True Hearts Bind Close

What is death?

If we cannot penetrate the reigning myths about death, loss and identity with living insight, we are prone misconstrue crucial aspects of our relationships and potential. We will frame them as tragedy, loss, and injustice. Seeking relief from pain, or influenced by truisms and figures of language that encourage or ‘help’ us to do precisely this, we may be deprived of the important natures implicit in these painful experiences.

Ironically, this quickly becomes immunity to life, intelligence, opportunity, relation and humanity. Which means that death is a way of seeing, more than it is an outcome. And as a way of seeing, it is always followed by resurrection. In the sense of rebirth. Usually, in new dimensions we are ill-equipped to notice or attend in the moments that matter. Or, even, everafter.

So what I really want to say is that when we can ‘see with and into death’ we will discover there is a domain, a way… of being, that is more alive than our ideas of life. Such a statement is challenged by direct experience. The experience of the death of one with whom our soul and mind, heart and perhaps body… is bonded, merged and joined.

And this is the door we must enter with grace, intelligence, awareness, understanding… and far more curiosity than we might ‘ordinarily’ suppose to be ‘appropriate’. In fact, this curiosity?

Is authentic.

Let’s follow it.

There is a strange taboo against the experience of loss, or even departure. Particularly, it seems, against death. And there is a bizarre tradition of falsifying the entire array of situations, relationships, changes and potentials.

And so I wonder if we have not misunderstood some of the most fundamental aspects of our humanity, intelligence… and sensitivity. I am inclined to wonder many strange things. For example, would those who desire immortality, ostensibly the permanent avoidance of personal death, also desire protection from birth? And, by extension, from existence?

Could it be that some of our obsessive aversion to death and departures has something to do with our misapprehending the fundamental nature of experience and consciousness? For which phenomenon is permanent, even in and as our mind, in a way that is not the mere shadow of our persisting in the demand that it must be?

We are confused by fear and tradition, and this becomes deprivation because we are not allowed to establish an intelligent relationship with life or death in our present ‘modern’ situations. This is not to say that death and departure, loss and injury are without pain or are to be invited. Rather, they are crucial to our awareness, insight, learning, humanity and intelligence. In fact, when we realize this… our more profound experiences of intimacy are uniquely informed, completed and elaborated by death.

It seems that many aspects of our relationships, our own hearts, and even our minds require precisely this kind of distance and even loss… to truly apprehend the deep value of relationships, moments, and beings we have encountered or loved.

There are no merely verbal ‘answers’ to the questions that surround this topic; they are ‘questions’ that our lives and acts become the living answers of.

The other morning I was ruminating on death because the beloved pet of a close friend had just died. The loss of an animal companion is amongst the most painful of human experiences, and this was amongst my own first experiences of death. But it is never merely a loss.

I was cooking some soup and unfed; the pangs of hunger in my gut gave signs of anticipation if not excitement. But as the soup would not be ready for a while, and was not my as-yet-unplanned breakfast, I decided to allow myself a square of dark chocolate as a hold-over.

I am familiar with the experience of eating the chocolate, but the context made a difference. I paused for a moment, stirring the soup and continuing my reflections as I popped the square into my mouth. First, the texture, chewing, the chocolate beginning to melt and suggestion of flavors to come. Ordinary. Habitual, really. Then the rise into awareness of the different aspects of the substance upon the tongue, and the rich chocolate flavor so familiar to me. Still, incomplete.

But then, as I swallowed and exhaled, as the food was departing from my palate, a whole array of wonderful flavors ensued that immediately made me want more. And then I realized: it was in departure that the real essence of the chocolate was available to my palate.

Most of my experience of its flavor happened while it was going away. Suppose that… that… instead of going away, it stayed in the second phase? It seemed that I would miss most of the flavor and be stuck with a mouthful of gooey, undigested chocolate for quite a long time. Could life and love be like this? I suddenly felt that, at least for me… they often had been.

It was in departure that I keenly sensed and pregnantly valued many of the most central people, animals and situations in my heart, life, and experience. *It was, as they say, ‘in hindsight’, that my vision, so acute, became fraught with many perils of self-incrimination or critique. But also, nearby and unseen, many other branches of a far more habitable tree.

Shadows of the leaves, the branches, move gently on the wall. The moonlight is their source. Now tell me, is the sun departed?

Somehow, to lose a relationship is a process that reforges it. The loss tears away layers of fiction, boredom and narrative and reveals what is truly present. An array of inner processes ensues. History is recapitulated in an imagination ‘set afire’ with passions for the departed way, being, animal, tree, place… and is and will from now on be actively or passively repurposed. Our inner universe is catalyzed into developmental accelerations. This is the key we too easily forget.

Repurposed. And if we shall establish it for mourning it shall thus be so to us. How peculiarly selfish and unexpectedly ignoble this tradition.

But in mourning proper is force and fire worth our trust. And thus we ache in re:membrance of the lost in the sense of gathering many moments, situations, novelties, crises… into a kind of inward storm. A singularity. An intensity. And this remains and grows… changes if we let it… within us.

The process is usually accompanied by something we surely feel as pain — I do — and yet I am simultaneously aware that some portion of this is a repercussion of how and why I am remembering. Other purposes yield very different results. Some of these are unremarkable. Others could change the world. They are the nature of our human heritage.

True hearts bind close. And sometimes closest… in the moments of departure.

Some time ago, I unexpectedly learned that someone dear to me died. We were not in close touch, and the death occurred in a previous year. The news shook me to my core. I supposed that I could intelligently ‘manage’ my feelings, and the talk around this concept was relatively simple to compose. Even slightly inspiring. But reality divided itself rapidly from theory, as it is wont to do in such circumstances.

In fact, the results were a tempest of often uncontrolled emotions, and my inner world did not seem particularly interested in nor compliant with my advanced ideas on perspective and such.

I had been a bit foolish, however, in thinking that my understanding and experience could somehow replace an embodied process of mourning and re-membering.

What was important was that new relationships with myself and memory were being initiated by my exposure to the death of the person. Inwardly, my relationships and constellations of experience were being suddenly and unexpectedly reconnotated by the process. My memory was being reforged by something like a storm, and although the feeling was pain, the result was growth, insight… expansion.

The more I was able to recognize this, the more fluidly I experienced the rapid growth that I have always felt seemed to follow upon a death. In fact, I suspect that the pain is somehow directly related to something we cannot entirely see.

Something is being born in us. I do not have to declare the specifics, but the pain is not merely loss. It is growth and re-membering. The singularity.

True hearts.

What actually happens in death, I believe, depends upon the role we take. We are culturally unfamiliar with many of the most human and profound roles; indeed, we can barely imagine them. In my long relationship with death, an intentional one, I have discovered some of these roles myself. They are not ‘magical’ or even, necessarily, ‘spiritual’ unless we intend to speak about them which is a distinct phenomenon from inhabiting them.

What I suggest, however, without the necessity of any accompanying metaphysic, is this. The experience of a death is the reception of a seed, we might say. We, as the survivors, are the recipients. The nature of the future of this seed depends upon us, but it is charged with potentials, powers, and benefits we have too rarely imagined, and more rarely become. Death is a doorway to both intimacy, and intelligence… of forms we are unaccustomed to recognize.

Because we are made of them.

But let us forge a figure that may be useful and while, not the truth, is more like the truth than much of what we think or imagine. Let us suppose that a death is something like ‘the recomposition of a body of unity’. A family. Of a new kind. So that, essentially, the spirit of the dying one shatters like a jewel whose living shards land directly in us. And we, thus injured, commend a portion of our soul … together… to join the one departing. And thus what happens is more than heaven. We shall travel “across” within and for the one departing — whose essence is now ‘accelerating toward Origin’ at tremendous velocity. We shall travel with them, across the Great Ladder of being and relation, Origin and purpose. And they shall remain as seeds within us. Alive, forever, eternal. And thus death becomes exstasis: exceeding of all fictions and ideas, ‘dissolving’ and flowing in true relation.

Yet even without such figures, we can see very simply that death ‘interrupts’ all of the overlays of culture, language, courtrooms, selfishness and distractions. It pierces and penetrates the strata we are so often buried in, it draws us together regardless of whatever else appears to be important or central. It unifies, corrects, nourishes and heals us. Death is a medicine we sorely need direct contact and participation with. Especially we who are trained to attend and obey language, authority, culture and fashion… in precedence to true relation, intelligence… and even humanity. Death is a light without which we will be blinded by ourselves.

And so the death of one beloved becomes an impossible doorway into and for ‘eternity’. This ‘is’ more than some heaven we can speak of. We become it, and live into and for it. Death opens on reality too true for us to otherwise admit, and each one who thus passes, passes this torch of awakening among the survivors and their pods. Most will never even notice this. Many will build churches of despair or rage. But this torch, its light is pure and true, and with it… worlds can be reborn. With its opposite, they are, like lives, quite easily destroyed.

Each parting is then an opportunity to evade the cultural gravity that necessitates our mishandling of this seed. If we should plant it in shadow, we can be sure of the nearly vampiric result. Yet many other choices await our wise and patient attention. Some of them lead beyond the forms and masquerades we are used to… into the sources of being, love, intelligence and nature.

Particularly, our own.

Some years ago, during an extended nonordinary experience in which I underwent a long series of transformations, I acquired a library of new perspectives on birth and death that had little to do with anything in our common cultures or even religions. I acquired the sense that those who die do not disappear into nothing, nor do they entirely depart the world, although some aspect of them does appear to ‘travel’ in a variety of ways our common conceptions are incapable of apprehending. And it became clear to me that those we love, those with whom we have forged deep bonds of union and mutual existence… die into us. That we, our own hearts and minds, are a living garden that the seed of their death may enter, therein to sprout, grow, and bear sacred fruit. I realized that I could actively invite and participate in this process, offering my own heart, mind and life as a new world for them, opening my soul to receive the aspects of theirs that are amenable to this intimacy. This practice has, for me, continued to grow and transform both my understandings of life and my experiences of the deaths of beloved beings, who now ‘have a new life’ within me which is not merely memory, not merely a fashionable idea, but instead a palpable reality. I suggest then, that those we live die into us, and that we, should we so choose, can become ‘a living haven’ for their continued existence, growth, development and experience… and is so doing find ourselves enriched beyond all possible expectation.

True hearts bind close in dear departure…

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.

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( My writing is a gift that I hope may inspire speculation, wonder, discovery and new relationships. If you enjoy it, kindly take a moment to share it, connect with me personally, comment, correct me, or tap the Recommend button ⇩ ☺ )