A Blessing for Old Age
May the light of your soul mind you,
May all of your worry and anxiousness about becoming old be transfigured,
May you be given a wisdom with the eye of your soul,
to see this beautiful time of harvesting.
May you have the commitment to harvest your life,
to heal what has hurt you, to allow it to come closer to you and become one with you.
May you have great dignity, may you have a sense of how free you are,
and above all may you be given the wonderful gift of meeting the eternal light
and beauty that is within you.
May you be blessed, and may you find a wonderful love in yourself for yourself.
SIX DEATH: THE HORIZON IS IN THE WELL
THE UNKNOWN COMPANION
There is a presence who walks the road of life with you. This presence accompanies your every moment. It shadows your every thought and feeling. On your own, or with others, it is always there with you. When you were born, it came out of the womb with you, but with the excitement at your arrival, nobody noticed it. Though this presence surrounds you, you may still be blind to its companionship. The name of this presence is death.
We are wrong to think that death comes only at the end of life. Your physical death is but the completion of a process on which your secret companion has been working since your birth. Your life is the life of your body and soul, but the presence of your death enfolds both. How does death manifest itself to us in our day-to-day experience? Death meets us in and through different guises in the areas of our life where we are vulnerable, frail, hurting, or negative. One of the faces of death is negativity. In every person there is some wound of negativity; this is like a blister on your life. You can be quite destructive toward yourself, even when times are good. Some people are having wonderful lives right now, but they do not actually realize it. Maybe later on, when things become really difficult or desperate, a person will look back on these times and say, “You know, I was really happy then but sadly I never realized it.”
THE FACES OF DEATH IN EVERYDAY LIFE
There is a gravity within that continually weighs on us and pulls us away from the light. Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form. Within a poetics of growth or spiritual life, the transfiguration of this negativity is one of our continuing tasks. This negativity is the force and face of your own death gnawing at your belonging in the world. It wants to make you a stranger in your own life. This negativity holds you outside in exile from your own love and warmth. You can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul. This soul-light gradually takes the gravity, weight, and hurt out of negativity. Eventually, what you call the negative side of yourself can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity, and growth within you. Each one of us has this task. It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it. There is a greater and more generous presence behind your negativity. In its transfiguration, you move into the light that is hidden in this larger presence. To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that, at the end of your life, your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life that you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.
Another face of death, another way it expresses itself in our daily experience, is through fear. There is no soul without the shadow of fear. It is a courageous person who is able to identify his fears and work with them as forces for creativity and growth. There are different levels of fear within each of us. One of the most powerful aspects of fear is its uncanny ability to falsify what is real in your life. There is no force I know that can so quickly destroy the happiness and tranquillity of life.
There are different levels of fear. Many people are terrified of letting go and use control as a mechanism to order and structure their lives. They like to be in control of what is happening around them and to them. But too much control is destructive. You become trapped in the protective program that you weave around your life. This can put you outside many of the blessings destined for you. Control must always remain partial and temporary. At times of pain, and particularly at the time of your death, you may not be able to maintain this control. Mystics have always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you comes deeper into you. Now no one can ever take them away from you.
DEATH AS THE ROOT OF FEAR
Some people are afraid of being themselves. Many people allow their lives to be limited by that fear. They play a continual game, fashioning a careful persona that they think the world will accept or admire. Even when they are in their solitude, they remain afraid of meeting themselves. One of the most sacred duties of one’s destiny is the duty to be yourself. When you come to accept yourself and like yourself, you learn not to be afraid of your own nature. At that moment, you come into rhythm with your soul, and then you are on your own ground. You are sure and poised. You are balanced. It is so futile to weary your life with the politics of fashioning a persona in order to meet the expectations of other people. Life is very short, and we have a special destiny waiting to unfold for us. Sometimes through our fear of being ourselves, we sidestep that destiny and end up hungry and impoverished in a famine of our own making.
The best story I know about the presence of fear is an old story from India about a man condemned to spend the night in a cell with a poisonous snake. If he made the slightest movement, the snake would kill him. All night the man stood petrified in the corner of the cell, afraid even to breathe for fear of alerting the snake. As the first light of dawn reached into the cell, he could make out the shape of the snake in the other corner. He was deeply relieved not to have alerted it. Then as the light of dawn increased further and became really bright, he saw that it was not a snake but an old rope lying in the corner of the cell. The moral of the story suggests that there are harmless things, like that old rope, lying around in many of the rooms of our minds. Our anxiousness then works on them until we convert them into monsters that hold us imprisoned and petrified in small rooms in our lives.
One of the ways of transfiguring the power and presence of your death is to transfigure your fear. I find it very helpful when I am anxious or afraid to ask myself of what am I really afraid. This is a liberating question. Fear is like fog; it spreads everywhere and falsifies the shape of everything. When you pin it down to that one question, it shrinks back to a proportion that you are able to engage. When you know what is frightening you, you take back the power you had invested in fear. This also separates your fear from the night of the unknown, out of which every fear lives. Fear multiplies in anonymity; it shuns having a name. When you can name your fear, your fear begins to shrink.