Everyday Bardo

Waiting for What Wants to Bloom

Photo by Dr.Sourabh Panari on Unsplash

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Some seasons don’t ask us to grow. They ask us to wait. Not the anxious kind of waiting that watches the clock, but the quiet kind that trusts something unseen is taking root.

There is a strange kind of stillness that comes after something ends.

Not the stillness of peace. The stillness of waiting.

Like whatever comes next is already there, hidden inside the darkness, waiting to bloom.

What happens to the mind in that space is fascinating. Sometimes it races ahead, eager to invent a new future before the old one has even disappeared. Sometimes it circles in fear, convinced the emptiness means something has gone terribly wrong. Sometimes it simply floats, suspended between what was and what will be.

I’ve come to think of this space as a kind of everyday bardo.

We usually associate the bardo with death, but there are smaller deaths that arrive throughout a lifetime. The end of a marriage. The loss of a job. The moment an identity we’ve carried for years quietly falls apart.

Something dies before something else can be born.

Vajrayana Buddhism speaks of the “three bringings”: bringing death into the path of the truth body, the intermediate state into the path of the enjoyment body, and rebirth into the path of the emanation body.

Those teachings became unexpectedly practical for me.

My divorce was one death.

Losing my job was another.

Neither was something I wanted, but together they dissolved much of who I believed myself to be. The identities I’d spent years building no longer held. For a while I didn’t know who I was without them.

The bardo isn’t always comfortable.

It’s spacious, but it can also feel empty. The mind desperately wants to become someone again. It reaches for certainty. It searches for the next chapter before fully letting go of the last one.

That’s where I’ve been living.

For a while I thought I’d done the work. I’d grieved. I’d reflected. I’d practiced. But recently I’ve realized there are still roots beneath the surface.

Identities are like trees.

Over years they sink deep into the soil. They grow trunks and branches and eventually produce fruit. We look at that fruit and think, “Now I get to enjoy everything I’ve worked for.”

But the fruit can only be as healthy as the roots beneath it.

If the roots have been fed by fear, anger, comparison, or the constant need to prove ourselves, eventually that nourishment shows up in the fruit. Picking it off doesn’t change the tree.

The roots remain.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether I ever dug deeply enough.

For a few weeks that realization turned into another reason to criticize myself. I thought I should have been farther along by now. I should have reached the bottom already.

But perhaps that’s just another identity talking. The one that believes growth should be efficient.

After a few honest conversations and more than a few deep breaths, I’ve found myself returning to a simpler thought.

I can begin again.

Not because I’ve failed, but because beginning again is the practice.

Maybe that’s what I’ve always loved about those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. No matter where the story led, there was always another page to turn, another decision to make. You weren’t trapped by the chapter you had just read.

Life isn’t quite that simple.

We can’t erase what happened. We can’t skip the difficult pages.

But we can meet this moment differently than we met the last one.

For now, that’s enough.

The roots are deep. The garden will take time.

And maybe that’s exactly what this season is asking of me. Not to become someone new as quickly as possible, but to stay here, in the quiet space between endings and beginnings, long enough for something healthier to take root.

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