TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Several years ago, my marriage ended, and with it the life I expected to have. I had no idea what the rest of my life would look like. I was freaked out, to put it mildly, and I turned to anything I thought might help calm me down and give me greater perspective. I tried meditation, I tried yoga, I tried exercise, I tried the advice of books.

I suppose I could have been reading about divorce, but instead I read Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, which a poet friend sent to me, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It makes sense, really. There’s so much in eastern philosophy about being present, embracing impermanence, and having self-compassion. Books written from a Buddhist perspective were the ones that brought me the most peace.

That said, I wasn’t great at meditation. My mind is loud, and often working overtime, and I tend toward rumination and worrying. The reason it’s challenging for me is probably the reason I should be doing it.

Meditation on death awareness, called maranasati, is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. It may seem morbid to make a practice from contemplating your own death while you’re still alive, but the idea of your death is probably affecting the way you live.

The idea behind maranasati is that by facing our own inevitable death, we acknowledge the impermanent nature of everything, and we deepen our understanding of what it means to be alive. Maybe we feel more grateful for — in Mary Oliver’s words — our “one wild and precious life.”

Maybe thinking about death can be uplifting instead of depressing, encouraging us to live fully in the present, with less fear.

Today’s poem takes us on the speaker’s journey through maranasati. By moving through the unimaginable, the poet finds beauty in the unexpected.

Stadium
by Heather Tone

I did a meditation on death. I was supposed to think 
of my own death, but I thought of yours instead. 
I did the meditation, and then I was thinking of you 
floating like a red shirt, blank sky. I was 
supposed to be imagining the decay of my 
own body, organs crumbling like burnt 
toast, me dissolving. I saw a gull lift and followed 
the flapping until waves ate the body, or sun did. 
I could almost imagine myself going quietly dark 
as an eight ball, but your dying just meant 
sudden emptiness on the couch, my ear against 
the phone, emptiness walking the floor. I 
always thought I'd be near to say some final 
sentence. Our blue canoe beached somewhere 
along the Ruby. We grew the seedlings they gave us 
at school into real trees.  How much because of you 
my life has been driven by love. I saw you 
driving away, then imagined the unreal second before, 
where I reached for your keys, threw them 
into a lake, waited for the ripples to be gone. Zero, zero, 
zero  in the dark in the water. Zero messiah. I draw 
my mind back, as one is supposed to: tiny fires grow 
brighter in my body until it turns to stadium light.

"Stadium" by Heather Tone. Used by permission of the poet.