Meditation for the Day

"This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway. ...Be bold. Be humble. Put away the incense and forget the incantations they taught you. Ask no permission from the authorities. Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home." Saint Teresa of Avila

Something to Think About

“There is in Celtic mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good—and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.” Peter Gomes

Quote of the Day:

We fear death because we love life, but a little too much, and often look at just the preferred side of it. That is, we cling to a fantasized life, seeing it with colors brighter than it has. Particularly, we insist on seeing life in its incomplete form without death, its inalienable flip side. It’s not that we think death will not come someday, but that it will not happen today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and so on. This biased, selective and incomplete image of life gradually builds in us a strong wish, hope, or even belief in a life with no death associated with it, at least in the foreseeable future. However, reality contradicts this belief. So it is natural for us, as long as we succumb to those inner fragilities, to have this fear of death, to not want to think of it or see it as something that will rip life apart. We fear death also because we are attached to our comforts of wealth, family, friends, power, and other worldly pleasures. We see death as something that would separate us from the objects to which we cling. In addition, we fear death because of our uncertainty about what follows it. A sense of being not in control, but at the mercy of circumstance, contributes to the fear. It is important to note that fear of death is not the same as knowledge or awareness of death." Geshe Dadul Namgyal, Tibetan Buddhist Monk

Quote of the Day:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” Louise Erdrich

Quote of the Day:

"The goal is not to cheat death, but to live in the stream with a humility and aliveness that only acceptance of death can release.... Even within one life, we shred and re-root. We break, bleed, and rearrange into yet another beautiful thing that learns how to reach. Resisting this process doubles our pain. Singing our way through, it is the source of wisdom and beauty." Mark Nepo

End-of-Life Care in Canada

The percentage of Canadians that want their family doctor to talk to them about what kind of care they want at end-of-life?: 60 percent! The percentage of primary care physicians that are comfortable having these kinds of discussions with their patients?: 26 percent. This is just one of the reasons why it’s so important for us to talk about and normalize dying, death and grief in our culture(s).

Such a lovely piece by Aldous Huxley

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.

Sacred Terminus - By Sandra Ollsin

A vital part of my work centers around the terminus of the lives of others. My roles as soul midwife and guide, funeral celebrant/consultant, death researcher/writer/educator and workshop leader are no facile undertakings.  They represent sacred service at its core.

Being with people who are blown apart, fragile-hearted from grief, means meeting and companioning them wherever they are at.  It involves acknowledging mystery and anticipating liminal states of consciousness.  States and processes that must be skillfully navigated and supported during our most humanly vulnerable times.  It is an art that is learned, practiced and refined over time. Reading subtle signals and secondary cues, in order to assist people in navigating the many changing relationships in relation to death. Knowing what the Void feels like definitely helps, having been there so often; having had to familiarize myself with and live within the in-between realms for much of my existence.

Being comfortable and experienced within a vast array of altered states of being is imperative to the work: visiting fear, panic, confusion, deep sorrow, rage, melancholy, conflict, depression, family system disarray, the not-knowing, these are the tenets of the unseen realms in all their glory and messiness.

Ah, the blessed sacredness --- the inherent comfort, knowledge and sometimes sheer terror of the unseen world. These are my allies, my informers, my sources of intuition, love, compassion that allow me the ability to hold the container for others, to sit with people in their hard feelings, raw emotions and painful realities and situations.

The shape-shifting shaman who lives on the edge of town, the wise woman healer who communes with Nature and her gifts --- these are my contemporaries, the stalwarts of my heart center in the storm.

Assisting someone in their final phase on the earthly plane is such privilege.  So many tender mercies and moments of immense beauty shared.  If riches are borne of deep, soulful experiences with people in their suffering and also their reverie, then I am surely wealthy beyond measure.

The terminus of this life, I believe, is but another station we must dissolve into on our way back into the unseen world.  Part of the emergent, effulgent tapestry of life continually being threaded and remade from births, deaths, living, dying, rebirth and renewal. The veil between worlds so thin, some of us venture to see, sense and communicate beyond and through it. 

Don't be afraid.  Find whatever assistance you need while living to ensure a smoother passage through death when the time comes.  It's not too unlike how we plan for travel well beforehand, so that we might acquaint ourselves with, and so better anticipate, the journey.

Fear is the thing that we must come to some kind of an arrangement with.  What we believe affects the quality of what happens next --- so choose your philosophy, metaphors to live by, and messages that you tell yourself, carefully.  Preferably, before you must embark upon what the mystics call, "the flight of the alone to the alone"---to join the fine company of all those who have already traversed the subtle divide.