Death Can Open Us to Joy

A very dear friend of many of us passed on a few weeks ago.  Walking down the path of life and death with him brought up so much sadness, but it also brought joy!  How can that be?

To explore the possibility of death opening us to joy, I would like to pull on a metaphor from my new book, What’s In The Way IS The Way (it is almost done!)  Imagine a beautiful meadow on a sunlit morning.  In this meadow is a rainbow of wildflowers, along with the heart opening music of birds. The smells of the heather and the pristine beauty of the surrounding mountains all bring forth a deep sense of peace.   There is also death here as one moment dies into the next and everything in the meadow – absolutely everything –eventually dissolves back into the great mystery of life.  In the ongoing unfolding of this meadow, everything flows and nothing resists that flow.  The grass doesn’t say, “I don’t want winter to come.”  The trees are not trying to be better trees!  The animals aren’t afraid to die.

The meadow represents your natural state of open, alive connection with life that you lived in when you were very young.  You hadn’t yet learned how to see life as a problem, and thus it flowed through you – the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful.

But there came a time when you left the flow of life and got caught in your mind.  In our metaphor, the clouds in the air began to circle around your head. At first they were just wispy clouds that didn’t fully block your experience of the meadow.  But overtime, usually by adolescence, the clouds completely surrounded and filled your head, so much so that you could no longer see the meadow.  All you could see were the clouds of your mind that were about good/bad, right/wrong.

The storyteller in your head that is always trying to do life and do it right constantly struggles with life, cutting you off from the meadow of your own being. This is where most people live, lost in ideas about life rather than the direct experience of it.  Rumi speaks directly to this in his poem The Glance:

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing,
there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

In other words, right beyond the cloud bank of your mind is another world.  It was this field that our friend Vaughan opened to as he was dying.  His wife Lyn speaks eloquently about the five days between the moment when he was told that there was nothing more that the medical world could offer him and the day that they took him off of life support.  She said he was lucid and luminous to the end.  The room was filled with light, and there was so much love pouring out of his eyes that she now knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that the field Rumi is talking about is the truth of her being. When Vaughan let go of any need to resist what was unfolding in his life, a door opened and he recognized the field of love that is always here.

There is also no accident that the last words of Steve Jobs were, “Oh wow!  Oh, Wow!  Oh wow!”  He recognized the field!  But it isn’t necessary to wait until you die to experience this.  You are not the cloudbank of your mind.  You are the field!  And it is a very powerful moment in your life when you come across something you can’t control – something your mind can’t fix – for therein lies the possibility of opening again into the field of love that you are.  The challenges of your life offer the opportunity to see how much your mind resists life and to discover the amazing healing that happens when you open into whatever life is offering you.

So what would it be like if you understood that the deepest of challenges in your life are for you?  They are not here because you have done something wrong or God fell asleep on the job.  They are here as an invitation to see through the cloud bank of struggle and come back to the meadow of love that is always here.  For you have never left the meadow; you just think you have.