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🌀🐇 #230 universal consciousness, Ram Dass on going home, infinite game
Pluse The Shapes of Stories
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🥀 Our Lives In The Rhizome
I shared this quote in a DTRH special edition on Saturday. It struck a deep chord of resonance in me, and I want to spend some time exploring it further with you today.
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
Let’s ground this sentiment more personally. The most significant “blossom” of life I’ve yet lost was my grandmother, Maizie. Fortunately, she lived a long life, passing away just 40 days before her 103rd birthday. Her biological body is very clearly, as Carl Jung put it, “an ephemeral apparition.” The woman I knew—the one who, many years ago, wholeheartedly poured love into me—is gone.
So if something lives on, what is it? Does anything of my grandmother remain?
Wrestling with these thoughts, I find them difficult questions to answer. Because when I say her, what do I even mean? The usual way of identifying her was through her body. In the absence of that, how can I point to her?
A common rebuttal might be something like her essence, but even if I could ask her directly to define her essence, it would surely seem like a moving target over the arc of 103 years.
This inquiry leads us into the heart of identity and what it means to be a person at all.
I used to sit on her couch while she faced me from her rocking chair, and we’d spend hours talking about life. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but the woman in front of me carried a rich tapestry of experiences, silently surrounding her, ambiently pulsing into the present—her alcoholic father, the early death of her husband, her diagnosis and triumph over breast cancer, her deep-seated faith in God.
All of these invisible, subtle forces shaped the dynamic between us. The interplay of suffering and joy throughout her lifetime cultivated in her an open-hearted ability to love. This flowed into our conversations and benefited me greatly.
What I’m beginning to allude to here is a sort of body beyond the body. We are beings that mistakenly perceive ourselves as having discrete edges. I could fall dead and be outlined in chalk, but that wouldn’t really capture me. We are more diffuse than we typically think, our outer limits blurred, cross-fading and interweaving with each other and the world around us.
We wear a skin of circumstance that profoundly influences the physical body and how it expresses itself. Despite our ability to imagine ourselves as individuals, as if we could be plucked up and out from circumstance, there is nowhere to be placed upon pluckage.
It’s only an intellectual exercise. You can’t truly escape our intertwinement with the world around us.
There is no shedding the skin—only changing its span and texture. And the skin is shared. We are bound to others in both obvious and imperceptible ways.
And so, you wouldn’t know until I told you, but I wear the skin of circumstance of a child who grew up with a loving grandmother, a teenager who weeded her garden for extra cash, a man who was the last to speak at her funeral, and a father who shed tears of grateful grief this morning while holding his son, knowing he will never meet her.
Her.
What does that even mean?
This wave of emotion was subsumed by a deeper knowing.
Death is not a flame extinguished. Death is a dandelion, its scattered seeds taking root in fertile ground.
Or, as Sophie Strand put it:
“Death was almost the moment when life overflowed its cup. Death wasn’t an end of life. It was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive, generative plurality. One narrative diverged into four hundred narratives.”
Of these forking narratives, one led here—to a grandson, holding a great-grandson, loving his heart out the way his grandmother taught him.
In that way, through me and for him, Maizie lives on.
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🌊 It’s All Temporary
Digest this sentiment from Brianna West:
“Temporary. Everything. All of it. Even the best of it, especially the best of it. We only have so many years to know human love, and do human things. Love them, all of them, even the painstaking ones. They, too, will not last. They are the experience. The insecurity? The experience. The heartache? The experience. The confusion? The experience. The joy? The experience. There is nothing lost if we learn something from it. Your willingness to fail is proportionate to your potential to gain, and to grow. The timer never stops running. All you will regret is not reaching harder for the things you actually wanted, while they were still in front of you.”
It pairs well with this piece from Jeff Foster:
“You will lose everything.
Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories.
Your looks will go.
Loved ones will die.
Your body will eventually fall apart.
Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed.
Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away.
Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.
But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy.
Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you.
This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really knowing it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence.
Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.
Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.”
🤓 Learn This Word
Vagary: An unpredictable instance, a wandering journey, a whimsical, wild, or unusual idea, desire, or action
⏳ From The Archives
A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇
Going Home, by Ram Dass & Mirabai Bush
“The next morning Ram Dass comes down to breakfast on his chair elevator. He looks sad and says, “Kush died last night. He was such a good cat.” I knew it was hard. Kush had been with Ram Dass for thirteen years. For the last several years, he had slept on Ram Dass’s chest every night, breathing together with him. “He was one of my spiritual guides,” Ram Dass says. “We vowed to let him die in his own way, not get shots to hasten it. And he did.” We all feel sad. Later that day, we will bury Kush in the garden, chanting his way to his afterlife.
After breakfast, I walk down the road from Ram Dass’s house. My heart is with Kush, but body feels good striding along; I’ve been sitting a lot. It’s cool for Maui, a good temperature for walking. I wave to two workmen landscaping a neighbor’s property, hauling dead palm fronds into the back of a truck, trimming the grass around the base of the trees. The activity of life. Aloha kakahiaka! Their dog runs out to sniff me and wiggle his ears. I pet him and smile. The ordinary moments of life are becoming more precious.
When I get back, I decide to listen to a talk Ram Dass once gave about what happens after death.”
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