Wind

As a new father, I fail at most things. The bath water is never quite right, her cries elude me, and sometimes I simply forget to change her diaper. Not because I’m trying to prep lunch or take out the dogs, but because there appears to be a dense “man-fog” shrouding my ability to read the basic needs of another human. What can I say? I thought I’d be better at this.  

My failures usually result in shared glances of disappointment. Through one poignant glare she conveys, “You don’t really know what you’re doing do you?” I shrug my eyebrows, hoping to say, “Apparently not. But I really do love you.” 

My luck recently changed, though, when another amateur father told me about an app that would help me put her to sleep. Holding her in my arms she jolts back awake as soon as she notices herself slipping. She then throws her face into my chest searching for a boob. In horror, she looks up at me in realization that I am the boobless dunst who knows nothing of caretaking.

As she continues fighting off sleep, I wonder what it’s like for her to watch her consciousness, her only real foothold in this world, fade into a place unknown. No wonder she spasms back to life after stepping to the edge of non-being to say decisively, “No thank you.” 

But apparently there was an app that could help guide her into the deep, dark unknown. A digital version of Virgil accompanying Dantes into the underworld. 

“The app is called womb sounds,” my friend told me, drunk with glee. “Dude, you have to try it. It’s a game changer,” he says emphatically before sipping a beer.

‘What does a womb sound like,’ I wondered. Everytime I rested my head on my wife’s abdomen I heard a cacophony of gurgling orifices spewing and churning. Is that the sound that accompanied my daughter’s ascent into being? A factory of bowel noises? Knowing my wife, it was probably pretty loud in there, as she has a unique affinity for Mexican food. 

I downloaded the app and pressed play as I anxiously swayed her in my arms. ‘Huh, that’s strange. It sounds like the wind,’ I thought. I closed my eyes and imagined us at the edge of the ocean, the breeze and waves singing us into stillness. I opened my eyes and to my delight she was asleep. 

I find it too coincidental that the womb sounds like the wind, for in my experience of birth and death, the ground from which we come is very much an effortless energy that soars over and through all things alive and still. I would later learn that the white noise of the uterus is actually the steady whooshing of blood being pushed through a nest of arteries. Cells and plasma, iron and hemoglobin, racing to grow life. 

As a boy my family boated on the Chesapeake Bay, a large, choppy body of water sprawling throughout Maryland. My father, escaping the drudgery of corporate middle management, would round us up every weekend and dart from cove to cove in a 30 foot bayliner fondly named “The Wet Dream II.” The name was lost on me as a child. 

I would like to think that my father felt truly free, truly alive, as we soared above those waves. And soared we did. I spent most of our trips clutched to my mother’s legs, hoping to survive that tidal wave my brother so diligently warned me was coming.  Every so often, though, my father would set down his beer, unclutch my hands and place me neatly in his lap. 

My father was a large man at six feet two inches. He had an earthy silence to him that felt at times imposing, but when offered to me, could feel like home. As a young boy, getting to sit on his lap and drive The Wet Dream may have been the greatest honor ever bestowed upon me. Wide eyed and smiling, I remember us gliding through the waves, the speed and expanse so immense, I was forced to let go, to let go into the excitement, the fear, the warm, stable grasp of my father’s hands as we cut through the ocean wind. 

“As a mental health professional and student of Buddhism, I do know this: much of the felt sense of self is an illusion that inevitably breaks. Maybe a traumatic event fractures the narrative of self. Or your ego slowly unravels as you approach death.”

The Buddhist teachings say that the ground of our being is seriously light. I remember hearing this teaching right after my father died. I was two weeks into a meditation retreat in the Colorado wilderness when my teacher, an elderly British woman, explained the concept to me. 

“As we grow into adulthood, we lose that soft, buoyant quality of our hearts,” she said, sipping her tea and staring out the window. “Hell, I would go so far as to say that we lose our hearts entirely. We have this pesky tendency to move into a cerebral interpretation of the world. We solidify things, making them more concrete and seemingly permanent. We do it with everything - people, places, ourselves even. And in this sort of…” she paused to let the word come to her. “Calcification of our souls - we disconnect from the dark, mysterious sea of life, forgetting that we are the sea itself.” Turning to me, she continued, “It’s all rather tragic, I suppose.”

My father. Dad. A permanent pillar in my life. His grounded presence, always patient, always gentle, was a planet around which the core of me came together. The fact that he had died somehow violated the laws of physics. Unsurprisingly, on that retreat I melted into a dangerous existential reckoning of the soul, from which it took years to emerge.

Was my father just a wave ascending from that unknowable space only to crash back into it? Was he ever even real? Just a collection of interdependent pieces that my mind gathered and solidified. His quiet, spacious demeanor, how he held me with his soft eyes. How could that person, through which I came to know myself, have been impermanent? Just a shadow darting across the wall. How could that heart, with more soul and feeling than most, have been an illusion? 

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I can only say that some distant part of me feels that he in fact does have a soul, that a core piece of his unlikeliness passes through the doorways.

As a mental health professional and student of Buddhism, I do know this: much of the felt sense of self is an illusion that inevitably breaks. Maybe a traumatic event fractures the narrative of self. Or your ego slowly unravels as you approach death. Maybe you dare to let go of all your hopes and fears, your conceptual frameworks, and sit broken with nothing to do or land on. However it may come to be, there is a vast space within us waiting to consume our smallness, waiting to breath up through our hearts and rewild us, to show us what it means to live fully and soulfully.

I have come to know this space as electric, as quick and light as wind, and wrought with a love that endures this world and the next. The Buddhist teachings call it the heart of emptiness, but I hesitate to expand further, as words only stifle this living breathing force. 

I can only hope that my daughter coalesced within that force and that my father returned to it when he died. It would be nice if some shred of identity slips through the threshold, but ultimately who really knows. And after a lot of living, I suppose I don’t really care that much either.

I no longer use the app when putting my daughter down. I purse my lips and let go into the wind like whooshing of my exhale. “Sshhhhhhhhh.” I am with my father gliding across the water, my being so light I can hardly tolerate it. I am with my daughter as her glistening eyes look up at me to ask, “You promise it’s ok to let go?” With the whole of me at peace, I tell her “Yes.”

Eventually both of us have our eyes closed. Her small body now heavy in my arms and her chest pumping sleep-breaths. And for a moment, I am grateful to belong, if only briefly, if only lightly, to this shifting, wide world.