Searching for the Green Tara

So having edited many past posts and deleted some others, it's time for me to get back to the basics: literature! Thanks goes out to my friend and fellow blogger Miss Wooly Daisy who recommended I read Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. She shared it after reading of my experience with Sue Monk Kidd's The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.

Longing for Darkness is the story of writer China Galland's search for female connections within the Buddhist discipline. I'm only a third through the book, but Miss Daisy must know my heart as she really directed me toward a significant read. Thanks, gurl! This Galland chick and I have a few things in common: we share similar catholic roots, we are both sober moms, and both of us desire female spiritual guides, deities, and gods.

So last night, with flashlight in hand (and Moira's head on my shoulder), I read of Galland's meeting with the abbot of the Dalai Lama's monastery in McLeod Ganji, India. She was sent to him by the Dalai Lama himself to learn more about Tara, who "according to the legend . . . knew that there were hardly any Buddhas who had been enlightened in the form of a woman. So she was determined to retain her female form and to become enlightened only in this female form."

While it is said that Buddhist practitioners see no difference between men and women, it is also admitted that there is some feeling of discrimination, albeit "superficial," the Dalai Lama states.

What Galland shares with the abbot is a visualization she's experienced. "After sitting for five years, some of my Christian roots began to crop up in my meditation. What has evolved is a kind of mandala in which I visualize Tara, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, and Jesus Christ."

This one paragraph is ripe with coincidences for me, but for this post, the significance that struck me is not in the presence of the Christian figures, but what Tara is doing: "I imagine Tara taking a pitcher of compassion and pouring it over the heads of all the people I love--my family, my friends, everyone, as well as all the people I don't love--that I find difficult or hard."

Tonight, after a long, afternoon meeting with Moira's surgeon, I thought of that visualization. I have no control over others, no control over their actions, their thoughts, their experiences, how they interpret, or what they say. But I do have control over myself and I must allow others the right to live according to their own will. I don't have to like it, but I do have to accept, and that's where the visualization enters: I must imagine my God, the great She, pouring warm, loving compassion over the heads of all the people I love and don't love, and trust in those oft repeated words of Julian of Norwich, "all will be well." Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but "all will be well."