Bicycle Buddha

We marched down Wall Street this morning, all dressed in black. Wall Street in East Van that is, down in the semi-industrial paradise by the port lands. A parade, in honour of the Buddha’s birthday.

Two smiling black-robed priests led the procession. I followed, striking the brass inkin bell. Behind me walked a tall man strewing flower petals, and then two young men bearing a small flower-canopied palanquin. Next, a woman holding aloft the six-inch baby Buddha, then an eight-year-old girl carrying a trumpet to herald the baby’s arrival, and then the rest of the various congregation. I’m not sure what our Wall Street neighbours made of the procession, but it felt the perfect way to ease into Mothers Day Sunday.

We processioned out of the zendo and down Wall Street to a sunny little park overlooking the inlet. There, protected by the grain elevators and the Second Narrows bridge, we bathed the baby buddha in sweet tea and listened to the story of his birth and awakening.

The Buddha as it turns out, was not your average family guy. His mother died when he was seven days old and he was raised by his aunt Mahapajapati, who nurtured and challenged him (as a good auntie should). She supported him in his radical departure and when he eventually got all famous she was the first woman to request ordination. At first, times being what they were and a woman’s place being clearly in the kitchen and the nursery, her nephew turned her down. But Mahapajapati was a relentless lobbyist on behalf of the women of the day. She mounted a full-blown campaign and finally was ordained as the first Buddhist nun. When the Buddha himself left the family palace to bring his ideas to the wider world, he left behind his own wife and child, knowing that love must extend beyond the nuclear bond. There are so many ways to live, so many ways to serve, and so many ways to forge intimate relationships.

We know this. Still, for women like me, Mothers Day can be a strain. I don’t have a mother and I don’t have any children. When the airwaves are jammed with odes to motherhood, and kids skip down the street carrying offerings of macaroni art and flowers, women like me can feel like freaks. But we are not freaks, and we are not alone.

Actually, we are one in five. In the U.S. and in Canada and in the U.K. the number is the same: one in five women (age forty and up) do not, and so likely never will, have biological children.

The one-in-five stat is a national average. In low-income and rural communities more women have children, which means that in cities and in higher-educated circles, the percentage is lower. Here in affluent Vancouver we are what — one in four? One in three? It’s impossible to say, because for all the time I’ve spent searching online I’ve not found any recent statistics. The lack of data or discussion is mystifying.

If you glance at the magazine covers in the grocery checkout or the bulletin boards cluttered with ads for pre-natal classes and mommy-baby yoga, you might think childless women were one in a million. Sometimes when I watch the stroller parade on my cozy residential street I feel like a freak of nature. But again, here’s the news: one in five. One in five. There are lots of us, and we have every right and reason to dance on our paths.

There’s a common misconception that women are childless for one of two reasons: infertility or conscious choice. I do know some women who who firmly decided to take a pass on motherhood, and who are fully satisfied and comfortable with their decisions. I applaud them and I’m grateful for their support. But for many of us the path is more subtly determined by circumstance, or by the small choices we make day by day and year after year as our lives unfold. We decide: not this time, not now, maybe some day. And then one day it dawns on us that the window of childbearing has shut, and that “some day” has effectively become never. For myself, as for many others, that is a shattering moment met with shock or denial or aching regret.

Many women will spend a precious decade of our lives in a state ranging from intermittent low-level doubt to full-blown and constant anxiety. We may carry a burden of unrecognized and unexpressed grief. We might never fully embrace our lives, always holding a part of our energy in reserve for the identity we may never assume. Some of us carry regret to our death-beds.

We might feel like failures. We might feel forgotten. We might feel envious. I am not proud of the fact that I have let some good friends slip away from me after they have had children. I might complain that they go to bed at 8:30 and are obsessed with dhoulas and potty training, that’s not the whole story. There is also an element of envy that has driven a wedge between us, and it has taken time for me to recognize it and forgive myself for it.

Now listen, this is important: I am not arguing for or against. Science will never prove which is better: the parental or the child-free life. Don’t bother telling me about the upsides or the downsides, to either side. And PLEASE do not send me any screeds from strident and self-righteous “child-free” advocates, whose dogma on the subject of procreation rivals that of the Pope. Having children is no more or less “selfish” than remaining childless. The pleasure and deep fulfillment people get from having kids is real, and good parenting is a gift to the world.

Again though, parenthood is only one possible path, and it cannot be the road for everyone. We are the childless one in five, and we don’t need to hear about the latest developments in in-vitro fertilization or foreign adoption. Nor do we need to be reassured that being childless is so much better. No one will win this argument. We have only one life we to live, and on this path we have endless opportunities to fulfill all of our emotional and physical needs in a myriad of creative ways. We can enjoy deep and ongoing relationships with children and with parents if we want them. We can leave meaningful legacies of all kinds. We can feel unconditional love. We are blessed to live in an evolving world where so much is now possible, as the buddha foresaw: both within and beyond the family mold.

I find now that as I plant my feet firmly into the soil of the present, I release remorse for the path not taken. Opportunities blossom around me in the freedom that non-motherhood affords. I find myself writing, adventuring, making art, and offering myself to creative service. In the back closet of my self I found a reserve tank of energy and creativity labelled “for baby”. The lid has blown off the tank, and now that energy is set free.

One day not so long ago I held a friend’s newborn in my arms, and for the first time in my life I felt genuine sympathetic joy. Joy for the baby, joy for the mother, joy for me. Unconditional happiness, with or without, anything or everything. It is what we  all can have, and what we all deserve.

I am wishing a very happy day to all women and men, and to all the juicy mothers and non-mothers of this world.

There’s this old Zen chestnut where the monk asks, why does the Bodhisattva of Compassion have so many eyes? The master replies: it is like a hand reaching for a pillow in the night.

I love that image, of compassion or generosity as an autonomic nervous response, as natural as breathing. Every cell like an eye, that sees a need and responds to remedy the situation. We see with any one of our thousand eyes and respond with any one of our thousand hands, in maybe the smallest of gestures, to activate comfort—not only for epic wide-screen suffering but also for the most subtle and personal pain, which is equally deserving of attention and care.

I know I wasn’t born with a thousand eyes. Or if I was, then every eye is wearing dark glasses. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben is stoking the fire for Chief Reuben’s sweat lodge, on the Tsleil Waututh reservation on the Burrard Inlet. He places another log onto the big fire over the grandfather stones and I ask him, so…how intense is this sweat, usually…like, on a scale of 1 to 10?

In the gap between my question and his answer my mind flips to the habit of deciding my preference: do I want it gentle or tough? How tough do I want it? Oh god i hope it doesn’t hurt. I hope it’s not too wimpy. I hope I don’t die. How do I hope it will be?… Read the rest of this entry »

I remember my mother as a small, solidly built woman with angry blue eyes. She is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking cold coffee and smoking Matinée Lights. I can’t remember ever having had a real conversation with her, about anything. We hardly knew each other except as adversaries. Read the rest of this entry »

The belly knows.

I wake in the night with that hissing and sizzling in my gut. That is my intuition talking. It is not to be silenced and it won’t let me sleep.

There have been times my belly said go forward, or stand still, or run away. It has said, jump on that approaching bus, now! Forget about the bus behind that you were waiting for. It has said, the money doesn’t matter–do not get on that plane (and I didn’t, and it was, more than once, the best flight I never took).

Last night my belly shook me awake to say, hey! You know that to-do list you made last night? It is bullshit. You can’t do that. You will be a stressed-out wreck if you try to cram that all into this very crucial week. Don’t worry about disappointing people. Damn the embarassment, just be honest – get on the phone, write that email, simplify your life. Do one thing at a time. Focus on what really needs to be done.

And so I got up and I postponed some work, I canceled some activities, I ate some crow. I may have looked like a flake but i made the right decision. When i listen to my gut, i always do.

What’s the deal about women being with younger men? Why does it freak people out, what is the big taboo?

I got to ruminating about this in the shower this morning, while still groggy from another night punctuated by hot flashes (which, I am reassured, will ease off within two to five years. Good to know).

A 30-year-old friend recently told me she was uncomfortable about the fact that her partner was younger than her – by all of two years. And her partner jokingly referred to her as an “older woman”. Two years hardly constitutes a generation gap, yet they are very sensitive to that small aberration of birthdays. I was wondering how it is that when a guy hooks up with a woman 10 years younger some eyebrows might be raised, but people don’t freak out. Not so the other way of course. Read the rest of this entry »

We buried Robin’s ashes yesterday in the roots of a black hawthorn tree out behind the Gumboot.

As the tree went into the ground three eagles circled overhead, and it being Roberts Creek, a few lazy dogs and feral children wandered through the circle of held hands. Someone blew marijuana smoke from a fancy glass pipe through the branches. And then we walked up the road to the Hall which was filled to capacity with several hundred Creekers and friends and fans, who cried and told stories and sang Bobby McGee, and then laid on a generous potluck. Robin for sure would have laughed and loved it all, especially the many chocolate desserts.

I met Robin some 15 years or so back when I was publishing a little bicycle magazine in Vancouver. She wrote me a letter—by hand, back in the day— saying she had a sort of a farm on the Sunshine Coast, and was wondering if cyclists might like to come to visit. It could be, like, a sort of bicycle b&b. The only thing was, the road was muddy and up a steep hill through the woods of Mt. Elphinstone. And there wasn’t any electricity. And oh…the water wasn’t fit to drink…in fact, better not to advertise, since it was probably illegal for her to even live there, Read the rest of this entry »

Try to love everything that gets in your way:
the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list. Read the rest of this entry »