Hello dear ones and welcome to today's story,
The Keeper of Sorrows.
A story of compassion and the courage to remain open to suffering.
So just settling yourself into the space now.
As we get ready to go on a journey together.
Maybe stretching out your body a little.
Lengthening your inhales and exhales.
And when you are ready,
We will begin.
On the outskirts of a large city,
In the days before the city had grown enough to consume all the countryside around it,
There was a garden tended by a man named Miroslav.
The garden was famous in the region for the quality and abundance of its flowers.
People came from far away to see it.
They said it was the finest garden in the province.
And they were probably right.
Miroslav had built the garden over 40 years,
Starting with a patch of stony ground behind a modest house,
And expanding it by degrees,
Adding beds,
And a path,
And a small pond,
And a rose arbor,
And eventually,
In the last decade,
A high wall that enclosed the entire garden.
Garden,
So that entry was only possible through a single iron gate that he kept locked.
You He had locked the gate after a particular event,
Which people in the city referred to only obliquely.
The way you refer to things that carry too much weight for direct speech.
His daughter had died.
She had been 22 and she had died in the way that people die when they are 22 and the century has produced particular poisons for the young.
Quickly and wastefully.
And the manner of her death had been,
For Miroslav,
Unbearable in its fullness.
He had borne it anyway.
Because you do.
Because the body insists on continuing.
And the days keep arriving whether or not you have any use for them.
But he had borne it by making himself smaller on the inside.
By reducing the surface area of his exposure to the world.
By locking the gate.
He still tended the garden.
The work of tending was something he could do without having to feel too much.
He knew where everything was.
He knew what needed water and what needed pruning and what was seasonal and what was evergreen.
The garden asked nothing of him that he could not give while remaining tightly controlled inside.
People pressed their faces to the iron bars of the gate and looked at the flowers.
And sometimes they left notes asking to be let in,
But he never opened the gate.
One morning in late spring,
Miroslav found a boy sitting outside the gate.
The boy was perhaps 10 years old.
Thin in the way that children are thin when they have not been eating enough.
And he was sitting with his back against the iron gate,
With his knees drawn up,
And his face pressed into them.
He was not crying.
He seemed to have gone past the point of crying into a territory further along.
Where the body simply exhausts the mechanism of grief.
And sits in dry stillness.
Miroslav stood on his side of the gate and looked at the boy.
What is wrong with you?
" he said,
Meaning it as a practical inquiry,
Not unkindly.
The boy looked up.
His eyes were the kind of red that comes from hours of crying.
My dog died,
He said.
Miroslav said nothing.
There was a long silence in which the garden breathed around him.
The sound of bees in the lavender.
The soft creak of the rose arbor in the morning wind.
My daughter died,
Miroslav said finally,
Without having planned to say it.
The boy looked at him.
When?
8 years ago.
Does it still hurt?
Miroslav looked at the boy for a moment.
Yes,
He said.
Though differently than it did at first.
Like a scar rather than a wound.
It is always there.
But most of the time,
You are not touching it.
The boy nodded as if this made sense to him.
Miroslav opened the gate.
He did not understand at first what had made him open it.
The impulse had moved through him faster than thought.
The key in his hand before he had decided anything.
He walked the boy through the garden,
Showing him the roses and the herbs,
And the corner where a fig tree grew against the south wall,
Warm and faintly sweet-smelling in the morning light.
The boy walked alongside him quietly.
His hands in his pockets.
Still somewhere deep inside his grief.
But slowly,
Visibly returning to the surface.
At the pond they sat on the wooden bench and watched the light on the water.
He used to come and sit on my feet,
The boy said,
In the mornings to keep warm.
Miroslav thought of his daughter,
The particular way she had laughed.
A sound that began quietly and then gathered until it was a kind of music.
The fact that she had always mispronounced a certain word and he had never corrected her because he loved the mispronunciation.
The way the absence of someone specific is more terrible and more particular than the idea of loss.
You don't miss loss.
You miss the sound of a specific laugh.
And the warmth of a specific small dog on your feet.
The things that are most themselves,
" Miroslav said slowly.
Are always the things that hurt most to lose.
Because they were irreplaceable from the beginning.
The boy wiped his face with his sleeve.
Someone said I should get another dog.
Someone always says that,
No slow sound.
It seems wrong to me.
It is not wrong to eventually have another dog.
But it is right to let yourself know first that this one was itself and not replaceable.
That the sorrow is appropriate.
That the size of the grief is the size of the love.
After the boy left,
Miroslav sat in the garden for a long time.
Something had moved in him that had not moved in eight years.
Not the grief.
The grief had moved regularly.
In its scar tissue way.
In the night or when he caught the edge of a memory.
What had moved was something adjacent to the grief,
But not identical with it.
A quality of contact.
The feeling of having actually been with another person in their sorrow.
As a genuine presence.
He had protected himself from this,
He realised.
The garden wall was not built to protect the garden.
It was built to protect him from the unbearable openness of the world,
Which was always presenting its losses,
Always offering its griefs.
Always asking him to be touched by what he could not fix.
The problem with building walls,
He understood now.
Was not only that they kept people out,
It was that they kept something in.
Some essential quality of aliveness that required contact to function.
He had believed that diminishing his exposure to suffering would reduce his suffering.
But the grief had not diminished,
It had simply calcified.
Become rigid and structural.
A wall made of old paint.
In the weeks that followed,
He began leaving the gate unlocked during the days.
Equal came in.
This was at first uncomfortable.
They admired the wrong things,
Or they did not appreciate correctly.
Or they brought noise into what had been silence.
Some brought their children,
And the children ran,
And he had to resist the urge to call after them.
Some came with a sadness of their own.
Because it turned out that beautiful enclosed gardens attract people who are carrying things.
And occasionally they would stop and sit by the pond and something would come out of them.
A confidence,
A tear.
A piece of a story they had not told anyone.
And Miroslav found.
To his considerable surprise.
That he did not shatter.
That's staying present with other people's grief.
Was not the same as being overwhelmed by it.
That there was a way to be fully present.
To let what was sad be genuinely sad.
To let what was difficult land in you without being swept away.
The capacity to do this was not something he had been born with.
It was something that grew the more he practiced it.
Like a mussel or like the garden.
It required attention and tending.
And the willingness to let things grow that you had not planned.
The boy came back the following spring,
Not because his dog had been replaced,
But because he had found that the garden was a place he liked to come and sit.
He brought sometimes a friend.
And the friend brought sometimes a parent.
The garden acquired a different kind of fame from its old fame.
Not the fame of exclusivity and perfection.
But the fame of welcome.
Miroslav was not a changed man in any dramatic sense.
He was still someone who found the world too much on certain days.
He still had the instinct to retreat,
To reduce the surface area.
To protect the interior.
But he had learned something about the nature of that instinct.
Which was that it was based on a misunderstanding.
The misunderstanding that openness to suffering leads to suffering.
In fact,
The opposite is closer to true.
Closing to suffering leads to a kind of inner deadness that is its own suffering.
Openness leads to genuine contact.
And genuine contact,
Even with grief.
Even with the world's endless catalogue of loss.
Leads to something.
That is not happiness exactly.
But deeper.
The sense of being alive in the fullness of what being alive contains.
He came to think of compassion not as an emotion,
But as a practice.
Not something you felt when the right stimulus arrived.
But something you cultivated day by day.
By choosing to stay present with what was difficult rather than turning away.
By resisting the reflex to protect.
By trusting against the long habit of the defended self.
That you.
Were large enough to hold what needed holding.
His daughter had known this.
He thought of it now as one of the most characteristic things about her.
She had been incapable of passing a crying person on the street without stopping.
It had sometimes made them late for things.
And he had occasionally been impatient with it.
Now he understood that she had been teaching him something.
Without knowing it.
In all those small acts of stopping.
Miroslav tended the garden until he was very,
Very old.
And he never locked the gate again.
