Befriending Death to Begin Life.
Today is the day.
Let’s talk about death.
equator journal
Death is society’s secret.
Death is often little discussed and perceived to be shrouded in a dark impenetrable cloak.
Has anyone stopped and asked death how death wants to be seen and heard?
Death is the closure of human experience.
Closure is the circle of life,
How can experience be understood if it is not bounded in context.
Draw 90% of a circle, then try to fill in the circle with color.
We either have to gestalt the closure of the circle, or color in the infinite amount of space that surrounds the circle.
Which one celebrates the experience of the circle more?
The human experience is designed as a container.
To have some sort of bound or limit allows us to fill the container with color, texture, and energy.
The shape of our container also creates the conditions for the compounding and amplification of what occurs inside.
Death is what provides the human experience with a container to amplify.
Being human is about being human, nothing else.
Your human-ness is the essence of what you are here to experience, all amplified within the container of your life.
equator journal
Death is a teacher
A liberator
A guide
A mentor
A guru
A creative
A mirror
A servant
A steward
A child
A sage
Everything.
Death, though it bounds us, is not bounded.
Death is the threshold of the here and now.
Literally in every moment, you are dying.
Cells are dying, thoughts are dying, beliefs are dying, and begin re-birthed again.
Death expands us, not contracts us.
equator journal
Death liberates our ability to see and feel.
When one passes through death, suddenly our capacity to feel that person ever-presently increases ten-fold.
Death allows us to see more life living.
A great friend of mine recently passed through death.
He was in new Zealand, I was in California.
Time and Space had no relationship to my ability to feel him here and now, there and then.
I no longer required his form to look him in the eyes.
The clouds
The birds
The surf
All became vessels to hear his laughter, to see him playing, to see us playing, and to see us laughing.
Death brought me beyond any thresholds of distinguishing between pleasure and pain.
Uncontrollable grief, blind with tears and swirling energy in my eyes, alchemically transfigured into pure ecstasy of hysterical laughter and unquantifiable intimacy.
Death knows no bounds, but it teaches us the power of being bound to our human-ness.
We are just as much spiritual beings having a human experience as we are human beings having a spiritual experience.
Where on earth does left become right?
equator journal
Death is the secret that we don’t talk about.
We place so much unnecessary guilt and shame around death that we never create a relationship wit hit.
“You can only befriend the negative is your recognize that it is not destructive.”
- John O’ Donohue.
Death is frightening if you don’t befriend it,
Life is frightening if you don’t live it.
Whether death to you is beautiful, frightening, impartial, or enlightening,
Death is just the same.
Death just is.
It is everything and nothing.
It represents the relationship you have with it.
Death is your vessel to live your life.
Only when you befriend the mystery of death can begin to actually live your life.
We can experience life without living in the same light that we can experience death without dying.
Death and live are but dimensions of the same thing.
Limiting your relationship with death limits your relationship with life.
The system is flow, not flaw.
equator journal
Death is supposed to illuminate what you fear the most.
The fears want to be liberated from you just as much as you want to be liberated from them.
The catch is you have to listen to what your fears, death, is trying to teach you.
All fears boil down to the fear of death.
This is one deepest universal truths.
Death has many forms, but fear is not one of them.
All fears are fear of death, but death is not fear itself.
Fears fear death, because they cannot pass through death.
Death dissolves them.
When we die, we cannot take our fears with us.
But we also do not have to be bound by our fears in this life.
When we confront our fears of death, we confront the only limitation to us fully living life.
Only when we realize that death and life are but brother and sister are we given full freedom to the life that we are here to live.
Living starts the moment you accept death.
equator journal