Reminders of our living and our dying are all around us. The seasons and cycles of the natural world, the food we eat, that we must rest to recharge alongside our need for movement and creative aliveness. When we are grieving the loss of someone dear to us, we might see more clearly how and where this seeming paradox is true – that we need death to live, and to be alive in order to die.
Likewise, when we are grieving, we might seek out reminders of impermanence to affirm the experience of our wholeness that death offers, so we aren’t lulled back into believing – thanks to this evergreen culture that idolizes youth and beauty above all else – that life itself is somehow separable from death.
Wanting to explore the natural interplay of living and dying doesn’t mean we’re stuck in our grief or intentionally choosing to be sad. It means we are opening ourselves to the fullness of our experience, of which our mortality is an inevitable part. Tending to our aching heart by remembering that it is natural for physical life to end helps all of the aspects of us – physical, mental, emotional, energetic, spiritual – to come into alignment with the loss, helping us to reconcile with it in subtle and profound ways.
There is so much to learn here, if we’re willing to be present.
I have a vase of daisies that I culled from a larger arrangement I received weeks ago when my mom died. It sits on the art table in my Soul Cave, where I write and paint and meditate each day. I consider the flowers a companion in my grief, an altar of sorts that can reflect back to me how living and dying are two sides of the same coin, aspects of the same process of creation and destruction that is central to who we are as beings of Nature. When I see them, it gives me pause. It offers the placeholder I need to remind me to breathe and pay attention.
What is happening within me right now? What am I feeling? How am I in my heart? How am I in relationship with my grief?
It reminds me to allow the truth of what I experienced ushering my mom from this existence to the Next to attune me still, weeks later, to its Universal resonance:
I am not separate from life and must keep on living; I am not separate from death and must hold the fact of its inevitable arrival with kindness and compassion and trust.
If I do, when I do, I can be sure that in my moments, throughout my days, I am choosing what matters. As all of us, I am a work in progress and need reminders to keep me grounded and engaged.
I am grateful for the daisies in this vase that are dying even with my devoted care. I am grateful for remembering that the two are not mutually exclusive. And that dying, no matter how conditioned we are to claim otherwise, is not a failure.
All of this, an incentive to keep cut flowers at the ready, an altar to living and dying both, throughout this year of tending.//