Often now, he comes over. We have lunch. He barely eats a thing. But it’s nice just to be here in my kitchen, my father at the table as he thumbs through the papers of whatever he’s brought. He always brings something to discuss. It’s not just the old teacher in him. The exchange of energy that passes between us via ideas is life to him. To us both.
Today he’s got a slim, hardbound volume from his library, long out of print. An historical study of Peter the Great and his forceful turning of Russia to the West, away from Orthodoxy, the great scourge of enlightenment. My father brings to my attention that Peter, upon founding his new city at St. Petersburg, issued an edict to ban the practice of separating all the women of a household into the Terem.
“What’s it mean?” I ask.
“Terem?” he says.
“Yes.”
“There were rooms at the top of the great houses, an apartment sealed off, dark, with few windows. Where the women were confined. Noble women weren’t allowed to mix with the activities of the main house.”
I think of Rapunzel and say, "Under the guise of protecting them."
“Yes. And Peter said,‘Enough of this. Let the women come down, be in the swirl of life and besides, we need them for this work of great change that's ahead of us!’”
Like the swirl of life I have with my father now, I think. Or those are the words, “swirl of life,” I will put to it later.
I have been seized lately with a want to recognize these precious moments between us. So I stop clearing dishes, sit across from him, and compliment his fearlessness, his choice to keep open to the flow of energy between us. I tell him I think this is what love is. This openness to the energetic flow. Letting it float, not trying to capture and contain and neuter it.
He understands what I’m saying. Here in the swirl. We know this will someday not be; his sitting there across the table, talking of Peter the Great. He’s so light now as to be almost dust. But I refuse to let my heart close in protection against my fear of his leaving.
I’m following his lead in this, of course. Encouraging, allowing new growth in this epilogue between us. Not letting our inevitable loss of one another keep us from this late intensity of friendship and ideas about the great change we are living together, now. Why deny, lock up in a Terem, this chance to feel tender being between us, this mixing of energies that gives new thought, new life? Right up to the end. That would be against all we believe and practice. He and I.