Reality is stepping on my toes
Sparkly everythingness expresses itself through the particular.
I’m in one of those times of life when the stories I tell myself about who I am and what I believe and what I want get challenged by reality. Reality comes right up and steps on my toes, holding me in a tight embrace from which I can’t escape. It smooches me on the lips.
The reality of death is the reality of life. Death is real. Death happens.
I’m not talking about the experience of dying myself; that will be a mystery. I’m talking about other people dying; people we know and love and who are part of the fabric of our lives, so that when they die our fabric changes color and pattern.
The death of people we care about forces us to accept that death is real. It’s easiest with people who have lived a long and satisfying life; much harder with the young, and harder still when, through war and other tragedy, death is everywhere. I cannot begin to fathom the trauma of losing your whole family in an instant through the literal carelessness of intentional violence.
People are so particular, so themselves. There is something so specific about individuality that it does not seem possible for it to cease to exist. Clearly it changes form when the body ceases to exist.
I want to use my life (or be used by it) in a way that encourages me to become more aware, more trusting, more tuned in, more real. Strangely, that desire often feels like death, because there is no ‘becoming’ anything without also letting go of what is no longer needed.
Even though I don’t exactly know what ‘becoming more real’ means, I can feel it in my temporary bones. My body is only a vehicle or container or radio or golden opportunity, which has its day and then dies. What my body can access is, perhaps, not subject to the same kind of death. I don’t know. I just feel it.
When I was young I was fond of the concept that my spirit, my individuality, my self, was a cosmic element trapped in an encasement, and when released by death it would rejoin the cosmos, like a drop of water rejoining the ocean.
The idea of personal continuation after death did not attract me. Being a person is so hard. I can’t imagine it would be any less challenging in some new format. I liked the idea of personal nonexistence. I still do. And yet, now that seems too simple.
All those stories about wooden puppets and stuffed animals becoming real are about the great power of love to transform nonbeing into being. So even though I haven’t been talking about love, I think that’s what I’m talking about. Love is magic fairy dust that makes us real in a way that death can’t touch.
Love does not die. It accrues. It becomes; it creates becoming. It is not bound by temporary forms. Love is a precursor to reality. Just like Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit, love makes us real.
Thank you, Helen
I am sad for you.