The Anniversary of Sybil’s Death

The twenty-third of March was the first anniversary of my niece’s death. She was pregnant with her first child, had a stroke and went into a coma because of complications from preeclampsia. Her son, Jack, was delivered by C-section on March seventeenth and Sybil never recovered. It amazes me how the anniversary of a person’s death brings up so much emotion and grief. I knew all year that I was sad and grieving but I was not aware of how much until the first year rolled around.

When I am feeling grief I am not just experiencing the loss of Sybil. I am dropped into the very pit of despair. It is as though I am touching the reservoir of loss itself. I experience long-held fear and doubt and grief that have always been there. I want to push the feelings away because they are so unpleasant. But grief holds me until I begin to soften around it, accept it, and get in touch with things about myself I probably would not have had access to without it.

The tendency I feel with grief is to close in on myself. The only relief seems to be found in the silence of solitude. And yet, what grief demands of me is to open. It does everything in its power to get me to open my heart. Loss puts me right smack in touch with what is important in my life. Even though closing in is an attempt to protect—it doesn’t work for long. My rational mind tries to understand what really happened even though it cannot truly know the meaning of life and death. But my heart, if I can keep it open, seems to find its own intuitive way.

Grief comes from trying to protect anything from being what it is…from trying to stop change. Each one of us experiences our humanness to the degree we can open to our joy and sorrow. It is from this humanness that we come to watch the constant change and changefulness of the mind. We see the whole world reflected there and we notice that everything ends. Every thought ends. Every feeling ends. Each taste, each moment of hearing, each seeing ends. It has never been otherwise. Every experience, every relationship ends. Moment to moment, change unfolds.

Our experience of life is the experience of change. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Nothing stays the same. In this flow of change, there is no real or solid place on which a lasting foothold can be taken. Every moment is precious. Every moment is just as it is and nothing needs to be otherwise.

When we recognize that all we have is this moment, then life becomes important and we open to it just as it is. Our loved ones, our children, our friends become so precious. Life takes on new meaning. Each moment becomes a whole lifetime, a universe unto itself. Our priorities change, our heart opens, our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretending. What truly matters becomes very apparent. We are no longer “a victim of life.” Every experience, even the loss of our dearest ones, becomes another opportunity for awakening.

I am deeply saddened by Sybil’s death. The gift is in being reminded that each moment is important. The pain of opening the heart to loss is countered by opening to loving everyone and everything in my life to its fullest. The longing for what was becomes simply a part of this moment and there is nothing more than that. I miss Sybil and am allowing myself to grieve and heal. That is part of the great mystery of life that her death has brought into my awareness. I offer her my blessings for bringing me to these realizations.

Living a Spiritual Life

Today I am looking out at a dreary gray day in Colorado with tiny, nearly imperceptible snowflakes coming down. The cold and dampness does nothing for my desire to do much of anything. My usual creative, motivated self is shirking from any activity that I think of. I feel somehow disconnected from my true self—off-center and a bit beside myself.

Just writing those words begins to wake me up. I look at what I wrote: disconnected from my true self, off-center, beside myself. The red flags go up and I am onto something BIG. I have lost my connection to the Divine. I have stopped living my spiritual life and have sunk into a hum-drum life that I lived in for so many years.

The way it used to be felt “normal”. I was preoccupied with all things physical: how I looked, how what I did would be perceived by others, money and “things”. It was not a very satisfying way of life but it was what I had learned growing up.

The main thing I remember about that life was the amount of worry that it produced. It was a world immersed in the future and the past. The stress caused by worry was enormous and I never got away from it. It was a world of lack that I created and lived out. There was never enough. Not enough time, money, friends, work, love. In it, there was no connection to anything greater—no Spiritual life at all.

When I was very young I remember distinctly being connected and living a very Spiritual life, although I didn’t have the words or concepts to understand it. I spent the majority of my time in nature. I can’t guess how many trees I climbed and how much time I spent in them. I played, used my imagination, spent time with friends, prayed and hoped and dreamed in the trees. I was totally aware that there was something greater than myself that was guiding, protecting and loving me.

When did I lose track of that and begin the life of worry? It was probably around adolescence. I don’t remember exactly as it was probably a gradual movement away from Spirit instead of a sudden shift. But, to be sure, I made the transition and it wasn’t a good one.

I lived in that hollow, empty place for years. Sometimes I would get glimpses of Spirit. Playing music, cross-country skiing, certain moments with family and friends, people dying, and nature all reminded me fleetingly that there was something greater than myself that was missing from my life.

Then, there was another shift back to being connected. Or was that a gradual awakening, too? It came about after I lost everything, including my sense of self. In the place of nothingness and in-betweenness I again began to feel that I was not alone—that there was something greater. The life of Spirit came flooding in. At first I didn’t feel I deserved it. Then I gave into it and was filled with love and abundance beyond anything I had ever known.

I began to live my life with this fullness as my guide. Living in the moment became a beacon of light and I was at the center. At first, it was a very strange experience but then, like this morning, the truly strange feelings signaled that I had wandered off the path and lost my connection to the Divine. The feedback system is now firmly in place and it doesn’t take long for me to miss the good feelings of being connected.

I am humbly graced to be able to live in this amazing state of being. Oh yeah, it isn’t all the time. Mostly I try for 10% of my day. But that is a lot and I feel blessed for the opportunity to be there when I am. Now when I look out on the day I see the beauty of the specks of snow floating down, hitting the ground and turning into damp spots. I am back living my Spiritual life again. I think I will take my dog for a walk and smell the wonderful earth.