Today I walked slowly down the road, perspiring in the humid air and admiring the bruised richness of late summer. Flowers in every stage of life dripped through green leaves like bits of pepper in rice. I was surprised. I expected the yellow that everything gets as the summer begins to fade, the color of the earth, but instead, I saw intense pink, orange, maroon, and creamy taffy white. Festival colors, celebration colors, party time. In fact, I went to a party yesterday. It was a birthday party and a deathday party. My friend is acknowledging that death could come at any time. She is choosing to celebrate her friends, her family and her life as the process of dying is unfolding. She has, in some ways, more reason than some of us to do so, since she was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago. Strangely, ironically, though, we all have reason. We are all dying all the time. We like to pretend we are not. Even more strangely, we really don’t want to talk about it. This summer and fall, I am teaching a series of meditation weekends called Making Friends With The Enemy. The enemy, in this case, is death and impermanence. This, of course, flies right in the face of our worst fears. In contemplating impermanence, we are brought to look right at the instability of both our minds and our world. Nothing lasts. When you know that nothing lasts, what do you choose to do? As Mary Oliver says “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
As I walked slowly down the road today, I fell into a flower trance. I walked seeing only flowers. Some were bright and open, gallant delicate blooms standing tall, others like young girls in dresses, pert and simple, looking shyly toward the ground. Still others shriveled and dry, beautiful in their barrenness. Drunk on their color and entranced by their variety and vivid display of life and death, I took picture after picture, hopelessly lost to their beauty. What lives in this moment of appreciation and beauty? And what dies, I have to ask? What dies and what lives? And does anything live by our simple seeing or loving? Mary Oliver again, “doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”
I spent a good part of the weekend practicing meditation, sitting down with myself, resting in the rhythm of the breath and my perception as I walked seemed undisturbed by the many waves of emotion or the choppy white-capped thoughts that bounced in and out of my awareness. Returning again and again, blossom after blossom, each a moment, each without a single story to tell, each moving forward without hesitation, without holding back. I have always wanted to live like that, intense and present, not looking forward or back, but joyfully and beautifully alive. Until I am not.
So I didn’t hold back, I just gasped each time, exclaimed at the color, or stopped and soaked myself in the array. It is late summer, the time when things begin to return to the earth, to the realm of darkness, stillness, death. Things are dying, yet, I can, we can, taste their essence, their vital aliveness, even as we witness their death. Separating the wheat from the chaff, the seed from the fruit, the gem from the stone, we each carry forward the essence of all we experience one way or another, the sweetness and sadness of being human.
Your writing is inspiring me Josephine, to walk exactly as you did, and allow the flowers to call me to be present. This week my in-laws have been struggling with facing the limitations to their lives that come with old age. My first reaction was sadness and depression…the realization that this will also happen to me. But through meditation I remembered, of course, life is impermanent. We can choose to accept that, or to fight it. And what good would fighting do? I want to share with you another beautiful poem, which speaks to these things:
Eagle Poem, by Joy Harjo
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Dear Heidi,
Thanks so much for reading and sharing thoughts and the wonderful poem. I have enjoyed this poem before and I am always struck by the notion of beauty in the native American sense, the beauty of oneness, of order and of some kind of wholeness to even the ragged bits of life. I love that the world keeps teaching us if we let it.
May you continue to walk in peace, acceptance and beauty.
Josephine