those bonds become weak, even insubstantial, and a great anxiety--potentially healing and generative it may be--seeps into the world.