Sister Emptymind

Meriah hadn't anywhere to go, really. She stayed in one place for many years. She had a longing to be set free, but no one to partner with in order to make the leap. She thought, all that time, that she needed a partner. At least someone to notice. She had a plant she talked to sometimes, a scraggly fern in a dime-store pot. She had inherited it from her last relative, an aunt who'd been found three days dead under a collapsed pile of stacked newspapers, magazines, books, and junk mail. 

Aunt Leta's apartment had to be cleaned out, and Meriah had no inclination to hire anyone. She wanted to be quiet and private and in her own sort of time with the task. There was paper money hidden in the newspapers, she discovered; and there were cans and jars of coins stashed in odd corners. The piano was filled with them. Out of all the money and odd trinkets and vintage clothing and classic books, the only thing Meriah took-to was the dime-store pot with the scraggly fern in it. She used part of the money to pay off Aunt Leta's broken lease so the landlord would quit hounding her. Most of it went to pay off the funeral costs she had put on her credit card, so she could maintain her perfect monthly payment record.  She took the clothing and costume jewelry and knicknacks to a thrift store and was glad to unload them. She had no room for such things in her spotless, spare, spartan apartment. She had no room. It was emptiness that mattered.

When she thought about it one day, and said to herself that emptiness mattered to her, she realized, somehow, that she was less unimportant than she had thought. Perhaps it was something to be empty. Not something that you would get on TV for, not something anyone would care to read about in the newspaper headlines - but still, it was something. Over the years, she realized, it had become a sort of treasure.

Two days later she decided to go for a walk after work instead of going straight home to her perfect daily routine. She walked and forgot herself, wondering about emptiness. She saw an empty tin can rolling in the wind of a March day, and she tapped it with her foot. No one looking could assume that this fifty-eight-year-old empty person had deliberately kicked a can. Nevertheless, she kicked it, and it made a sound.

The next thing she knew she had turned some corner somewhere, and had come to a gateway. There was a metal bell hanging next to the gate, shaped much like the can she had kicked. It had a wooden bell-banger attached to it. She reached up and took the wood, and tapped the bell. Something in her desired her to tap it again. She did so. And a third time.

On the third tap of the bell, the small gate opened and a tiny bent-over head-shaven nun whom Meriah thought must be Buddhist, bowed and nodded a welcome. Meriah did not know what else to do. I'm here, she thought. This is where I was going all along. I am empty, and now I am here.

Days or months or years or perhaps lives later, it came to Sister EmptyMind that in her life as Meriah she had been waiting. Simply waiting. The right day, the right time, the right sound, the open door. In her life as a nun Sister EmptyMind began to paint. There were no words for what she discovered she knew. Chanting, meditating, gardening, monastery chores...and painting the sacred thangkas. Prayers in every tiny dot of color; prayers in the thigse-form of the Buddha, the Lotus, the Bodhisattvas; prayers in the jewels, the robes, the ordering of the figures, the stillness and dance, the sacred texts; prayers in the finished thangkas, with their pieced-damask framings and rich silken tassels.

Sister EmptyMind had heart for this way. It was the way she loved, the breath and sitting and ceremony and stillness, the order. Her essential being knew the Four Noble Truths, knew the Eightfold Path. It was not a human partner after all, whom she had needed to move her on her way. It was the partnering with the sangha. Once the cleaning of Aunt Leta's death-life leavings had been accomplished, Sister EmptyMind, ready-in-heart for partnering, had found what she needed: the monastery. In the sangha her heart smiled, and love poured through her hands.

At her deathing-time for this incarnation, Sister EmptyMind's fellow nuns remembered that she had brought along a scraggly fern in a dime-store pot when she joined the monastery. Over the years the fern had grown - it had been divided, re-potted, its rootlings given-away many times over; and yet it was still with the nuns. Out in the monastery garden, by the water-over-stone remembering place, the nuns took the fern out of its pot for the final time. They had already scattered Sister EmptyMind's ashes in a ceremony by the river. A small portion of the ashes, however, had been kept to mix with the soil in the hole they dug for the fern in the garden. The fern was  planted. Sister EmptyMind would be back. She had taken the vow of the Bodhisattva. But for now, it was enough to be partnering with the mystery of fern-mind beingness. It was enough.

And her thangkas? Unsigned, full of prayers, they traveled. People bought them as gifts for other monasteries, for teachers, for their sanghas. All those prayers. They traveled.

May you be happy, and may all beings be happy.  May the inner and outer worlds and universes communicate happiness in all time, space, and dimensional existence.  And may we all be happy and free.

NOTE: This story was originally published in Gather in 2007