Today is the first and the last day of my life. Every day is the first and the last day of my life. Each breath the first and the last, each encounter the first and the last. As a friend recently said, I am practically already dead, except I am still in this body.
How am I making the most of that?
Living is witnessing consciousness through our bodies; living is a succession of deaths that result in rebirths of awareness in our bodies. Living is dreaming ourselves awake. And lately, everything about life and living is more readily a dream of constant death and rebirth, of awakening over and over again in a surreal existence, replete of synchronicities and chance encounters chuck-full of meaning.
While in the dream, whether asleep or awake, we tend to identify with the ego in the dream, the me in the dream, and this dream ego is constantly evaluating, judging the self, the other, the experience, the container, everything, and missing out on the bigger picture, the broader meaning, the collective purpose of which we are an equally indispensable part. We tend to overlook the essential nature of our existence, the web of life-death-life that sustains it, and its absolute neutrality.
The dream ego is our attachment to all that we identify with in everyday life—who we think we are, based on from whom and where we came, the language we speak, the cultures that have influenced us, our history and what our body has survived, stories and interpretations of all of that, the roles we play and have played, who we have been told we should be or led to believe we are, who we have been and wish we could be.
But there is a bigger, all-encompassing truth about who we are, and a vantage point that is unbiased, equanimous, able to take it all in. This is the objective observer. It allows us to disidentify, to float above all the heaviness of who and what we think we are. It is the death of the dream ego, and the relief of not having to judge, evaluate, achieve, classify, qualify, fix, solve, alter—where everything just perfectly is.
“Death is the point of rebirth; in this zero point things end and new things come at the same exact moment. That’s when time vanishes.”
— Matt Kahn
Recently, I have been in awe of spontaneous phenomena of essential importance to our human experience, surrendering to the surreal, synchronistic, chuck-full of meaning dream that is life. In this dream, death and rebirth are constantly occurring, literally and symbolically, externally and internally, personally and collectively. Being in the zero point where things end and new things come at the same time can be beautiful, overwhelming, intense, insightful, profound, leaving us with little space for pause and integration simply because we are constantly in it.
It is in fact part of our conscious human experience, if we let it, to flow with the imagination, be with our intuition, abide in the symbolic, and make meaning of the tapestry of life outside the dichotomies of right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark, positive and negative, birth and death; what we like, what we don’t like; what we prefer, what we don’t prefer; what we’d rather, what we’d rather not.
The more we let go and surrender in that place of the imagination, of intuition, of a new way of perceiving and making sense of things, we find relief in a third, labelless, option that is not good or bad, right or wrong, where binaries—these things that we get hung up on—have no relevance anymore.
This is an invitation for us to play there and exist in and through there as much as possible.
Several weeks ago, during the days of the dead, I was in Guatemala for nine days with a colleague, representing the EKR México Centro team—teaching, doing community outreach, offering volunteer grief support, and collaborating on developing the curriculum for the EKR Latin America certification program.
Members from EKR México Centro, EKR Guatemala, colleagues from El Salvador, and other guests were all staying together for the first International Thanatology Conference in a sweet collection of donated adjoining houses that will soon become a respite house for up to 40 country people waiting for appointments, treatments, surgeries in the city hospitals.
Something dead—like these abandoned houses—contains the promise of new life. New life contains the promise of death. Everything that begins ends, and with each ending, there is a new beginning. Today is the first day and the last.
Thinking thus about the life that death begets, we may, and perhaps should, remember the lives of those who came before us, their strifes, their survival, and their thriving as what secured the earth that sustains us, and allows us to have life and sustain life today. Because when we intend to honor and celebrate the days of the dead, or at least attempt to understand and appreciate them—November 1st and November 2nd, but, really, every day—we really must remember that we are here because of everything that our ancestors, who are generations and generations of all of our dead for millions of years, whose remains make up the soils of our earth, were able to survive.
Thinking about the life that death evokes, we may, and perhaps should, also think about and contemplate, what we are leaving—how we are living—for others to have life and sustain life now and into the future.
A waking dream comes through to illuminate these contemplations.
It is Friday, November 4th, 2022, in Guatemala City, around 5:20am. I sleep a cozy room at the end of the hallway, where air and white noise collide to allow unexpectedly good sleep. I am already awake, lazily returning to waking consciousness until I am startled in my process of slowly awakening.
“BAM BANG!” Right at the door of our building. Very loud, very close, gunshots, as if shells propelled hard against the thick gray metal door of our garage. Two gunshots, and a car speeding away, speeding further and further away. And then, sirens, their wail close and closer, then distorting far and farther away. As if entering a tunnel in time and outside of time, all sounds go distant, further and further away in time and outside of time.
This is the closest that I have heard gunshots, or is it the first time? I do not feel afraid for my life or like something terrible has just happened. What I feel is the jolt of a sudden, perhaps unwelcome but yet expected transition, my transition from sleeping to waking, and the unexpected transition of someone, from running for their life to inevitably giving into death. I feel the great importance of this timeless moment, the zero point of so much ending and so much beginning at the same exact moment.
Somebody shot a gun, and a body has been shot by the bullets from that gun. And my sensation in this moment is to hold space for a body that is bleeding, that is shifting slowly from stress to rest, from hot to cold, a body that is dying, a consciousness that is both leaving and returning.
I do not need to know who it is, where it is, or why this is happening—it is all in my consciousness, so it is me, in me, and happening so I may awaken to it. I am not afraid, nor do I feel in danger. I do not question the shooter, the bleeding body, Guatemala City, or this corner where we are comfortably abiding. I am all of it, in a timeless moment, both leaving and returning, both ending and beginning, being and vanishing.
Something is happening, constantly happening, imperceptibly, like the ripening of fruit, fruit falling off a tree, or seeds lazily germinating in the darkness of moist soil. Something like birds gathering twigs for a nest, nesting over an egg, chirping and calling and screeching, like birds getting into formation and gliding across the sky. It is not anything more than what it is, and it is everything. Bodies die and are born every day, consciousness leaves and returns, all the time, in the same moment. Our body may die today, our consciousness left and returned, and we have already been born and died, many times today—it is all a matter of fact.
In stillness and in silence, the day breaks softly and faint light comes in the glass pane above our door, and I am deeply moved by what is happening. Under blankets and comfortably warm, I feel breath and heartbeat; I watch for the space in between. I am automatically holding space for a body, for consciousness, wherever it is, whomever they are, because we are where we are and who we are. We hold space and are born and die, all at the same exact moment.
It is around five hours twenty minutes in the morning, and I lie still in bed, silent, breathing, holding space and holding my heart, for what feels like an eternity. There is no time when death and birth coexist, which is always—the zero point, when time vanishes.
It is Friday, November 4th, 2022, in Guatemala City, around 7:00am. We are all readied and gathering together at the entrance of the house, waiting for the shuttle bus that will drive us to the conference space for the closing day. Holding awareness of something together, unspoken, in silence, with expectation. As we walk out onto the street, lining up like little children ready for school to get on the shuttle bus that will drive us there, yellow barrier tape delineates the area—we are all inside the zero point of death and birth timelessness.
A police officer very officially announces, “We will let you pass. The barrier tape is here because a dead person is there,” and points to some 10 meters from where the shuttle bus is stopped and running.
I look over 10 meters from where the shuttle bus is idling, stopped and running. Behind a short wall I see a body laid on a small patch of grass, tree standing at its feet, a body covered with a synthetic light blue sheet, right arm hanging down over the curb, right hand facing up, asking and receiving from the heavens, embracing air against the ground.
In this moment, getting on the shuttle bus, taking our seats like well behaved school children, faintly hearing the whisperings of gossip and speculation, connecting with the sacredness of this moment, some of us more aware of it than others, we sink into the undeniable reality of this particular zero point. This is the exact same moment someone has given their life so that we may continue living. Somebody took the bullet for us this day. Something ends and something new comes, simultaneously.
This first and only response in this dream was humble reverence in the face of somebody who gave their life—a sacred act we all get to do—the sacred act this man performed this morning so the rest of us could be reborn into living, dreaming ourselves awake.
How miraculous to deeply know the sacredness of the deaths that happen so close to us all the time, the many deaths that allow new things to come. I choose to honor the death that allowed me to get into a shuttle bus and go facilitate a workshop and inspire a crowd of people, as a start.
We are already dead, except we are still in a body. How may we make the most of that? How might we choose to honor the things that end and the new things that come, at the same exact moment, consciously and intentionally, as every day is the first and the last day of life? Each breath the first and the last, every encounter the first and the last.
Awakened into the zero point, recognized as part of the scene by the yellow barrier tape, allowed to cross the line back into the everyday, invited us, and encouraged me, to really think about what is being asked of us at the zero point of death and birth—which is all the time and outside of time. What is being asked of us encourages us, so that we may all more closely and more readily be able to recognize that every death is a sacred act, and that every death allows us to continue living. Until our turn comes to allow life to continue with the death of our bodies and with our consciousness leaving and returning as time vanishes.
It is quite astounding when we become conscious together in these sorts of waking dreams, these invitations to bring awareness to the zero point where things end and new things come at the same exact moment, together, and then make choices together, as what we connect with and understand can help all of us get closer to and harness the essential nature of our existence.
Not only was this very exact moment a recognition of the opportunity that we begin again to live while somebody else has died for us, but the invitation to make meaning of that and share it. May we continue to awaken together to this truth, so we may continually honor the fact that no death is in vain.
All living beings give their life into death and new life comes.
And so, that morning of November 4th, I facilitated an unforeseen, extraordinary dynamic that surprised and delighted even us, for the many people who looked up to us for guidance as we integrated the experiences of the week and began to bring closure to our collective dream of the first International Thanatology Conference.
When asked, months before, what I would present, I had an idea for a title—Death: A Legacy of Life—and I thought I would facilitate a workshop, something experiential. That’s all I knew then, and that’s all I could muster even into the night of November 3rd. Of course, there is a lot I could say about death as a legacy of life, but I left it open so I could see what our waking dream would bring.
And then this man who gave his life inspired something amazing that I could not have planned or even thought about, but which was available to me, to us, as it always is, when we connect with what transpires in the present moment. What new life is asking to be born through us at the zero point of now?
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
— Pericles
I began our presentation exposing some possibilities and inviting new ideas exploring how we leave a living legacy every moment of our life, with every word and every action, with our silence and our presence, with our choices, our errors, our changes, our pleasures and our pain. I then invited the group to leave the concrete structures, walk over to the grass, take off our shoes, come into contact with the earth and with our hearts. We invited our child spirit to come out and play.
We remembered and honored the dead and our ancestors with every footstep, opening our minds, our hearts, our bodies to receive messages from them through nature, the imagination, synchronicities and chance encounters chuck-full of meaning. We entered into an experimental practice of humanism, connecting with the wisdom that our subjective experience with death leaves us in all its manifestations throughout our lives.
As we consider the different ways in which death gives life, may we consider how every death is an affirmation that we are spared, for now, so we may do something meaningful with the time we have left.
We are practically already dead, except we are still in this body. Each day, with each breath, with each encounter, how may we make the most of that?
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