Life had hardened me. Years of ridicule, injustice, and poverty had taught me to stay silent — to absorb mistreatment without reacting. The pain lodged somewhere deep and I stopped feeling much at all.
During past Vu Lan festivals — the Buddhist celebration of filial love — I received a red rose, a symbol of gratitude toward living parents. Some years a faded rose, some years a white one for grief, until finally the deep red returned.
Then one year I heard a teacher speak: your body is made from your parents’ very essence. Something cracked open. I felt shame. All those years surrounded by songs and teachings about parental love — and I had absorbed the love songs instead, the ones about romance. Why?
This Vu Lan season I sit with that question. Gratitude is not a ceremony. It is a reckoning.