On Death and Yoga

( and love and life)

one of mine. 

         

Death.

A most certain future for me, and Susi, and Jim and everyone else, everything else. Death, the passing of the Summer, dead leaves on the ground. Bugs we squish under our feet without, a further thought. Stars exploding somewhere far away. Our Sun burning out. Our spouses passing on and leaving us heart broken. Brake ups. We can bring life forth and we can take it away. It is a dance we are a part of.

Death is inseparable from life. Something ends, another something begins. 

I painted her while to help me deal with my grief.
She was the best
company. (I never finished the painting)

                                              

When I was little, I thought about death all the time. Through life circumstances, I learned to pacify myself with the certainty of it. I accepted that death would come, one way or another, and if my parents were to die, I would be ok. If I were to die I would be ok. Not by imagining I would be in heaven, or some other place. Just somewhere I belonged. I had an 'inner sense', that none of this 'theatre' mattered anyway, and I am a part of something bigger than my mind could grasp. I was around eight years old then, and this explanation brought me relief.

I have looked closer at a death in my self, while studying yoga, in my twenties. 

My yoga teacher Yogi Vishveketu, a founder of Akhanda Yoga, thought me the most important in the practice was observing my own breath. Through this, I became an observer of death in my own body. And thus, I began observing Life. How I lived, how I expressed my life. Most of the time my inhaling was gasping for air. Then I felt anxious to relax when I exhaled. I didn't know why I felt so many emotions only just by breathing. Sometimes I was angry, sometimes sad, fearful. But never at peace with the process. Always trying to control the breath. Control my life. I felt so very far away from that eight year old girl, who seamed so 'clued in' and together.

 From a great yoga teacher Iyengar, I learned, that every inhale is allowing life in, and every exhale is letting it go. The space in between is given to observe, absorb, to rest.  In his book "Light on life", he writes, that if we center our mind on the breath, we gain awareness. What is awareness? I believe awareness is light. Remember being scared of the dark as a child? It was not knowing what lurks in the darkness. In that, the mind created monsters, some of them could have been real, but how do we know, if they are there, if the light is turned off?  Did you ever turn on the light, and fall asleep peacefully?  ''Shine some light on the situation'', and you can face the monsters, because you can see them better. 

Till death do us apart...

Death is parting and goodbyes. It is transition into the unknown.

We feel, and it hurts, and it is excruciatingly beautiful. 

                  

A dead starling that flew into my studio and broke its neck flying into a closed window. I cried. I took photographs while I did. The bird remains beautiful.

A butterfly. Also dead

          

Death, being companion of our life, is a witness of our Love. It is the love, or absence of it, that carves itself in sculptures of our lives. 

Here are two beautiful poems by Pablo Neruda. Someone, somethig dies, and through a filter of the writers experience a poem is born. 

Enjoy.

A Dog Has Died 

Sam, my four legged friend, and me.

  

  By  Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he'd keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea's movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,

and that's all there is to it.

When I die I want your hands on my eyes.

By Pablo Neruda

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.