I've completed another year on earth. How many breaths have I drawn in the last year? How many conscious ones? These are questions I cannot answer, and I am intrigued by what motivates them. Is it a call to reflect on how I have lived my past year?
I tend to feel this inward pull more strongly on my birthdays. The moon rises from the center of my being, beckoning, as I sip on the wonder of me. Today's concoction is brewed with melancholy, nostalgia, and poignance. One can also describe it as gratitude and beauty laced with sorrow.
I am nowhere near old and nowhere near young. It is uncertain I am nowhere near death. In the eyes of empirical science, I may score low on probability. But we never know, don't we?
Through the process of mending my relationship with self, I am more in touch with my desire to be close to life—to live as life itself. The part of me that pleads for death to end all my suffering still whispers from time to time, though less often heard than the part that is afraid of dying and losing all I love. Recently, I heard a simple solution shared by a great teacher to another fellow student, “Love (them) to death.”
All we need is love.
An old cliché, perhaps. But you know what, many clichés begin as expressions of truth. It is the depth we bring to them that supports our interpretation.
All we need is love. Does love remove our suffering? Not at all. Yet it holds us through our darkest times and quiets our resistance, so we can bear our suffering with more ease and trust.
The love for life
What happens when we tune into our love for life? Well, in a way that is not yet explicable to me, I find that having death as a companion has brought me closer to feeling my love for life.
The practice of keeping death close instead of away has brought me closer to the reality of my existence. It has nudged me to be more generous and open; to take chances; to give and ask for hugs; to express love more than I might have if left to my habitual patterns.
I had imagined it will keep me on my toes. Instead, this companion kept my soles on the ground. I don't have to run away or toward. It walks with me. It can be present in my consciousness.
If this is the last I see or hear from a person, how will I be with them? Death puts things in perspective for me. On the contrary, it is in the moments when I forget about death that I may experience nervousness or anxiousness. Isn't it interesting?
What's more we die a little every day. Old cells die, new cells are born. Old parts give way to the new. No growth and transformation can happen without death.
Holding death in consciousness
So what exactly does it mean to keep death close? It is taking it out of the shadow into the light. It is facing the knowledge that I have an unknown finite time here, and wanting to be in every moment. Not to make it count, for it is not about using or spending time, but being in time, claiming my location in space.
It is not seeking shelter in camps YOLO (you only live once) or FOMO (fear of missing out), which creates a thrill for life through the chase. To hold death close is to befriend it, to know it as a part of us, a part of life, choosing to be here and live open while we last.
Living: walking alongside death
I move slower. I achieve less, produce less. Rather, I enjoy more.
Dwelling just a little longer with everything but not overstaying. My heart lingers to behold, to appreciate, to know.
As I pen this on my birthday, I linger with me, savoring the life of this being.
A toast to life. And death. 🥃
🔖 Read last year’s birthday reflection on self-re/membering and its accompanying poem.
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Hello & welcome — I am glad you are here. I am Rosslyn Chay, an inquirer, poet, and coach. The Dandelion Notes are field notes on my process and learnings through my human journey as I go on a quest to mend our fractured relationship with our nature.
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