She is my grandmother.
She is my mother’s mother.
These are pictures of a birthday party where the whole family gathered,along with my grandmother, who visited with us for the last time. My grandmother had 5 children, 10 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren. She passed away a few years ago leaving them behind in the world.
She was famous for giving everything to others. My mom said she always cooked a lot and gave the food mostly to others. Even when my grandfather brought his second wife home, she greeted that young lady warmly as a member of her family. Many people asked her how she could do it, then my grandmother answered, “If there is a person who also cares for someone I love, then how couldn’t I be grateful for her?”
Thanks to her living without attachments and greed, my grandmother wrote poems every day, memorized TV programs she watched and was even physically fit until she passed away at the old age of 88. Her eighty-eight-year life was, in some way, the life of an ordinary mother. I now feel how great it is to actually live as that ‘ordinary mother,’ upon seeing the seeds she embraced and sowed in the world.
Creation. Every life of the world is carried in the body of the mother and created. One of those lives, myself, lives happily at this moment. I know I can now live happily because of her good deeds.
The great love of mother is an enormous mind that not only loves her own children but also embraces others and the world. Every one of us received such love and so lives sharing the love with the world in the same way our mothers did.
When my grandmother passed away, I didn’t weep over it. I was not even sad because I knew that she would stay in the world as it is. Although her physical body is gone, the love she has borne stays in the world as it is. So seeing from the perspective of the world, she also exists as it is. The physical transformation occurred but I believe that there is actually no life and death in the world and that the love exists forever.
I felt grateful upon seeing her skinny feet, which I always massaged, within the tiny feet of her great grandchildren.
Our mothers always stay at the center of creating everything in the world, even at this moment.
Thank you, mother and everything that has come out from the mother’s body.
