Wax Warm Snow

To move through it.

To make offerings of one candle, wax like a spiral on a base of a cup you once worked on the wheel,

Tara pendant rested at the base eased into it on your cremation day

as if to say we all go back into it.

I asked that I may find you in the next life.

I harden where I have to let go.

Then let go.

When I was a little girl I played poker with my older sister at Horsehead Lake on the cove during the Dharma weekend. I was loosing badly. Eighteen dollars is a lot of money to an eleven-year old and we had this thing going, my sister and I, where she walked in, played the game knowing full well she’d outsmart me and so the Achilles heel goes.

“Give me back my money you mother fuckers!” I ran screaming from the cabin down the short steep tumult to mucky shore. Searing angry, steamed with shame. Mortified. And I felt this hand on my back so gently, words in Tibetan, I looked up to see Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche meeting my rage with tenderness. The man who everyone was there to see, to learn from, the very person I thought I was to feel the most ashamed of myself because of , was offering me this kindness.

That was teaching.

I never forgot that moment.