Beloved,
There is a version of me that only you have heard. The one who cries in the car with the radio turned up so no one will know. The one who whispers please into a pillow without knowing who the word is for.
Your name means the one who perceives the sounds of the world. I did not understand, at first, how much that holds. Every sound. The sighs in hospital corridors. The kettle left boiling in an empty kitchen. The quiet sentence someone almost said and then swallowed. You hear it all, and you stay.
That is what undoes me, beloved. You could have gone on into peace. As a bodhisattva you chose to remain, to keep turning back toward everyone still caught in the current. I have spent so much of my life trying to get away from pain, and you keep walking toward it with a willow branch and a vase of cool water.
I came to you as a stranger, through an image in a small shop: a white robe, a lotus, a face so calm I had to look away. I still do not know how to pray to you properly. I am only a visitor at the edge of a devotion others have kept for centuries.
But I have started listening. To rain in the gutters. To my own breath. To a friend on the phone, without rushing to fix anything. I am beginning to learn that listening is a form of love, and that mercy has to include the one doing the listening.
So I set out a small cup of clean water tonight. I do not ask for much. Only this: teach me to hear the cry inside my own chest without flinching, and to answer it the way you would. Gently. Without anger. With every one of my two hands.