How I Lost My Wedding Ring: Thoughts About Inconceivability, Hope, and Nembutsu
My wife Geri does most of the yard work at our house. I respond to her good nature about this with relief and guilt. Occasionally, to assuage guilt, I engage in short bursts of manic labor, for example by raking up leaves that have blown into locations in our back yard where they are difficult to retrieve.
Some seasons ago I went out to rake a lot of leaves from underneath our low-lying juniper bushes. I filled a lot of leaf bags in short order, threw them in the bed of my truck, and drove them to the county dump. Driving to the dump with trash in a truck is a man’s job: inflating if not elevating. Then I returned home and raked up more leaves: crawling under the scratchy bushes, reducing guilt with every scratch. The bags piled up again, more than two dozen of them. I decided to take a break. Then I felt something odd about my left hand; something was missing. My wedding ring had slipped off my finger! I had lost it during these hours of mindless work.
All the guilt flooded back, plus more, like interest on my earlier deposits. I thought about all the places I could have lost the ring, which included anywhere I had raked, anywhere I had been during the day. I got back down beneath the junipers and searched the ground, but the ring was not to be found there. This seemed like a pretty hopeless situation.
Confession was the beginning of a resolution, so I told Geri that I had lost the ring. Together, we looked around the wider area where I had been raking, without success. If I had lost the ring at the dump, it was gone forever. Then there was the big pile of trash bags stuffed with leaves. Perhaps, as I was scooping up leaves between the lawn rake and my left hand, my ring had gone into a bag with the leaves—unlikely, but maybe. Those bags sat there like a lump of reproach: if I didn’t check them out, I’d never know for sure.
Geri volunteered to go through the bags with me. This would be a big job. It was a lot of work with small chances of reward. Neither of us wanted to start it right away. So the bags sat through a winter season, in a corner of the yard, waiting for us, doing what wet leaves do when crammed together for months.
On a clear warm day, all our excuses exhausted, we put a tarp down on the deck, dumped the first bag of leaves onto it, and pawed through the mound. When we finished searching, we replaced the leaves into the bag and dumped the next bag. We knew without saying it that we had a simple plan: we would search every bag. This turned out to be important.
One of the early bags in line had a surprise for us: an ant colony had developed within the leaves over the winter. As we sifted through the leaves, thousands of ants panicked. They grabbed eggs the queen had laid and ran around frantically clutching the orange eggs between their front legs, trying to save the future from disaster. As I watched this, one of the few Japanese words I know popped into my head: fukashige: Inconceivable Shinran used this word in the second line of the Shoshinge, describing Amida’s inconceivable light. But here is the other side of inconceivability, when complete disaster strikes, beyond expectation or cure—from the ant’s viewpoint. My stirring of leaves to solve a problem of my own had ended the world as they knew it: inconceivably! Humbling it is to consider that the world could act on me as I had acted on the ants, without intent to harm, but to destroy my world nonetheless. This is “collateral damage” indeed. But then the bright side of inconceivability arises, as the sun rises, its benefits accruing with no intent from a distant actor, just the way things are, beyond my comprehension.
I had these fancy thoughts, but still no wedding ring and a lot of bags left to empty. So we swept the ants back into their bag and dumped the next bag of leaves onto the tarp. No ring. Next bag: dump, sift, and re-bag. And so on, bag after bag after bag. No ring.
I recognized that my feelings were all over the map as I dumped and sifted. Was I hopeful about finding the ring? The fact was that sometimes I was (particularly as we opened each new bag and spread it out), and sometimes I wasn’t (particularly when we re-bagged the leaves and tossed the bag on the growing pile of bags that had disappointed us). After a while I recognized that how I felt about this task didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had a plan and were sticking to it.
In the midst of unpleasantness, my feelings vary widely and quickly. That’s my nervous system at work: electrochemical fluctuations in a bag of flesh located in a speck of the universe. I fall into a trap if I monitor those feelings too closely and worry when I find no optimism, no hope there. What matters is to have a sensible plan and stick with it. Feelings of hope go where they will. Endurance follows the plan. Calm arises from recognizing the capacity to endure irrespective of feeling’s fluctuations. Beyond hope is a good place to be.
As the number of remaining bags dwindled, I made a promise to myself: if I find that ring I won’t wear it on my finger but on a chain around my neck, beside the small wisteria crest I have worn for years. Same promise for a new ring, if that was necessary.
Extending the plan was comforting.
At last, the last bag. Open it up, turn the leaves onto the tarp…plunk!! The ring…in the last bag!! Spontaneously, out of my mouth: Namo Amida Butsu!! Namo Amida Butsu!!
But not so fast—what was that nembutsu that emerged just then? What was spontaneous about it? Was I thanking someone for the ring being in the last bag? In particular, was I thanking Amida Buddha who had kindly arranged for the ring to be there, like Santa Claus or parents who hide Easter eggs for their children to find? Or did I have a shred of an idea that I had deserved to find the ring? Any of this is magical thinking, not things as they are, not Jodo Shinshu Buddhism.
Whether the ring was in the bag or not, the world is as it is, was as it was at that moment. “Inconceivable” means just that: my efforts to conceptualize the working of the world, in respect to my intentions and hopes, are puny. This time, I caught a break and found my ring: Namo Amida Butsu. Next time, I may not catch a break: Namo Amida Butsu. It is the same nembutsu. The world is not about me. My task is to turn toward the world and everything in it, remaining open to whatever is there. I can plan, I can endure, and I should. Outcomes are what they are. In the meantime, my ring rests next to the wisteria crest on the chain around my neck. Namo Amida Butsu.
