Homecoming

Closure

I look for closure the way I look for a door to close. I want to weld shut that chapter in my life. I want to walk away from a memory. I want to wash my hands of the past.

What seems to be the most logical path to closure is in fact the most futile path that leads to no closure at all. It is an obstinate child throwing a temper tantrum.

The more I suppress it, the more I subjugate it, the stronger and better it grows at resisting. Soon I tire myself out from all the battles for closure I have thus far lost. And I beg for respite in my personal war for freedom, a war of attrition that I am losing.

Can it be that the secret path to closure is to stop looking at closure as a door I slam shut? The more I look for it, the more I go outside of myself in desperate search. The more I wonder why diligence has removed me farther from goal.

Can it be that closure is both elusive and immediately present - like my true Self? I go outside to look for, to seek, and to search for what cannot be found outside. The farther I seek, the farther I am from Self, the farther I am from closure.

It is aiming for enlightenment through analysis, which my friend tells me does not work. If anybody wants proof that ardent analysis has not taken a person anywhere near Nirvana or peace or closure, please... Take a look at me.

Closure is a matter of the heart, not the head. Closure does not work in a linear way or abide by the laws of time.

Time dulls the pain and puts distance between old memories and new memories. Time puts me farther and further away from old memories.

A wound is a ship that disappears into the horizon. The ship disappears from view. After enough time elapses, the inner image of the ship that I hold in my mind's eye fades. But I know the ship has not disappeared. The ship has only faded from my view. I need all but a signal, a trigger that springs the old memory back to view.

Then I am transported back in time when the wound was fresh. Then I feel the same pain, pain I am supposed to have forgotten by now, pain that time promised to heal.

This is because closure is a matter for the heart, not the head. My head finds ways to fill in the emptiness that scares me, to keep me too busy to breathe, to shield me from my prying heart. My head does what it can to keep me functional, a socially intact human being among other human beings, while I pass through tides of hurt in this ocean of time.

But when the wound in my heart heals, closure comes. True healing comes. Healing happens so quickly that I feel as if I haven't caught the critical moment that healing began. Then healing was already over and done with, hiding in time.

This magic wand that waves over me when I become whole where I once felt broken. This warmth that wells up within and around me when I come to rest where I was too tired to sleep.

Yet the path to healing seems not instantaneous at all. The path feels long, arduous. Makes me a lone Bedouin lost and thirsty in a desert without a compass. makes me wonder if healing ever comes, if healing is but a mirage and never a possible oasis.

Maybe the real task is not figuring how healing happens. Maybe the real task is not trying to harness healing the way I lasso a wild horse. Maybe the real task is not trying to assemble healing the way I build prefabricated modular furniture that comes with instructions.

Maybe the real task is staying by my own side on this long and arduous path. Maybe the real task is breathing and living through each moment, one breath at a time, one moment at a time.

Until healing finds me.

Letter

Emotional invalidation, emotional abuse, whatever it is called, it is a poisonous leech that drained away the life blood of joy and left me perpetually anemic. So anemic that I needed a blood transfusion or I would likely die. I wanted to feel joy again. I wanted to feel that light in my soul again.

I was desperate enough to go out there seeking love however I can find it. I did not even care if what I got was love at all, or however what I got was infecting me with seeds of self-destruction.

One day, I received a transfusion for all that had hemorrhaged from my heart. This transfusion came in the form of a letter written by a friend. The letter said:

Tears poured from my eyes and drew close the wound around my heart the way stitches and sutures drew close a wound of the flesh.

My head knew this letter did not come from the one who had hurt me. But my heart did not care.

Cookies

I was driving home, fumbling fingers through freshly salon-cut (and much shorter) hair. I grimaced at the excessive pomade sticking on my fingers.

As I approached the traffic lights at the intersection, I saw her sitting on the curb by the gas station. I would not have noticed her if the dirty green luggage standing next to her had not caught my eye. My ferocious flying frequency (because of work) has made me immediately aware of anything resembling luggage.

The lights turned red, and I applied the brakes. I was curious, but did not want to stare. My eyes darted between the woman and oncoming traffic. She was wearing dirty clothes, and, unaware of my furtive glances, lifted the leg of her sweatpants to scratch her skin. Her legs were badly discolored and peeling. I thought I saw her smile a little.

The lights turned green, and I drove onward. But instead of driving straight through the street, I turned left into the corner grocery store. I headed to the cookies aisle and grabbed four boxes of cookies. I chose two boxes of sweet cookies and two boxes of savory biscuits, all of which were on sale a very good deal for the money.

I carried the bag of cookies and across the street toward the woman. She was unaware of the bustle at the intersection. She seemed very absorbed in thought and on a plastic bag of dirty paper that she had with her.

I approached and felt awkward. I did not know what to say or how to explain what I was doing.

"Excuse me," I said, rather hesitantly, "I'm wondering if you'll allow me to leave this with you."

I brought the bag of cookies close to her. She seemed to suddenly become aware that I was talking to her.

"Oh," She said, "I'm going to leave pretty soon. I'm actually leaving California and I am waiting for my ride." I saw teeth missing from her mouth.

"Maybe I can leave this with you for you to take on your trip?" I set the cookies down. I didn't put them too close to her in case she felt threatened but close enough to be obvious to others that these were hers.

"Ok," she said flatly.

I hurried across the intersection toward the parking lot before the pedestrian light signals turned red. I never saw her again.

I hope she was able to get a ride to where she wanted to go.

Surrogate

I had a recurring dream about an ex-boyfriend that began a few years after I got married and moved from upstate New York to California.

In my dream I found myself in a familiar place. Sometimes I recognized the apartment, sometimes the room looked unfamiliar yet the place was eerily familiar. Each time I would realize, in the dream, that I had gone back to a time when I felt trapped in the relationship.

I would think, "What am I doing here? I thought I had left."

In the dream, I would remember that I had gotten married and, years later, that my husband and I had a baby. I would panic in the dream because I could not reconcile finding myself in the past and at the same time being completely aware of my very different present.

The same dream haunted me off and on for 10 years... as I had once felt trapped in a relationship for 10 years.

I could not solve the mystery of this recurring dream. Sometimes the "ex" did not even show up in the dream.

In 2007, I asked a spiritual teacher about this recurring dream. He said that I must have something I needed to say to "ex", and because I haven't said it, I could not get closure, and the dream recurs.

I told my husband about this interpretation and we both agreed not to heed the advice. I had already said the most important thing I needed to say to the ex, and I was at peace with those words. I could think of nothing more that needed to be said.

In 2008, the dream visited me again. Only this time, it was during a holiday it was Thanksgiving. I was standing in the corner of a street in the California neighborhood where I lived. I was at a public pay-phone that existed only in the dream. I picked up the phone and began dialing a familiar number. I had dialed this number a thousand times. My fingers remembered the dialing sequence even if I were to forget the number.

This was the woman whom I had come to love as a mother for a decade, someone that I had to lose as part of the break-up.

I never said goodbye, never told her how much she meant to me, never thanked her for making me feel loved and enough, never explained how much of a difference she'd made in my life.

It was easy never doing what I should have done - because I physically moved thousands of miles away. I used distance to wipe clean a mental slate. I forgot that emotional plates always reflected what I pretended I couldn't see.

I'd thought about writing a letter to her but I had avoided writing it long enough to forget about it.

She was my unfinished business. She was the home I turned to when I could not go home. She was my recurring dream.

The dream that unlocked the mystery took place on Thanksgiving, another clue to the thanksgiving I had ignored for too long but could ignore no longer.

The next day, I wrote the letter I had wanted to write. The letter was rife with poor penmanship and awkward Chinese sentences. But it thanked the woman who had long been a surrogate mother when I was at war with my own mother.

I mailed the letter.

Then the dreams began to fade.

Emergence

My physical vessel goes through birth and death but once during my life time. My spiritual vessel goes through a thousand births and a thousand deaths during the same life time.

During my birth, I was oblivious to physical pain, not that I didn't feel it, but my consciousness was not yet connected to this pain.

During my death, I may connect to physical pain, if I get to bring my full consciousness with me to the end. Maybe this is why I am scared of dying and wish that I will "die peacefully, in my sleep".

The process of my spiritual evolution demands that I experience the full intensity of the pain of birthing and dying, and to experience this intensity emotionally, spiritually, and physically. The process infiltrates my very core and every pore. This thought is so terrifying that I find myself doing all I can to avoid it, deny it, and run away from it.

Yet this process of my spiritual evolution is the only direct way I get to experience reincarnation at the conscious level in this human life, a reincarnation that transcends spiritual doctrines and does not beg my faith in an afterlife.

In my desperate attempt to avoid and deny the intense pain of spiritual birth and death, I tell myself stories, expertly served with a side of intellectual justification, of why "now is not the right time", "this is not the right place", "I'm not ready for this."

These stories from my ego-mind became the chatter that drowned out the truth from my heart-mind. I was only too eager to fixate on the cacophony ringing the loudest.

But in a quiet moment, when the chatter fades away, I hear a resonance from my heart that ripples through the noise, a resonance that carries a message that I had planted for myself from a place I was made to forget once born to this life.

The message shows me the colors that my human life brings to a tapestry of humanity, however ephemeral and fragile this tapestry has become.

The message tells me that I have a choice.

I believe that the pain of my soul dying while I am alive will be far more excruciating than any threats of death that fear inflicts upon me.

This spiritual rebirth is preceded by a pregnancy that is not unlike physical pregnancy. I am at once familiar with and estranged from this person I was and the person I am about to become. I straddle a chasm of uncertainty that leaves me lost and confused.

Like physical pregnancy, if I tried to transition before term in this symbolic pregnancy, I endanger my soul, plunging into a depth for which my lungs are not ready to meet.

Like physical pregnancy, if I ignore the pain and all signs of birth in this symbolic pregnancy, then the person I am to become will die within me. This corpse turns poisonous and kills the "old me" that I can't set free.

Like physical pregnancy that has come full term, I have but a limited window to transition between the past and the future in this symbolic pregnancy, and this present moment can be full of risk and danger.

Through it all, a helping hand from a friend who is wise and kind can be the difference between life and death... Between a life-giving emergence And a life-taking emergency.

Dad

Once upon a time, I vowed that I would never be like my father. In spite of glowing references from family and strangers about the kind of person my father is, I decided that my father is weak.

My father allowed people to take advantage of him. My father was too trusting. My father was too gullible. My father didn't know how to take advantage of opportunities. My father didn't garner his bosses' favor to better his promotional prospects. My father lacked the kind of ambition that my mother always complained about that other husbands had husbands she deemed less intelligent than hers but had advanced farther in their careers.

But when I was a little girl, I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to be a college professor, like he was. I wanted to marry a kind man, like he is. I wanted to receive as many love letters from admirers as he once received in his youth. Then I would share those letters with him the way he once shared those letters with his grandmother. I wanted to be as well-liked, well-thought of, and well-respected, as he was.

When I was a thirteen year old, I started an argument with a grown woman that I had heard gossiping about her employer - my mother with the other employees. I told my mother about what I had seen and heard. Tension broke through the thin sheet of politeness between my mother and this woman.

My father was the predictable peacemaker. My father first talked with my mother and calmed her down. Then my father talked with the woman and calmed her down. Then my father came to talk with me.

I didn't know what he told my mother or the woman, but I was angry when I saw him speak so kindly to the woman. This was the woman who had just insulted a person who pays her wages! She insulted my mother! I demanded to know why my father didn't get angry.

I felt resentment rise. I resented the weakling that my father appeared to me. Since then, every time he trusted a person he shouldn't have trusted, every time he was betrayed or stabbed in the back, I decided that my father deserved these injuries. It was his punishment for being stupid and naïve.

I no longer looked up to the words people said about how my father was a good man, how he was a kind man, a scholar, and a true gentleman. I came to see these praises as excuses for weaklings and losers.

In 1996, more than a decade later, I visited Taiwan. This was the first time I'd returned since my family visited the country in 1983, back when we were still a family, before I could believe that I would learn to hate and leave my parents.

It would be many years more before I could be my parents' daughter again.

My father asked me to go and sit with him in the balcony patio. I would always dread my father's signal to step aside for a talk. My father would want to tell me what he'd been doing and why it was exciting and important. I would never find what I'd heard either exciting or important.

We sat on the balcony of the apartment where I grew up. My father and I overlooked the street that has become unfamiliar to me, the same street where my brother and I once played and galloped on imaginary horses when we were toddlers.

My father asked me what I wanted from life. I began telling my father of all the things I wanted to accomplish, the way I would describe long term goals to a prospective employer at a job interview. I was still a graduate student then, my future uncertain. But I was already sure of what I thought I wanted. I was already certain of what should be deemed important in life.

I talked about success and achievements and being a winner. My father listened quietly and smiled. I took this as a sign of his approval. Then my father told me what he wanted from his life.

My father said, "I don't care to be promoted, or compete with others up a corporate ladder. I don't want to flatter bosses to get ahead. Those things aren't important to me. I want to enjoy reading the books I love and learning about the subjects I find interesting. My goal is to live a peaceful life."

I felt contempt rise. I thought little of this man who was my father. I saw my father as having all the intellect that I wished were mine for the taking, but none of the ambition and drive that seethed from my pores. I saw my father's three masters' degrees as a complete waste of time. I saw him as a man who wasted his talent. I vowed that I would never become my father.

Years passed from that day when I sat with my father on the balcony. I graduated with a doctorate degree. Just as I expected from myself, I pursued those exceedingly important-sounding things like success and achievements and a career. I succeeded. I achieved. I had a career.

Each time I succeeded and achieved, I felt a brief moment of exhilaration. Then I asked, "Is this it? Is this all there is?"

I got to the point where I began to fear success because of what laid in ambush behind it.

Is this it?
Is this all there is?

I got to the point where I began to see how much career advancement depended on the opinions of others and obedience to others.

Keep quiet. You don't want to jeopardize your promotion, do you?
Everyone's doing it. You don't want to be labeled a trouble-maker, do you?

I got to the point where I began to write:

It was ironic that what should have been my prime years of career-building I would start to question what mattered to me, that I would start to care what I want my life to mean.

It was ironic that I would start to look beyond my familiar box now, a box that was set a very long time ago, when I was a little girl, a box that had been continually reinforced with social pressure to compete and succeed.

This was a box that I thought had served me well thus far. I didn't care that this box had tempted me with promises of finding meaning and happiness once I'd "arrived", only to disappoint me with how empty it and its promises - had been.

In time, my questions changed. I stopped buying books on how to be a winner, how to appear more visible to bosses, and how to achieve success. I began buying different books.

In time, I discovered how much willpower I needed to stop chasing hallmarks of success and instead, to look for signs of significance. I found out for myself how difficult it was to slow down and ask what I really wanted from life when everyone else is speeding full-throttle toward what we were all told we should want in life.

I learned the amount of discipline I needed to rely on an internal compass of congruence as opposed to an external compass of ego. I felt the pain of waving away looks of contempt from those who thought me as a waste of talent the same looks of contempt that I had once given my father.

I heard myself saying, "I'd like to help, even if in a small way, even if only a few people. I'd like to experience peace in my life. I'd like to read books that I actually enjoy and not books telling me what I should do to be who I should be."

I'm beginning to understand dad.

Chocolate

I stopped by the drug store to buy cough drops. My husband had been complaining of a sore throat. I found the cough drops I was looking for and joined the line at the cashier.

There were two lines of customers waiting to pay at the cashier. Both lines moved slowly.

A man was at the front of the line I waited in. He swayed a little from side to side, as if he could not stand still. Even as I could only see the man's back, I sensed that he was not completely present. His hands were covered with dirty yellow gloves and he was wearing a dirty yellow jacket.

Instead of ringing up the man's purchase, the cashier said loudly for us to hear, "My register's closed!"

The person in front of me moved over to the next line and I followed him. But the man in the yellow jacket, now alone without a trail of customers behind him, stayed where he was.

"I said my register is closed!" The cashier said again, loudly. She was speaking to the man in the yellow jacket. The man continued to hover and sway as if he was unsure of what the cashier was telling him.

If he didn't understand, the cashier made her message clear when she shouted, "Get Out! And I don't want to see you in my store again!"

The man in the yellow jacket ran out of the store.

Then the cashier looked over to a customer waiting behind me and said, "Sir! I can help you here!"

"I thought you were closed," said the customer, walking over to pay for merchandise. The cashier rang up that customer's purchase.

I paid for the cough drops and walked out of the drug store. I saw the man in the yellow jacket pulling his belongings in a cart down the pavement. I put the cough drops on the seat of my car and closed the car door.

I walked toward the man in the yellow jacket. I was a little fearful. I didn't know if I should accost the man in the yellow jacket. I wasn't sure about his mental state of mind.

When I saw his face, I was surprised. He looked clean-cut and normal. I expected a homeless person to have a dirty face with dirty hair wearing dirty clothes.

"Sir," I said to the man in the yellow jacket, "Are you hungry?"

Giuliano's Deli was a staircase away from where we were standing. I was ready to go up and buy him a sandwich.

"No, I just ate," said the man. Then he pulled something out of his yellow jacket, "In fact, here, take it."

The man in the yellow jacket waved a Hershey's Chocolate Bar toward me.

"Can I buy it from you?" I said.

"No, I want to give this to you." He said..

"Are you sure I can't buy it from you?" I said. I was very confused. I lived in a house in Redondo Beach. This man lived on the street of Redondo Beach. This "giving" looked like it was going in the wrong direction.

"Yes, I really want you to have it." He said.

"Thanks." I said, still confused. I took the chocolate.

As I drove away in my car, I saw the man in the yellow jacket pull his cart of belongings out of the parking lot.

My husband asked what I was going to do with the bar of chocolate. I said that I was going to keep it until I see another homeless man and offer that person the chocolate bar.

Then I told my husband about how I felt when I heard the cashier yell at the man in the yellow jacket, and what it made me remember.

When I was in the eighth grade, there were special needs children who attended our public school and we all rode on the same school bus. The special needs children and their aide would sit at the back of bus. The rest of us "regular" children sat near the front of the bus.

Ian was one of the special needs children, a tall African American. He was taller all of us children and even taller than the aide who sat with him at the back of the bus.

Ian was always smiling on the bus. He seemed genuinely excited to be going to school while the rest of us looked sullen and gloomy.

Even though Ian looked happy and friendly, because Ian was "different", I was scared of him. I averted my eyes when Ian came onto the bus. I avoided looking at him and at the same time, I couldn't help staring in quick furtive stares.

One morning I was at my locker in the hallway. I was getting the books I needed for my first class. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ian nearby. As usual, I averted my eyes and avoided looking at him.

Suddenly Ian ran up to me. To my horror, Ian stood right next to me he stood very, very close to me and smiled at me.

In that instant, fear overtook me. I instinctively shouted, "Go Away! Get away from me!"

Ian ran away.

My fear subsided quickly. Embarrassment and shame crept into my body. I regretted that I had shouted at Ian. I must have made Ian feel the same way that I had felt that time when three white kids on a school bus looked at me and taunted, "Ching-Chang-Chong!"

For a very long time since that morning, I'd felt like a coward for shouting at Ian, for being scared of Ian, and for scaring Ian. From then on, Ian seemed to take care to avoid me or at least, to keep a safe distance.

I told my husband that he was the first person I'd ever told this to. I remembered the trespass I had committed as a child, old regret becoming fresh once more and welling up my eyes.

My husband told me that I should eat that bar of chocolate. "That man gave it to you as a gift. You. You can buy another homeless man something else to eat," said my husband.

A few days passed and I went downstairs for a snack. The bar of chocolate was still in the pantry. I unwrapped the bar of chocolate. I closed my eyes and silently thanked the man in the yellow jacket for his gift. Then I silently asked Ian to forgive me.

I broke off a piece of chocolate and put it on my tongue. Sweetness filled my mouth.

The Youngest Light

I remember this story from a long time ago but I can no longer remember what the story was called or where I may find it. The very first time that I came upon this story, it made me think of you, Dear. I've kept this story deep inside my heart for a long, long time.

Today, I am ready to share it with you.

In 2009 we met again. After years of warring and fighting, we found ourselves in a kitchen. Only this time you were in my house and in my kitchen. You were the guest and I was now the host or should I say the master?

As you stirred the pot that contained our lunch, you brought up an old wound and I sat up, readying my warrior gear to engage in a familiar battle with you.

I tried to hold back, I really did. I tried to listen without judgment. I tried to let you voice your opinions and let you live in your reality without entering your world.

But how can I restrain myself, when your world has collided with mine, right there in the middle of the day in my kitchen?

"What do you want from me?" I heard my voice rising, "is it debt that you want repaid for bringing me here to America? Is it money that you want?"

I saw my mouth letting loose a torrent of words that my willpower couldn't stop. I heard myself asking you how much money I should pay you for giving me the opportunity for a better future in America.

"I'm not asking you for money!" you said, holding onto the wooden spoon you were using to stir vegetables in the pot. "I am only trying to help you understand!"

"Oh, I understand!" I said, unsheathing my verbal sword, "You made stupid decisions! You had taken bad risks and lost all your money and ruined your life! That's why you are where you are right now! You could have been financially secure! You could have been retiring right now!"

"You can say all this now," you said, stopping your stirring to look at me. "I could say those things once, too. I was once like you, when I was your age. I too, enjoyed success. I too, thought I was invincible."

I stared back at you, my eyes hard. I wanted to cut you with my eyes the way I wanted to hurt you with my words.

"Sometimes we think that we can predict how life unfolds, and the truth is, we can't," you said, turning your back to me so you could stir the vegetables in the pot. "Then when you become old like me, one bad decision can change your life in ways you can never imagine."

I looked at the familiar hunch of your back. It reminded me of how you used to hunch over a big flour-laden table in Saudi Arabia. You would knead the dough on the table and cut out donuts to fry for the donut business.

This was the donut business that landed you in the hospital for emergency surgery when I was a little girl; the same business that had put me through 2 years of private school education to learn English so that I wouldn't be chased daily by curious girls in the local Arabic school; the same business that had made you the envy of other Taiwanese wives who petitioned their husbands to deport us for being lowly merchants and "shaming the Taiwanese" in Saudi Arabia; the same business that made you scream and weep when the business sponsor decided that it was more profitable to steal your business rather than collect your sponsorship fees; the same business that earned you enough money to bring me here to America so that I could become an American teenager who rebelled and ran away from you because you weren't American enough to hug me and tell me "I love you".

Suddenly I couldn't understand what you were saying to me. I couldn't hear your laments of having lost everything - your youth, wealth, and family and how you could never take it back no matter how deeply you regretted the decisions you had made.

I felt as if you and I had been here together before. I felt as if we had had this conversation before, even though this was the first time you had visited my house, even though this was the first time since I was a teenager that we would live together under the same roof,

Then I saw you as the little girl who had to take care of two younger brothers, who didn't know when her mother was coming home, and who almost starved to death if a kindly neighbor hadn't given you a bowl of rice to eat. I'd never known hunger like that.

I saw you as the little girl whose father would come home in the middle of the night and wake everyone up so he could beat up all of you before taking money from your mother and heading out to drink some more. I'd never known fear like that.

I saw you as the little girl who still lived in the brink of poverty who had grown afraid of eating porridge that ran thinner and thinner with water every day, with cheap sweet potatoes as fillers that made your abdomen bloated and cramped with gas. I'd never known pain like that.

I saw you as the little girl who was determined to finish high school even when other children laughed at you and called you names for being poor, who wondered if she would be made to marry an older man who was a widower just so you could have a roof over your head. I'd never known desperation like that.

I saw you as the little girl who had gone through more horrors than I could ever know horrors that I will never know because I didn't have to live through them and you will never tell me how you had gotten through them.

I saw you as the little girl who had escaped the poisons of alcohol that claimed the life of one of your brothers, who had escaped the snares of poverty and addiction. I saw how you now remain trapped under the weight of all the bad choices and all the miscalculations and all the consequences of your desperation.

Through your tired, wrinkled gaze, I saw the dimming eyes of the scared, scarred, and sad little girl. But that little girl had stayed free long enough to give your daughter this little girl the chance to forever change our family tree.

Suddenly I no longer knew whether I was the child or the parent sitting there, at the kitchen counter, waiting for lunch.

I had come through you, as your child, yet here we are, standing in front of each other, me ready for a fight and you begging me to wait long enough to understand you... To recognize you, to recognize me, to recognize us.

Can it really be this long since we had laughed together and danced together? Have I really forgotten who you are? Have I forgotten who we were once upon a time when we lived in that nameless formless place of Light?

Yet here I am touched by familiarity. Now I remember what we may have been, why we may have come. I remember how we said that we would one day walk side by side again, as the little girls we are, and return to whence we came.

In remembrance, I felt awe. I felt gratitude. I felt love.