Our Illusion of Separateness
We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness - Thich Nhat Hanh
Listen, I don’t know shit about Thich Nhat Hanh. I mean, I know he was a Buddhist Monk who spoke out about the Vietnam War, was good buds with Martin Luther King Jr., and who did a huge amount of teaching, speaking and writing on mindfulness. Many, many, many people admire him and his teachings. I certainly do, as much as I know - But I’m saying I don’t know much.
I’m just writing about an occurrence that happened right after Thich Nhat Hanh passed this week.
I’m cleaning out boxes in my garage and I knew I had some books and records of my dad’s that my step-mom gave me. When he passed, his family history research records came to me, because I had been his sometimes-sidekick in those efforts, and I love that nerdy stuff. Most of the paperwork and files were already in the house, and I thought that the boxes in the garage contained books and other less personal items.
When I brought one of the boxes in and opened it up, I found an unexpected collection of items inside:
There were two bags of my dad's things along with notes from my step-mom to my sons, written a few years after he passed away in 2007. I remember her giving them things of his, and I’m not quite sure how they ended up in this box.
There was also a binder of pictures and research and memorabilia from his trip to New York and New Jersey to find the gravesite of my great-grandfather, the rum-runner, who was shot in New York Harbor in 1924. This character will come up a lot in this blog, since a lot of my current research and writing are about him, his family and his generation.
I also found a manila envelope of copies of all the final documents in1996 from my grandma, his mother - her last will and testament, the final bill from the nursing home, from the funeral home, her last phone bill (including a 9 minute call to me!), and JC Penney expressing sympathy for my aunt’s loss and agreeing to close my grandma’s account.
And then some tri-folded notepaper fell out as I pulled the binder all the way out of the box. I unfolded it, and saw that it was a letter I had written to my dad and step-mom in the summer of 1989, thanking them for moving me and my stuff from Portland to Eugene, Oregon so I could finish my undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon. I updated them on my admissions status (officially accepted!) and financial aid status (hoping to hear by August 1st), and my job search.
I did not expect that finding this document that I had contributed to the archive would crack me open. I sat ugly-crying on my couch and thought about the quote I had read while scrolling social media just minutes before. My separateness is an illusion. At some level, if I’m really honest with myself, I think of my dad, my grandmother, certainly this great-grandfather that I never met, as somehow different from me. That they couldn’t possibly share the same worries, fuck-ups, shame, pride, joy, excitement, thrills as I have…. Yet I am part of their story, our story is all one.
I thanked my dad for keeping my letter. I considered the young woman of not-quite-twenty years of age that I was when I wrote it. I was really on the cusp of getting my shit together. Honestly, it could have gone a number of ways. Thank the deity of your choice that I was at least together enough to thank my parents for their help and to let them know how I was doing.
I really love that my best and sweetest moments are those moments when I realize I’m in connection with other humans in the truest ways. That we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness, but the thing is, I gotta do this repeatedly. I gotta reawaken all the damn time and keep turning my face towards the sun.
