Darkness & Light & Friends

It's a true honor to be with people who know they're dying, and this is part of my life now.  You know the saying, "Be with people as they are"?  When people have come to this place where they know they will die, or grappling with that idea in a body that is starting to stop working, still not knowing exactly what that means and will be, they're in a place I haven't come to yet.  My psyche has gone into this dive in various ways over my life, but my body has always been working well, so I have certainly not become that raw in vulnerability yet.  The people, just as they are, are my beautiful teachers and friends, even if we've only met for a few minutes.  I feel more love between each of them and me than the normal perspective on human love.  It's just there.

Sometimes our eyes meet... sometimes we stay in a place for a while together without anything other than there.  With nothing to do.  It's a wordless plane of existence while still here in the space and the time of a moment.  

Someone wrote the most beautiful description of the total eclipse. She talked about the quality of the light in that darkness, neither day nor night to the mind as we know light.  She used the words "completely rarified".  I recognize her description in my own experience of the total eclipse and in these grateful times with people who are close to death.  My friends.

We talk about AWE in these extraordinary experiences, and they are teachers for our minds.  There is AWE everywhere all the time.  It becomes more and more visible to us, feel-able to us, never graspable, never definable, owned by no one.  We're all gathered into AWE cleanly without residue, and even as we put words to it and say from our personal points of view how it was, it only opens and opens and opens us.  And we are friends in these impermanent bodies.