By Dr. Michael Fayne
As the Evening Gatha reminds us, “On this night, the days of our life are diminished by one.” No one knows that number, from which their days are relentlessly subtracted. It might not be a large number at all. This is an easy thing to say, but to hold in our hearts a deep understanding of this truth, is an awareness both shattering and liberating.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver addresses this matter in a work entitled “When Death Comes”, from which this excerpt is taken:
When death comes
like an iceberg beneath the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering,
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms…
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Ms. Oliver poses inconceivable questions for us to consider, again and again. How can we look directly at our mortality and feel joy? How can we acknowledge the impermanence and loss of all that we know and love, with a heartfelt peace?
She offers a way: Only by befriending our life, she says, can we befriend our death. Through a loving engagement with all things — “look[ing] upon everything as a brotherhood and sisterhood” — we can see with amazement the miracle and transcendent value of each life, each name, each body, each moment.
To look upon everything in its true nature, without exception.
To engage with life in this way would be to shake free of many chains of the mind. Breath by breath, in our practice we move closer to the truth that, in Ms. Oliver’s “cottage of darkness” — be it throughout this life or after it, or perhaps over many lifetimes — there is a tenderness from which nothing is ever cast away.
Ms. Oliver poses inconceivable questions for us to consider, again and again. How can we look directly at our mortality and feel joy? How can we acknowledge the impermanence and loss of all that we know and love, with a heartfelt peace?
