Yesterday was a nice day: the sun was warm, warmer than usual for April in the Berkshires; the promise of Spring was everywhere.  It was the kind of day where happiness was close at hand.  Yet in the midst of it all, I felt a sadness deep inside of me.  It didn’t take long to recognize its source.  Aidan was not with us.

    I am not an especially emotional man.  I do not cry easily, though I am fairly quick to laugh.  I do not spend a lot of time fixating on my feelings.  There are usually many things to do on a daily basis – work, housework, homework with Maggie, various and sundry bureaucratic details of modern life – and that is where I keep a good deal of my focus.  I try also to turn my attention to writing projects and the reading that goes with them.  Time fills up readily and I do not pay much mind to my underlying emotions.

    So, the sadness, welling up from within, was noticeable.  It pushed into the scene unannounced and stole my awareness.  I turned and hugged Maureen.  I did not tell her what I was feeling; it was not so strong that tears were imminent, just a dull, depressing moment of sadness.  Her sorrow runs deeper and closer to the surface and I did not want to draw that out with my own anguish.  My instinct to suppress outward signs of my inner life seemed to have worked.  She happily went on with her business unaware of my transitory sorrow.  There were things to do, schedules to plan, places to be.  The sadness passed.

    Today, I have a better sense of it.  It was one month ago that Aidan died.  I was not thinking of that yesterday; I did not consciously call forth the sorrow.  It just came, as if my mind, my heart, is intuitively marking the time, the days, the weeks, the months without him.  He is infused in my soul and I remember him without thinking.

    What I did do yesterday after the sadness passed was to turn to the kind of reading I want to do and cannot quite find the time to do in my busy work and life schedule.  There are Chinese classics I have not read.  In the Taoist world, the Lieh Tzu (also transliterated as Lie Zi), the third great treatise, after the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, has escaped my systematic attention.  I have read bits and pieces of it here and there, but I have never sat down and read it front to back.  That is what I started to do yesterday.  And, like so much of my experience with the ancient books, it spoke to me directly, with uncanny relevance to exactly what I was feeling and thinking that day.

     I picked up my copy of A.C. Graham’s translation that has been sitting on my self for a year or two.  Graham is a hero to me.  His combination of linguistic and philosophical knowledge is unmatched.  Although his translations may not flow as well as some others, his insights are always eye-opening.  Right in his introduction, I realized that the Lieh Tzu was the right book for me now.  He writes:

The Western reader of this book, struck first of all by its naive delight in the irrational and marvelous, may well feel that no way of thought could be more alien to the climate of twentieth-century science.  Looking more closely, he may be surprised to discover that Taoism coincides with the scientific world-view at just those points where the latter most disturbs Westerners rooted in the Christian tradition – the littleness of man in a vast universe; the inhuman Tao which all things follow, without purpose and indifferent to human needs; the transience of life, the impossibility of knowing what comes after death; unending change in which the possibility of progress in not even conceived; the relatively of values; a fatalism very close to determinism, even a suggestion that the human organism operates like a machine.  The Taoist lives in a world remarkably like ours, but by a shift of viewpoint it does not look so bleak to him as it looks to many of us.

 There’s lots in there, but let’s pick up where it ends.  The Taoist shift is an embrace of uncertainty and change and transience.  What matters is not what we think our lives might mean, but the mere fact of our lives in themselves.  We are here, we cannot know what comes after, but we can open ourselves to all that is around us and thrive on the spontaneity of the moment.  Death, from this perspective, is not "loss" but an inevitable transformation that all things move through.  What is here before us is simply the immediate expression of an unending circulation of life and death, being and non-being.  Aidan’s absence, then, is very much a part of our presence; there is no strict distinction to be drawn between the here and the not-here.  The not-here is here in the here; and the here is not here in the not-here.

     OK, that last line may seem a bit strange.  But here is a brief excerpt from the Lieh Tzu that Graham uses to illustrate his introductory point:

Your own body is not your possession…It is the shape lent to you by heaven and earth.  Your life is not your possession; it is harmony between your forces, granted for a time by heaven and earth.  Your nature and destiny are not your possessions; they are the course laid down for you by heaven and earth.  Your children and grand-children are not your possessions; heaven and earth lent them to you to cast off from  your body as an insect sheds its skin.  Therefore you travel without knowing where you go, stay without knowing what you cling to, are fed without knowing how.  You are the breath of heaven and earth which goes to and fro; how can you ever possess it?

 I must say that losing a child is much harder than an insect shedding its skin.  Love makes us feel a certain possession.  But the point here is the same as Chuang Tzu’s: there can be no loss.  We do not possess our own lives, though we think we do; they are lent to us for a time, a brief time in cosmic terms.  Instead of fretting over them as if they were possessions, we should simply live them and find joy in our immediate senses and experiences.  We do not possess our children.  They, too, are the "breath of heaven and earth."  What matters is that they are in our lives, even when they are physically absent. 

    Aidan still swirls in the vast movements of the breath of heaven and earth, whether it is one month after his death, or a year, or a century.