Yesterday was a beautiful summer day. We’ve been thirsty for it like panting dogs waiting for the sprinkler to turn on so we can run around and play. I drove up into the hills to spend time with friends who were gathering at a pottery studio where one of them works and has love affairs and sweats in the damp heat. “Hold me” the earth said, and we said, “we will.”
“Death. Death. Death” we said and we were smiling and laughing and touching clay and we were so alive.
“I want to spend a summer with my intuition” she said, in preparation to become a hospice nurse, and she said it quietly, with a glimmer of sad mischief in her eyes. We all exhaled a version of “yes” and continued to brainstorm and sculpt our lumps of earth as if it were the most natural thing in the world to say, to desire. And it is.
When did the most natural thing—to spend time with our own spirit—become a special adventure we have to seek out? Is this the fissure in the foundation of humanity that led to all the books and essays, posts and podcasts about how to heal the world? I feel like I’m drowning in them. Like I’m being suffocated by all the brilliant ideas for how we can decolonize, re-wild, become native, decentralize, socialize, democratize, and embody. All the ways we can heal our relationship with the earth, with death, with each other, with the other, and with our selves. I feel the way that the wild love of me and my friends is slowly turning into a cry of fear and exhaustion. The way that our sharpened minds that have learned how to think properly about existence have been severed from the organisms below them that are bending, lifting, holding, and heaving continuously.
I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. It was the same feeling that makes me want to work with the dying. There are people, I’ve met them, I’ve eaten meals with them, worked alongside them, who find joy in death work, pure joy. I am not one of them. I go to the end, to the big rupture, because I am seeking reunion with the Divine. I am taking the dark, heavy putty of death and trying to scrape it into the cracks in the foundation beneath me because I think it is the only thing certain and strong enough to put it back together.
“There could be a grief garden, where loved ones can tend to something beautiful together,” she said as we agreed on our next outing to a place that is trying to heal the world.
Each time we gather I feel a moment of pause, waiting for an unspoken permission. Permission to be answer-less and to sit quietly in awe of the love that bounces from heart to heart. Permission to sink into this small crack in the foundation that has filled up with soil and clay and rain, to find my companions there, planting seeds, and to say hello.
*image of pottery by Anna Hepler
This was very beautiful to read. Thank you.