It's a cool day, really feels a lot like fall right now. The sky has gone from cloudless and blue to a bit overcast, and as the wind blows the trees - and wind chimes on the porch - a few more leaves are falling to the ground. There is a fragrance of surrender in the air, something sweet and soft, and I feel it in my body, too. I think one of the reasons I love the "between" seasons the most is this feeling of constant change in the air. Winter often feels like it will last forever, cold and dark, keeping me inside. Summer also feels timeless, hot days by the river, I wish they would last forever. But Spring and Fall really speak of the fact that *nothing* lasts forever. Flowers erupt from the ground with a force that is awe-inspiring, bringing life and beauty to land that was recently frozen, barren. And Fall bows in graceful surrender, that none of this brightly burning livingness could return unless there was a time of letting go, of dying and returning to the Earth.
Death and dying have been on my mind recently. In the summer, for sure. But really, death and dying have been on my mind since I was nine. That winter, my grandmother passed, and I began to understand for the first time this strange truth that people are born into this life, and that they eventually leave it, too. This summer, death and dying became real to me in entirely new ways.
In this moment, I am remembering my friend Laura, who passed in August. After a particularly long struggle with cancer, she surrendered, and I got the emails from her family in her final few days. When the day came, I was far, far away, in Peru. And I felt such a mix of things. Grateful that she had come to the end of a long time of suffering. Sorrowful to know that she will not walk this Earth again as she was in this incarnation. Also, sad that it had been so long since I last saw her. I still remember it well. The last time I hugged her and told her how much I love her was in February 2008 - at my graduation from Goddard. In my speech, I shared a quote from Joseph Campbell, and she had loved that quote. She had looked stronger, healthier that day.
Earlier in the summer, I had come into my own encounter with death. In my ceremonies, I had occasionally experienced a powerful death encounter. And in my own life, I have had a couple of close brushes with death, too. But one ceremony this summer really brought me to face death in a whole new way. In that particular ceremony, I was facilitating, and I now realize that I should not have been. Regardless, I found myself deep in the woods, deep in the throes of the journey, and then it began to rain. In the midst of a ceremony, there is no sense of the passing of time. What is happening in any one moment feels like eternity - and that is one of the blessings of the medicine, for sure! But the rain that came in this particular journey was very strong - a cloudburst. We were more than 30 minutes by foot from "civilization," down a rather secluded trail by a river. There were only a couple of people who knew where we were, and there was no cell phone signal. The rain was cold, and I began to panic. I was shivering fiercely, and recalled stories of people foolishly going into nature without enough clothing and gear...my shivering intensified, and I feared hypothermia. I panicked, and foolishly decided that we needed to leave the woods. In the most intense part of the ceremony, there we were, walking hand-in-hand through the woods, walking in circles. And the fear rose within me, it threatened to swallow me whole. I knew that my time had come, that death was breathing down my neck, clawing at my throat, pulling me into the ground. I have never felt so clearly that I was going to die. Every rope I reached for - hoping to pull myself to safety - fell to the ground in front of me, frayed and severed...metaphorically speaking. We did eventually make it out of the woods, and I clearly survived the event. But death haunted me for weeks.
In a profound ceremony earlier in the year, I had been asked right-out: are you ready to die? I declared that I absolutely was not! But the way it was shown to me is this - there are two responses to the question, "are you ready to die?" First one, and the one that I clearly faced in the above ceremony, is struggle. Responding in fear, resisting the inevitable. When are we EVER ready to die, really? But when the time comes, the choice isn't really whether to die or not, but how to face death. The other response? Surrender. Not the weak, collapsing, abandoning oneself to death that I had imagined. No, the medicine helped me to redefine surrender - a fully present, wholly conscious process of leaning-in to the thing at hand. Gracefully bowing to death, no resistance. In that particular ceremony, I was shown how to do this. Much harder than it sounds for sure. My ego had often claimed to have no fear of death. But I have learned through experience that the fear is there, and it is very real.
Fall seems like the perfect time to contemplate this kind of thing. Death doesn't always offer a season of preparation, sometimes it comes out of nowhere. But fall is the perfect time to enter into the truth that living and dying are the essence of the cycle of Nature. I am not separate from that cycle, I am intricately woven into it.
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