“Do you know where a church is,” she asked, as I stepped off the escalator.
In the dim aisle of the drug store, she explained her mother had died the night before, and she wanted to light a candle for her.
“I just talked to her,” she wept, “two hours before she died. And, it’s so far, it’s so far, and I can’t get there. I just want to light a candle for her.”
The church she knew, kitty corner, was closed, and she, now, repeated, over and over, “I don’t know where to go.”
“I don’t even know how I got here,” she said, again and again, a murmuring that became, in recitation, almost a mantra for her disorientation.
“You got here,” I said, after I’d listened tenderly for an hour, “because you got out of bed, and you put one foot in front of the other, and you followed an impulse to do something beautiful, to honour your mother, to light a candle for her. This is how you got here. And, this is how you can go on. Get out of bed. Put one foot in front of the other. Follow the impulse to do something beautiful. You could do that every day for the rest of your life. That would honour your mother, too.”
The Sri Lankan woman in a Toronto drug store who wanted to light a candle for her mother reminded me what in life is luminous. (Namaste.)
“Sarah,” she said, holding both my hands in the downpour, “you do not know the dark thoughts I had before I found you, when the church was closed. You do not know. You do not know how much you helped me today.”
She did not know the sadness I woke with, grieving the end of a cherished relationship, or that I wondered, myself, how I’d persist after what felt, to me, to be a deep loss.
I am not a teacher of yoga. Nor is she I walked with in the rain that summer Sunday, seeking for church where she might light a candle for her mother. But, we taught one another what it is to practice, to seek union and live in light: get out of bed; put one foot in front of the other; follow the impulse to do something beautiful — be kind to one another.