(From a newsletter, November 2021)
Sat Naam
Dear every one,
This last month has brought tragedy into my life. You are going along, doing what you’re doing (in this case teacher training) and then suddenly, with a phone call, it strikes. Then that news story that touches your heart is about your own family.
Such events have impact. The ripples that can go out from the passing of a single soul can be many. As we are interconnected and separation but an illusion, there are many threads woven into the tapestry and the connections reach far and wide.
The loss of a loved one, and a very young one at that, has led me to confront things in myself. Death is right here, always, and yet we pretend it isn’t. Moving in the space of grief where death is so real and present reminds me of travelling in India. There, sickness, decay, death is in front of you, on the streets and on the burning ghats of the Ganges in Varanasi, where the bodies are burned. For me Varanasi is a place of death and romance both, going hand in hand, existing in the same breath, one illuminating the other. Death is there in India as a very real possibility every time you get into a bus with a crazy bus driver to travel those insane roads. I found it so liberating to be confronted on a daily basis. Anyway, I am not my body. That was the only attitude that could help me relax. And it was, after all, relaxing. The thing that in western culture is blanked out in India is in your face. Not hidden. It was healthy to live with that reality. It is actually crazy to live somehow forgetting that death is a constant companion of life.
On returning to the West I felt the weight of suppression and ignoring return. The nice smooth pavements and roads covering up and concealing the reality of the cracks in the universe, the impermanence of all this. Paving over the soul and not letting it breathe. That avoidance, that passive lie born out of fear holding so much reality at bay. And with it, so much release, so much beauty and grace.
This is what I feel about this death. It is terrible and yet there is beauty. There is horror and there is grace. There is the impossibility of living with such a loss, and yet here we are, doing it.
I am reminded how very very human I am these days. The teachings do say, I am a spiritual being having a human experience. Well, here it is, that human. It hurts. But it hurts because of the love. And love is never not worth it.
It is too soon to say that healing is coming from this event, yet I know behind it all that that is true. In some moments and at times I have been attuned to the waves of wahe guru – this is what was always going to happen. It is the hukam, the command, of that soul, and all who are connected to it. There is nothing but universal will playing out. There is no other way to “understand” such a thing other than standing under it and bowing. It’s not a contradiction to at once feel overcome with grief and sadness for the human loss and also touched by the magnitude of grace and poetry, the perfect weave of Life, beyond our ken.
So I do what I always come back to doing. The only thing that makes any sense. I bow. I fight and I bow. I complain and I bow. I shake my fist at God and I bow.
It’s too soon to say I am grateful. That would be premature. But I do feel grace, so that is getting closer.
I realise this is very personal, what I am sharing, and not the usual fare of a newsletter. But it is also a universal experience and in times like these, humanity and heartfelt connection between people is grace made physical. Humans can be really shitty, and they can be incredible. Like angels, almost, in their selfless service. So there is a lot of human warmth in this story. A lot to be pleased with. And when it comes to the death of a child, it doesn’t matter what your views and opinions are on this or that topic: every human heart feels the same love and loss. There we are really the same. There we can feel we are one. So I feel events like this open the heart door and through that true community can be ushered in.
Thanks for being a reader of this, and of receiving my words. They have been healing to write. Some say, words are just words. They can never reach. But in my experience, words are what we have. If I can reach across a silent space and into your heart with my words, then that is a kind of magic.
humbly
Jai Ram Kaur