Who We Really Are
The whirling wind whipped its way through us as were coming down from the mountains today...
Kathy and I were walking along the winding road into Capiliera, when suddenly the wind was chasing us and dancing about, whipping up the sand, blowing us about... We turned around and walked backwards into it; a fierce, playful, strong and feisty 'wind of change' blowing through us...
An hour before we had reached the top of the rocky mountain road, where four paths crossed...
Kathy stood there 'the crossroads of my life...' She called to me.
Later we were sitting in Teide, eating omelette and tostadas when she received news of the passing of a person very dear and close to her...
Just ten minutes earlier we had been talking about letting go; 'are you okay, have you let go?' I had asked....
Kathy thought for awhile and then said, 'yes, yes, I am okay,and I have let go...'
'Because he's gone hasn't he?' I said 'yes, he's gone...' She agreed...
The news of him actually leaving his body then reached us...
When Kathy arrived yesterday she knew that soon he would leave... His passing came sooner perhaps that she expected...
But reviewing our conversation, once we had heard the news, we saw that we had known...
Already...
And Kathy was ready...
As we had walked into the middle of the mistral today, we had been talking about death...
Kathy has been reading a book called 'Being mortal - Medicine and what matters in the end' by Atul Gawande... She was telling me that the author writes about how has witnessed the acceptance and letting go of the world of 'matters', of everything in this world, by those approaching death and with the knowledge that they will soon leave their body. The book goes on to suggest this is how we must live, as if we were going to die, rather than living in denial of it...
To live fully we must fully die, fully accept this...
And then we live without fear...
And we can choose life....
I have been a friend with death all of my life... I became aware of it the day my little sister Rosy was born...
My father was wrapping our dog Judy in a blanket on the morning of my sister's birth... 'Where are you taking Judy' I asked, 'to the vet', my father had replied to his two and half year old little girl... But I knew she had died.
And then I met my little sister later that day... A joyous occasion...
I came to understand that life and death are in the same stream, and that we must know about death if we are to fully live and truly know ourselves...
Rosy's and my mother died when we were young teenagers and so that changed us... We have agreed that however difficult and sad it was for us, we both appreciate the understanding it gave us and the people it made us....
I have lived my life knowing death, and chose to read about it from a young age... I read from the position of questing to learn to live more fully...
I found 'The Tibetan book of living and dying' to be a source of great learning and truth...
Here Sogyal Rinpoche echoes what I understand and have sought to live:
“Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?” ― Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
And so I knew from reading his words many years ago, that all that is required is that we learn to be silent... And so know ourselves in that still, silent, space..