Holding Space for Presence

Dear Friends,
Twice a week, we drive our teenager to a community college an hour from our home. While they are in class, I spend my time chatting with the campus workers, hiking up and down hills with my book-laden backpack, and catching up on correspondences and projects in the library. One of my favorite walks is the Geological Time Trail at the far end of campus. Taking me from 4,600 million years ago to today, I visit this series of placards describing the different eras of earth’s history often. It reminds me of two very important truths:

we are always evolving
and
someday we will die.


Are you still reading?
If so, congratulations! Many people turn away from conversations about death.
I get that.
Grief, vulnerability, pain and suffering are often death's close companions.

After 30+ years of feeling heavy grief and loss, I've completed my curriculum of grieving my mother's death. Now when I think of her, I am no longer overwhelmed by longing. All that sorrow has transformed into utmost joy and gratitude for my experience of her and how she loved the people, animals and plants in her life. I now feel her warm presence is always with me.

Curriculum? Yes, there's a belief in Daoism that each of us is born into life with a purpose and lessons to be learned—a curriculum. No matter how long we live, in the womb or out of it, or what we experience, all of us come into this realm to experience, relate and learn.

My favorite placard on that time trail reminds us that we are here in this manifestation of form and function only temporarily.
It shows the five major mass extinction episodes worldwide, reminding us that extinction is part and parcel of life and evolution.

Extinction. How does that sit with you?

In witnessing my parents' life and death processes, I can say, without worry of being punched in the nose, that death itself is definitely nothing to fear.

Nope. Whatever I feared about death was not death itself.
What I feared was sorrow, loneliness, regret, and a future without my beloveds.
Oh, and anger that I couldn't change the outcome.
Well, let's just go ahead and add worry and joylessness to that list.
It is these emotions that accompany death that have made me want to shy away from it.

Those are mighty feelings to reckon with in the best of circumstances, so it's understandable when the world we are attached to is irrevocably altered by loss of a loved one, we find ourselves under-resourced to respond with resilience.

This month, a young beloved in our community took his own life.
At the burial, between waves carrying huge clumps of grief through my chest and throat, something else kept washing over me as my husband held me close:
Just be here, hold the space, and be present to all that's here.
That mantra brought me so much peace as I grounded myself and let the feelings move through me.
I think it was the most ethical way I could engage.

After that, my dear friend and colleague Josephine shared her understanding of suicide and grieving from her Buddhist tradition.
The key takeaway I got from our conversations:
By being present to the emotions that naturally arise, we can hold space for death and each other.

No matter our curriculum or the length and terrain of our life's path, being present to ourselves and each other is what makes life endurable and, as an old man under a bridge once said to me, worth the living.

Join us in class as we make friends with ourselves, our emotions, and each other while exploring the home all those relationships take place in:
our bodies.

photo credit: https://bluespiral1.com/artist/705-coralie-tweed/cv