What is the perfect gift?

Hello my son. It’s a quiet and grey March afternoon. I am at my desk, at Bliss, writing about your mom, as I’ve been doing most every Saturday or Sunday for the past months. You’re asleep in your bed, as you mostly are on these weekend days and I can tell you (and I believe I can speak for your mom) that despite what popular opinion might be and despite my conditioning (and her conditioning) as kids, there are few things that brought her more joy and bring me more joy than knowing that you are resting your body, your mind and your spirit. From the moment you were born we were both swept away by our common feelings of joy and peace and hapiness to witness you at rest.

But that’s not exactly why I’m writing this.

The reason I’m writing is because this is what occurs with me when I sit to write (really it occurs all the time to me), I get ideas, they come like birds into my mind, flying in, sometimes perching, sometimes dive bombing me, some times flying out as quickly as they came in. When I see a most beautiful “bird” sometimes I try to capture it, which can prove futile and defeat the purpose of the beauty in the first place. But often, beautiful birds come back and I have slowly realized over 40 years of writing that it doesn’t matter to the bird whether I capture it or not. In fact, in ways I can barely grasp, the bird cannot actually BE captured and so all this talk from me is just, well, it’s my own creation, it’s my own limitation, it’s my own delusion…but, again – this is not why I’m writing this.

I am writing because I’ve been thinking about death so much more since your mom died. I could probably write every day for the rest of my life and not understand death or life…and I have to be careful to not allow myself to get so carried away by my birds that I lose the touch of earth under my feet. But when I think of death, I think of you. I think of you because you are the most important being in my life. And I think of your mom, because she was also the most important being in my life, after all she gave me you.

And in thinking about you and mom and death and life…because they’re all wrapped up together, I think about what we leave behind and I think about what’s important to do while we’re alive. There is no doubt that Sally’s death has redefined my life, it’s kind of stupid to say that actually but sometimes it’s ok to say stupid things as you’re wondering around in the world. It’s stupid because it’s obvious. Obviously Sally’s death redefined my life…when I think about it, life is being redefined all the time, this word redefines life, this “word” redefines life…my breath redefines life, your rest, Norah Jones playing in the background, the grey sky and the truck passing our house…life is fluid in time, always changing, always being redefined, every nano second, every nano second…constant re-definition.

And yet – Here I am. There you are.
I, at my desk.
You, in your bed.
Mommy, not here.
A point in time that seems to defy any change. We’re just here, at Bliss on this mid March Saturday. Just here, now, nothing moving.

I promise, Jake, I will get there with the point. I know you probably hate this, if you’re even still reading. One thing your mom always said about you…you’re on FIRE, you wan to move and do and have fun. She said so much more about you and that is what I’m coming around to here.

When I think of our life and our finite time with each other here in this life (and I don’t know that there is another kind of life but I also don’t know if this life is all we have and then it’s nothing – simply I don’t know) I think about what I want in my life. And one of the things I want in my life, is for you to be happy in your life. It’s proably the thing that your mom and I would agree on most, that we want you to have a life that is meaningful and joyful. And so I think…how can I influence that? Is it possible I can influence it? Can I help you at all in that endeavor? Could mom help you? Can anyone help anyone else to have a meaningful, joyful life?

I don’t know.

But I do know that the answer might be, YES. And that’s enough.

So, my son, we finally arrive at the point. What do I want to leave to you, what could I really “give” to you that might help you in this life? What can any person “give” to another person that could “help” them? Sometimes I think money is the answer but then I quickly realize that money isn’t the thing that brings meaning or joy. I know this only for myself and only because of the death of your mom. Material things can be and are wonderful things. Money is the currency of our world, our society and culture and it can allow you to have a certain level of peace, safety, security and fun…don’t get me wrong, it can allow for a lot. But money and material things can never “get” you to a deeper understanding of yourself or of life and it can never touch the mysteries and the infinity of Love.

So as you begin to wake up to the world we live in, to the game that is part of this world (but not all of it) I wish you the best and I will (at least it’s my plan) leave you an amount of “money” that will allow you to contemplate the truer questions, the deeper questions of life. You see, one of the great tragedies of our lives is that there are some people who may die, even as you’re reading this sentence, because they do not have the money to feed themselves or because they do not have the money to provide for themselves adequate shelter or live in a community with enough safety that they do not have to spend their life’s energy only to survive. That is a dire predicament of this human life. And it’s a predicament that you and everyone you know, does not have to face. We do not have to struggle for our survival in a primitive way. We do not have to worry about basic foundations of living, food, shelter, safety and that, my son (as another aside) is the greatest privilege that exists today.

I will also leave you with something I think is more valuable than money and I think your mom would agree. This does not mean you will think it’s valuable, nor does it mean that you should. But as a parent and as you may see one day, you have to make the decisions you think are best, even when you really have no idea.

Your mother and I talked a lot about you and thought a lot about you before you were born. We talked together, we though separately. The idea of you was something that grew, as Sally and I spent more time together. And when we finally decided that we wanted to create you, it happened almost immediately. I remember the night you were conceived. Sally remembered it too…there is no question. We were in Bolton, we had just sold Nectar’s after almost seven years of great stress and activity and I think we were both feeling relief. I took your mother and she let me take her and, as you will hopefully come to feel, we clawed at each other in desperate yearning, sweating, feeling, sliding, pounding, moving, loving, conquering, accepting…and in the moments leading up to my climax I thought of you, I thought of strength and fire and sparks and love and I knew, as I exploded into your mom, that she was having her own thoughts of you. I’ve never had another experience like that and later that Summer when I got off the Ferry from Martha’s Vineyard and she was there, waiting for me with the most pure joy and emanating smile and she told me, showed me, that you were now growing inside of her, I knew.

I tell you all of this because it’s the beginning of a story or at least, near the beginning, of the story of how you impacted our lives and how you continue to impact my life and how through the first 13 years of your life with your mom and I, how our world was made more meaningful than we could have ever imagined. I will not do it justice to put it into words but the reason I am trying is because this is where the gift lies.

And this gift, not only from me, but from us even though she is not here anymore, it’s the product of two people being consumed by their awe and love for another, for you. I don’t think there is anything we could give you that is more real than our own perception of you. A perception forged in complete and utter transformation, destruction and re-emergence. All of our thoughts about how life worked, what was important, what we liked and didn’t like, what we spent time on and why…all of these things were destroyed and then reformed around your creation, the creation of you. And as we reformed around you and around our family, we watched you, we loved you, we ferverently examined ourselves with you as the motivation to be better. We loved (and love) everything about you and this is still the lesson for me and if your mom was here, it would still be the lesson for her; in fact while she was here, she was my teacher and my mentor is loving everything. You see, it’s when you learn to love the things you hate, that you truly understand what love is. But do not be confused, we did not hate you…it’s more the expression of a truth about love. I could write volumes and maybe one day I will but for now the example that best suits is the last year of your mothers life. There was so much that both she and I “hated” about that last year. As you can imagine and know, watching someone go through what your mom went through gives a person plenty to hate, or at least it gave me plenty to hate. But your mom and I, we went though our hate (and our fear) we went through it because the other options were not something we could do. Run away? Run away from sickness? Run away from death? Run away from fear? And what? Leave her? Leave me? Leave you? Leave our family?

We would not do that. And we did not do that. And it’s not because of some super power or some heroism or anything…it’s simply because we, she, me, you, us, were more important than the hate, the fear, the death. And so we found out about love. We found out what happens when you do the thing your afraid of, when you do the thing you hate…you know what happens my son? You find out what love is. You find out how much you love, you find out what love actually is.

This translates back to you and back to your first 13 years in our family. It translates back to the gift that I’m trying to give you…writing, writing, writing…are you going crazy yet my son? I’m sorry. But it translates back, it translates back because we did that with you.

Having a child is hard. Even the most wonderful, beautiful, peaceful – all the good descriptions – still…it’s the hardest thing we ever did, your mom and I (this might be followed by a close second of your mom’s cancer). I remember thinking, shortly after moving to the Farm outside of Albany, NY that I was never going to feel rested, ever again. Your mom and I were now parents of a baby, baby Jake, and that meant our life was so completely different and there really was no hope for it ever to go back to the way it was, a way of feeling rested! But the truth of it is, we didn’t want it to go back to that. We discovered a love we never knew we had as we dealt with the realities of being new parents. Realities like we were never going to feel rested again. What seemed impossible to overcome before becoming parents was now not only possible but transformative to our understanding of how much we loved you and our new family.

I don’t know if you understand that my son, but the point remains that you became our world in a most joyful process that we welcomed, embraced and charged into despite the impossibility of the obstacles we had yet to overcome. We never thought we’d need to do what we did, we never wanted to, until you came along. And once you came along, we poured ourselves into you and into ourselves, our family. Discovering new territory, growing out of old habits and old ways.

All of this said as a build up to the fact that your mom and I, it’s safe to say, know you more intimately than any other person on the earth. There may even be some truth to the concept that we know you better than you know yourself. Maybe “better” isn’t the best word but we know you in a way that is free from your internal dialogue, free from your self-imposed distractions, free from your opinion of yourself.

To explain this a bit more…after all how could it be possible for someone to know another more than they know themselves? Consider this, my father once told me that fighting was not in my character. He didn’t say it in so many words but he made his point at a time in my life were I felt I had to fight everyone and everything. I felt as if I was being attacked again and again and my only response was to fight. I was struggling and his comment to me wasn’t even meant to be “advice” it was simply a father sharing an observation about his son, to his son but the thing that really mattered was that he was right and I had forgotten that peace and love and joy and friendship were all etched in my character. When he said it to me, it immediately hit and helped me to see how far I’d drifted from my foundations and how I’d allowed and invited distractions into my life, including the need to fight, that were keeping me from being more true to myself. I never told him about this but it’s the same point and the same gift I’m attempting with you.

My father knew me in ways that I also knew myself. He knew me in ways that were formed in the purity of the parent child bonds. He knew me before I had an inkling of what “knowing” was. He saw me before I saw myself. He existed with me, observing, loving, before I was conscious that there was a world and a self that could distract me and keep me from myself. When my father shared that tiny piece of wisdom with me it helped me. It opened me up and gave me a path back to myself.

It is my duty as a father and a parent to keep that path lit for you, for whenever you might want it and I commit to doing that for you and in honor and tribute to your mother. But with her death, I come full circle to what happens then if I also die? What would happen to that lit path?

And so, this letter:

Son, I have seen you strive past the point of exhaustion. I have seen your drive for completion, like a hunger, it seems you must make Justice in the world. You must make things equal in your eyes, this is what I’ve seen. You are a deeply feeling human and you have peace in your heart but you will fight for Justice, I have seen it. You have a connection to what you want that is the most powerful I have experienced. Your mother and I talked about this often and it made us very happy to see it. It made us happy because we both believe that human wanting is the foundation for a joyful, meaningful life. It’s easy in the world today to see how folks who do not know what they want, make wanting bad. Wanting is not bad. Nothing of meaning can occur in this world without wanting and your connection to your own wanting is a pure, honest and virtuous one. Perhaps you will run into some adversity in the world as your clarity of wanting runs up against those with a lack of clarity, these folks may want to hold you back or make you bad, they may want you to do away with your wanting because they do not know how to want or maybe they have been taught that wanting is bad and so they want to make any wanting bad. This might be part of your burden to bear, son and only you can bear it. The only thing I can share is related to my own burdens and to what I know of your mother’s own burdens and that is, try not to hate those who hate what is beautiful about you. Try not to hate those who hate you or others. I think it’s probably the hardest thing to do in this world, but it’s also the most rewarding and, in my experience the only path towards the undiscovered territory of the human heart and soul. “Or being hated, do no give into hating” this is a quote from one of my favorite poems of all time, if you choose you can easily find the body.

Also my son, I think you love to know things. It’s not so different than most, but I think your hunger and “wanting” to know may be another burden in another way for you. From the time you were very small, you did not like, not knowing. You went so far as to upset yourself and avoid those instances where knowing was presented to you in the form of teaching. Left to your own devices you found many wonders of the world, you would study and concentrate to the point where you mom and I would be in awe but often that study was in your own time and in your own way and when another made it their goal to “teach” you – look out my son, look out…you did not take to it at all. This is why I question writing this my boy. Because if my perception holds any truth this will be a difficult document to read, one because perhaps you take it as another wanting to teach you and maybe because you are also a person who does not like to wait.

Oh yes my son. You do not like to wait at all. And really, who does and who should? What could be wrong, if you want a thing, to get it immediately. That is a pure as it can get. The only trouble is that is not how the world works, even as we’ve made revolutionary progress in getting the things we want…life itself is waiting, between breathes is waiting, between music notes, for the day to turn to night and for the food in our bodies to turn to nutrition and then to waste…everything is within a process of change and so maybe I introduce another burden, like food or supplies in the backpack of your life, we all carry a pack and we all carry weight. Some of the weight you never want to get rid of, some of it you can put down, if you know how and want to, some of it is unnecessary. To be upset over waiting is to add unnecessary weight to your pack.

And son, although I could go on and on, it’s now been nearly four hours since I started this writing and it’s time to conclude this chapter. Maybe this will be helpful to you. That is my goal. But maybe I will have a chance to experience all of this with you and more, that is my hope. If for some reason I depart from you before I have seen you become a father and a husband or before I have had the opportunity (not the chance) to share this all in a different way, know that you will be ok my son. And know that the pain and loss you feel, it is only so that you understand that part of your humanity. I have come to realize that life is about living with loss, it’s not about being sad or angry or violent of even joyful…it’s about all of it. It’s about allowing everything, all at once and realizing while your here you can not be hurt by those things. Sure, you will feel pain and the deepest sadness, but those things are like the night to the day. And know that if there happens to be anything more to this waking life and to what we see as death, if there is ANYTHING else, your mother is with you and I would be with you too, in whatever form there is, in whatever else there is. Know this son, we have a love that is bigger than this life, we have a love that is bigger than death, your mom’s heart beats within me as does yours and as does hers in you and mine in you. As your mother said, “James Arthur, my heart helped make your heart, I will be with you always”.

We will be with you always. Our most joyful love.

Dad and Mom.