Released Once Again

I’m happy to report that I have been released from the dark realms that held me so tightly yesterday. Isn’t that the way it goes? No guarantee on how long or how short the hard times (or the good times) last, but for sure everything changes and everything ends. I easily fall into thinking that if I work hard enough and am skillful and compassionate enough, I can make the good things last and the bad things go away when I want them to go away. For some stretches of time, this may appear to be so, but when I step back just a little I see the great rhythms of life are fundamental. Everything comes and goes. Everything that rises falls. Life leads to and includes death.

Yesterday I used the image of the darkness and difficulty we encounter being like a cocoon that holds us. Cocooned without reason / I am slowly digested / by the darkness / that embraces us all. Indeed we are all in the dark about what that comes after this life or what comes after this death. Theories and beliefs abound, but what comes next—even what comes in the next moment—is unknown. Sometimes this is more obvious than others.

In writing the poem No Choice, I pondered for some time whether the darkness embraces us or presses in on us. These two phrases came to mind and I felt I had to choose one, but I was quite ambivalent. To be embraced by the darkness is much more hopeful than being pressed in on by the darkness. It was more comforting to go with the embrace rather than the more ominous pressure, but I think the darkness I was speaking of includes both aspects.

This morning, on the internet, I found this resonant description of what is going on in the cocoon:

Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar is transforming into a new creature. … The fluid breaks down the old caterpillar body into cells called imaginal cells. Imaginal cells are undifferentiated cells, which means they can become any type of cell. Many of these imaginal cells are used to form the new body.

I don’t suppose the caterpillar likes the whole breaking down thing one bit. But the idea of imaginal cells—cells of possibility that come only after being broken down–feels deeply right to me.

Despite my best efforts, I find myself in dark places again and again. Years of meditation and coaching don’t seem to protect me from the natural rhythms of life. I suppose this is a blessing, but it is one of those hard blessings that I have to take a deep breath before I’m willing to say I’m grateful for. But I have increasingly learned to trust the landscape and the process of darkness. There is a death that is required—and not just the death when the heart stops beating.

Moving through our lives, we lose so much. We have to let go of our children as they grow up and move on with their lives. We have to let go of who we used to be, what we used to be able to do, of friends and colleagues gone from our lives. Some endings are so slow we hardly notice them and some happen with such speed and power that we feel ripped apart.

In Zen we talk about the possibility of participating in loss – about joining in with the very process that is breaking us down. It still is sometimes wildly painful, but when we say ‘yes’ to what is going on, there can be some ease in the middle of the dying itself.

The Christians talk about resurrection. I don’t know what happens when our hearts stop beating, but I do believe that we all die and are reborn again and again in this lifetime. When we allow ourselves to die to who we were, to die to our opinion or whatever we were clinging to, then we are reborn as a new version of ourselves. In the dying and the breaking down we are humbled—brought to the earth. Our conceited illusions of power and control are dissolved and we are able to proceed on with some slight bit more of wisdom and compassion for ourselves and for our fellow human beings.