The first time, when I visited Ganden monastery on Mount Drokri,
Through a self-controlled synchronicity,
I went first to your meditation cave
And thought of you guru who could not meet your mother.
The twilights of the solstices and the anguish of thinking of you each morning
Silenced even the songs of the cuckoo flocks amidst the thickets.
Your mother, Shingza Acho,
Might be wondering, “Are you hungry, my son?”
“You must be cold, my son?” “Are you weary, my son?”
Mother Shingza Acho
Surely thinks of you whenever she eats something tasty.
Surely misses you if she glimpses some nice clothing.
Surely thinks of you when she sees others your age.
And surely misses you all the more when she glances at the toys and baby-clothes from your childhood.
Surely she strokes and rubs them.
Surely she hugs them to her chest.
Surely she looks at day after day.
Sensing you right beside her, she surely loves and cherishes them.
Tears for you, welling up, surely flow from her eyes.
Mother Shingza Acho,
Her desire to meet you, is surely binding itself into her bones.
Her desire to meet you, surely points her path of life and death toward you.
Each night passing in tears, surely, she welcomes each morning with a sigh.
In brief,
Within a mother’s entire life-long prayer
There is only room enough for you, her son. Surely.
Surely she has dreams in which she meets you.
Surely she believes it might still be possible to meet you.
Yet as she’s chased by her age, she thinks how she wasn’t able to meet you, her son
Surely her head rests against its pillow.
Surely her hindsight is cast on you
And surely, just like that, Mother Shingza Acho’s life is stitched.
If all mothers under the sky shared the same joys and sorrows
Then I’ve also come, bearing a mother’s anguish, to visit you.
Carry in my hands the suffering of being neither fully alive nor dead,
I offer it to you.
The suffering of a mother missing her son,
I offer to you, in place of mother Shingza Acho.
