{"id":10838,"date":"2015-09-09T18:17:24","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T22:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/?p=10838"},"modified":"2015-09-09T18:17:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T22:17:24","slug":"pebbles-weeks-and-mortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/2015\/09\/pebbles-weeks-and-mortality.html","title":{"rendered":"pebbles, weeks, and mortality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"via<\/a>
via amazon.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’m reading a book I suspect I will re-read as soon as I finish it, Lewis Richmond’s Aging as a Spiritual Practice<\/a>. Like another book I finish, then lay on my table to re-read for the umpteenth time (Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom<\/a>), each time I re-read a page, it blooms differently. The way my roses are a vivid peach in the cooler fall, and a pale apric0t-flushed white in the heat of August.<\/p>\n

What hit me like a skillet pan epiphany was an anecdote about one of Richmond’s spiritual mentors, who had a bowl of pebbles on a shelf. When asked what the pebbles were, the mentor said,\u00a0My life.\u00a0<\/em>Each pebble represented one week, to the average life expectancy of 80 years. And as each week finished, Richmond’s friend threw away one of the pebbles.<\/p>\n

\"the<\/a>
the author’s<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wow. The utter material simplicity of that gesture, those pebbles in a bowl, shook me like a gale force wind. So I did the math: how many weeks are left for me until I turn 80? And what if I don’t even get that far? What if I only have … 20? Or even 52? Perhaps only the few beautiful rock-weeks I’ve collected in this bowl a friend’s daughter once made for me?<\/p>\n

I immediately ordered the gemstone chips above — hundreds of tiny 1\/6″-3\/4″ gemstones I can cradle in a bowl for my life. \u00a0What’s left of it. I will never know how many actual weeks I have left, but I will see them as they pass, and perhaps it will make me more conscious of how often I let them fall like chaff\u00a0instead of irreplaceable moments I could fill with memories\u00a0<\/em>through my fingers.<\/p>\n

Today, friends are preparing to lose a baby. This is not a week they will want to remember. So I will bear witness to their grief instead, and choose a black heart stone for this week of loss & mourning. It’s not my own shattering heart grief, but I can breathe for them, and place this dark heart of a stone in another bowl for time behind. ‘Horizontal time,’ Richmond calls it: that which we pretend flows past us. Instead of the ‘vertical time’ that is where we always are, breathing. Being. Learning, still, how to live and love.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m reading a book I suspect I will re-read as soon as I finish it, Lewis Richmond’s Aging as a Spiritual Practice. Like another book I finish, then lay on my table to re-read for the umpteenth time (Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom), each time I re-read a page, it blooms differently. The way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":398,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[165,32,576,266],"tags":[1227,11,1181,1187,262,1308,1106,1248,1107],"class_list":["post-10838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-beginnings","category-everyday-living","category-living-in-the-moment","tag-aging","tag-beginners-heart","tag-britton-gildersleeve","tag-buddhism","tag-buddhist-blogs","tag-everyday-living","tag-lewis-richmond","tag-living-in-the-moment","tag-rachel-naomi-remen"],"yoast_head":"\npebbles, weeks, and mortality - Beginner's Heart<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I'm reading a book I suspect I will re-read as soon as I finish it, Lewis Richmond's Aging as a Spiritual Practice. 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