Hiding out behind everyday things, obscured but near at hand, grief is a strange beast. It wont be pinned down. It cant be put somewhere and told to be quiet.
It hides out behind everyday things and in a sudden flash its all over you, turning awareness into a deepening vortex, and awareness wont be pinned down either. Out of nowhere from every direction, sadness is all over you, disabling everything.
This feeling that the word feeling cannot come near to containing, draws perception into a world thick with suspended matter. Everyday things morph their meaning or come apart. Edges disappear. Corners vanish. While surroundings dematerialize, the self loses sight of its own boundary. Is that me over there?
Movements that normally define familiar habits of experience stop moving. They cant or they wont. Theres hardly any breath. Eyes wide open cannot see. References, destinations, and safe places have evaporated.
If escape is possible it will be slow and gentle, toward an inner sanctuary. Right where the machine told us not to go, into the self that has survived a childhood fraught with danger, needles, and improper care. Is there someone who knows how to navigate these tides of grief?
Trying to get away too quickly will queer the deal. Its imperative to step with presence moment by moment against the rising tide. Theres no getting there with hatred shadowing the heart. The backwash will wash you away.
A group of women sit in a round room around a round drum. The drum is big as a bed, soft as a good mother, and reverberates with the rhythm of a heart beat. The movement of a stick padded with leather gently meets the skin of the drum. Again. Again. Again. We go round the circle answering. Who will say is the greatest miracle of their life?
I survived. I survived. I survived. Again. A gain. Ag ain. Aga in. Aga in. Aga in. Agai-n. Again.
Voices and drumbeat mix to intone sounds of the bodys life living in spite of lifes losses. Earth my body, water my blood. Volition entrained to the rhythm of the heart and everyones heart in the circle. We unite in a universal language, undifferentiated wholeness. Air, my breath. Fire, my spirit.
Following my brother passing, the shock and pain was strangely pacified when someone shared a text he had sent in response to hearing of a friends passing. He wrote this,
When someone we know passes on, it is a reminder of the temporal nature of our being and hopefully inspires us to cherish life and not fear death. My philosophy is that the only purpose to life is being alive. Just ask any one of your cells. Let your being revel in being alive. The rest is just details. Hope to see you in the spring when I pass through. And know you are welcome to visit any time.
Hearing his voice in that message soothed my insides. Some of the feelings hanging out behind the everyday popped off. Now I am left with his stark philosophy, the way it so simply answers everything.
How I survived. Again and again. Each time making way past the obstructions. Out there, past the holdups, awareness expands into acceptance. Acceptance of certain cosmic forces that shape me, and you, regardless of our plans for ourselves. In the beginning it seems obsequious to co-operate with those forces. Then as understanding deepens, surrendering to those flows becomes inevitable. No longer being an obstruction to life, realizing what is actually at work here. Life is at work. Whatever personality, purpose, or property we claim as our own, eventually it becomes clear every vehicle in our care is meant for lifes expression, lifes exuberance.
My brother was a warrior. He loved being in his body, and fighting on green pitches wherever he found them. It was his unmitigated revelling in this life, being in a body. Like he said, just ask your cells. Corporeal existence for him was where it was at. So I believe the native elders when they tell me, he died a warriors death. He died in battle, saved from experiencing the ruination of his body in old age or worse.
Listening for the mother drum. She beats for his passing, his cells surrendered, his spirit free to embody what the cosmos has in store for him next.
Listening to the heart beat of many hearts synchronized. In the round room, and in the daylight dimming, I imagine his fearlessness. I envision an intimacy between that measure of freedom and human survival. Fearlessness looms large as a prerequisite for freedom and survival to move in unison. Moving together intimately. For now, freedom and survival are at odds in our current culture. Fear is fed through countless channels, the tools of coercion and oppression. Reaching a critical mass, fear serves the wide path to destruction.
William Blake was stubborn in his assertion that duality is essential to human evolution. The tension between two ends of a single pole is an essential dynamic in any human development. The tension begins a conversation with two viewpoints at odds and the impulsion to meet at a place out past the duality. That becomes harder in an environment that disallows debate, or the inspiration to rise above name calling in order to argue the actual issues at hand. Unity of a faithful few at odds with the other side. Facing off with The Enemy becomes violent. That viewpoint works from either side of the divide. From either direction, faith leads to violence.
Lets imagine the freedom to be, just as I am, in opposition to the requirements of survival. What matters most in that relationship? It really cant be said either or. There must be a balance that is acquired through trial and error. By exploring the intimacy of being true to the self in the midst of material necessity, spirit and matter intermingle.
I like Blakes politics. He has written that politics are expressed in our choices, not our votes, but in everyday choices that are enacted in day to day life. The way we treat other people, the countless daily decisions we make, what and how we consume things or ideas. We are free in these choices. Blake affirms that transcendent moments occur daily, that we have the power to turn our world into heaven. So why not?
The mind argues with paradise and refuses to enter.
There are cosmic forces at play, eclipses and solar flares, and wild animals are running to higher ground. How shall we survive and stay free in these times? Someone asked Ramanamaharshi, how are we meant to be with others? He said, there are no others.
Others can scare the shit out of me. My heart can race and break upon receiving hate mail or personal attacks on a misunderstanding of my way of seeing the world. Rumis field out beyond right and wrongdoing has disappeared into an inaccessible dimension. I fear meeting others who are faithful to a cause, an ideal, a movement, or a cult, who cannot see there are different humans existing outside their world view. This fear undermines my freedom. It threatens my survival.
The drum lies still and the silence around us is thick with suspended matter. Everyday things have morphed in meaning or come apart. Edges disappear. Corners vanish. While surroundings dematerialize, the self loses sight of its own boundary.
Is that me over there?
or You?
Most definitely, Us.
I love this:
“…the only purpose to life is being alive. “
So simple.
💚🌱✨