....AND DYING
An egret thinly stands
brushes dazzling ideograms
cross roiling sands
Her long straw beak’s
snuffing translucent shrimplets from above
death forging beauty as it seeks
Intensities of blue and white and peach
on Sunset Beach
If once mime speaks:
However twists our sense of gorgeous love
ascending life is all that Grace knows of
A leaf suspended yards below the branch by a single spider strand, swimming in the wind.
The decomposition inherent in all composite things; the eternality we are held in, even as objects rush towards dissolution; the hardness of dying to the body, the total faith to see through that; the only life is the Life of the Tree; the return of “that leaf” cyclically.
Apocalyptic eternal present. In my death, the world transforms again. Everyone meets at once in one vast Being. The visible world of progressive centuries always skittering on the verge of climax, a tableau (analogous to individual evolving), from which we rise towards Renewal, a Resurrection day prefigured in each vision, in each death and in each breath.
888
A very elderly patient of mine, “Ruby,” was comatose, just before her death. Upset by the picture, I sought in prayer for an answer to my fear of mortality. I wanted some tangible proof.
That same day, “Linda,” who was Ruby’s best friend and neighbor at this retirement community, was travelling hundreds of miles away, and had an accident and was temporarily also in a coma. Amazingly, many staff members, unaware of her trip, saw Linda at meals in the dining room that day, spoke with her and gave her things. (Later, Linda had a “miraculous” recovery and returned home.)
As witnesses to an event which we are attuned to by prayer, we are each sent specific individualized lessons that we are ripe for. This incident showed me the spiritual nature of our existence and demonstrated our immortality, with the same poetic displacement of characters as in dreamwork. It revealed the exquisite love and care and acceptance with which Divine Consciousness answers and nurtures us, even when I was looking for a “proof” instead of resting back without desire. Because, as we saw with Hannah, my motive was to dispel my unbelief.
When our motive is pure, God may reveal extraordinary things, not to feed our ego, but so that we voyage beyond.
Beloved, these helpful, sheltering messages lead us by the hand. Nothing is physical, so why ask if such apparitions of a person are physical? Life isn’t literal, it’s metaphorical, metaphysical.
In the story, the resurrected Jesus could only be recognized by some, his appearance fluctuated. In eternity, we’re continuously transfigured.
Meditating, we may feel God As a separate Presence across the room, arriving to become Me, with the personal me cast off like a coating. Me/you, subjective/objective are bridged. “I” and “Thou” can ring countless variations.
888
Fear of aging: People who, in less than a century, are able to look ancient and sear, are opening to us in this image all the vaunted wisdom they’ve garnered, the work they’ve done for us all.
Sometimes a demonstration we make seems great, sometimes it looks like defeat. There is never any blame. Nothing to forgive for the person we help, for me, for God. It is most vital to see this when things look their worst. When the world is seeing the most awful tragedy, something entirely different may be going on beneath the surface. “My ways are not your ways.”
The fruitage of meditation can emerge with great subtlety, requiring all our inner discernment to recognize it. Judge not by appearances. When we do judge, judge with charitable judgment.
One morning here in Oregon, I was giving my father a massage, before he and my stepmother flew home. While kneading his muscles, I thought, it would be incredible as the parting of the Red Sea if my father was ever divested of his suit of rationality, even in the afterlife. The next day, at his house on Long Island, he suffered a massive stroke. My brother and I saw how the disaster immediately freed him up emotionally. Then, though he couldn’t complete a sentence aloud, he spent several years typing a sincere and revealing booklength autobiography one-handed.
Ten years later, my father, at death’s door, came to live at a nursing home where I worked, giving me the opportunity to physically rehabilitate him, to pray for him daily, to realize the non-power of any visible effects, to relate through our true identities, and so to resolve my conflicting feelings about him.
One day, a year later, a new depth of pure unalloyed love broke through within me for my father, and that very night they called with the news that he lay unconscious with a blood pressure of 60/30. I meditated and drove there, realizing on the way that for the first time I was ready to let him go without regret. Arriving twenty minutes later, we found him tossing his pillow around, and then he woke up. In his torments he was doing the work that lifted me to this greater lovingness, just as his struggles and achievements, aspirations and unconscious dreams have moved me since early childhood. Meanwhile, to the material eye nothing had happened but an upsetting meaningless crisis.
Then, in his last months, again he couldn’t walk and could hardly find the words to talk at all. Yet he completed essential work: he had finally opened me to this greater love; he restored his lost marriage to my stepmother so they too parted with love; where he had been screaming in terror, he grew to accept and welcome his leaving this world.
His long last months gave him just enough time to wrap things up before making the transition. So with discernment, we saw these many miracles.
Everyone exits this scene; how do we take our leave? We can triumph incredibly.
If someone close to us is dying, have we completed our business with them? Are we expecting eternal life for the dying one and for ourselves? Have we let ourselves feel the terrible suffering of human life, laid down our judgments in the graceful arms of meditation, and seen that life enfolded, encompassed in the wings of Compassion?
