not dying - changing
In this elbow time between heat and cold the colors have been nearly neon in their insistence to be seen before it’s too late. (Think if we humans wore only the most brilliant hues in our final years. Eight- and ninety-years olds resplendent in amber and fuchsia and scarlet.) The bright reds of zinnias and nasturiums. Deep orange marigolds, the color of monks’ robes. The duet of goldenrod and purple aster. It’s the last number before the curtain comes down for the season, and nature goes all in. She knows it’s soon time to rest. And we should know. It happens every year. But somehow we don’t get it. At least that’s what I interpret from the blankets and sheets dotting yards, protecting plants against ever dropping nighttime temperatures so that yards look like convenings of ghosts or poorly conceived Christo knockoffs..
As I walk and make dinner these days, my earbuds are playing the wisdom of conversation between Frank Ostaseski and Joan Halifax about death. The two teachers have this conversation annually, gently encouraging people to view death as part of a cycle. What they say doesn’t change greatly from year to year, though as they age—Roshi Joan just turned 80—their relationship to the topic deepens. Having sat bedside in the final moments of countless lives, these two leaders in end of life care long for us to understand that death is something we need in order to fully feel joy and to be vibrantly alive; it’s part of the equation. Death is not an end but a change in how we are in the world, our energy transformed into something different. Our death makes way for others to use the limited resources of this beautiful earth, and to horde life is to horde resources. They remind us that death is overly avoided in this culture to our detriment, so that most of us utterly lack the skills and ease of being with the dying. We avoid death at all costs — literally since more than 50% of our country’s medical spending goes toward people’s final months and weeks of life.*
And for what? We sleepwalk through so much of our lives, numbing out on drugs of various sorts and tv and shopping. We’re not really here. A young friend recently told me, with quite a bit of anger in her voice, that she has had an iPhone and either an iPad or a computer since she was in first grade. She now smokes quite a bit of weed as a way to cope, and she sees a coalition between the two. No one ever taught me, she says, to feel and be okay with feeling.
This in turn reminded me of Dan Eldon, about whom I’ve written and spent considerable time with, and how he’d cajole friends off of sofas and out into the world to have adventures, often goofy, occasionally dangerous, but always filled with aliveness. He lived only 22 years. Much too short. But they were lived at the highest volume—all in crimson and cerulean and the deepest plums. Nothing of the greyscale about that life.
At what cost do we resist change? A friend has described his father’s final period of life. After he had a stroke and lived in a fairly diminished way, his wife was insistent on keeping him going at all costs — the cost to her own well-being as her very small frame took on the task of caring for his much larger one—including moving it, the cost of her husband’s dignity and wishes because he didn’t sound like an “at all cost” kind of guy, the cost of other family member’s wishes, the cost of funds that could go toward others more in the midst of this thing called life. I know that this clinging to what has been in so hard not to fall into. It takes real effort not to cling.
Change scares us. When I recently quit my job, some people I told were elated. But many many others had a look of pity on their faces and intoned fear; rocking the boat in this way couldn’t be good, I was foolish, setting myself up for disaster.
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I’ve also been thinking about the relationship between change and our resistance to repair. I’ve been looking for shoe polish without much luck. I finally relented and ordered it online, but the lack of local stories carrying the stuff made me wonder if the act of caring for items as they age doesn’t interest us. Few of us possess the skills to care for our clothes—to darn holes and sew seams, or change the oil in our car. We don’t tear out the carpet and refinish our floors. Or remove old windows and repair the sashes.
Repair and mending and restoring are skills ignored by schools, rarely passed on any more by families, and increasingly lost. They’re vital skills for addressing climate change and social justice. “Repair” lies at the center of “reparations.”
Our cultural tendency to throw out the item that seems broken or rundown in favor of a new one (and yes, the economics often make this the easier route) is a way of avoiding change. It’s a way of remaining with the lure of the fragrant, bright blooms of summer and not consciously living with the reality of our changing ecosystem, a system that is in so many ways dying under our weight. Many of us aren’t willing to wear the sweater with the wonky hand-sewn patch or live in a house that is pieced together with our own haphazard attempts at mending it, each one either an eyesore or a proud reminder of self-reliance, depending on how you look at it. We tell ourselves we don’t know how, we don’t have time, it won’t be/look/work quite right, and hence we need a new one. Or, perhaps we try to bargain with the climate gods and get a newish one. Or we pay for the carbon offset of our flight. There are so many ways in which we dupe ourselves and keep pulling the sheets over the final blooms, trying trying trying to ignore what we know is true. Florida is sinking. The patient is dying. Change is inevitable.
We forget that change has beauty. The rough edges of seed pods. The husks of a garden fully spent and now bitten by a hard freeze. (A term that reminds me of “hard stop”, as in no more, all done, stop trying to do something else.) Change is also imbued with the rich possibility that comes with not knowing. Jumping off the known-ness of my job, I feel more alive than I have in quite awhile. And calmer.
If any of this sounds chiding, let me assure you that I, too, scroll for too long on Instagram. I, too, numb out with Netflix and another glass of wine. I am uneasy about the flight that I am taking next week and the equation that can’t be undone of the fossil fuel spent on my behalf. I do each of these things with a some awareness. And that awareness is so key to my ability to change. To move my inner compass away from practices that don’t help this shared world and its efforts to be a healthy, vital space for all beings—not just humans of a certain hue and economic bracket. I am practicing in order to move my inner compass toward ever greater joy and equanimity for the garden in its post-freeze state.
I talked with a guy yesterday who is a few years out of college and working with a local nonprofit aimed at local sustainability. I wondered how his works sits with his 20-something friends. He said they thought it was cool, but that it didn’t actually encourage them to change. They see their lives as “fine”, as “good enough.” They are smart enough, he said, to understand the ways in which their actions have ill effect on other parts of the ecosystem but don’t feel called to change. He admitted that he, too, stops for a Big Mac sometimes and notices the discord between what he’s been reading and talking about all day—against the practices of Big Ag with its monoculture and sucking of resources, against the non-local interests of multinational corporations that seek to line their own pockets.
We’re all in this place: collectively we’re all in the car at that drive-through ordering that Big Mac. More than half the challenge is to notice the discord. To not get sucked into guilt or shame, those loud suckers that want us to pull up the covers and do nothing.
Shame and guilt are so terrified of death and cannot embrace change. They can get really loud until we can’t hear other frequencies. We succumb to the burger. To the shiny new thing. To believing it’s too late and there’s no choice, so why not go down with a bit of something soothing in our belly and a new sweater on and a trip to Greece crossed off the bucket list?
Here’s a practice in lieu of giving into those loud voices. Sit there with the burger in your lap—or the new clothing purchase in your hands, or the tickets to Athens flashing on your computer screen. And get really curious about what a weird moment this is in world history. You have these things at your finger tips! Amazing! Be grateful to all who have made this moment possible for you. Say thanks to every one and every thing who made this moment possible—the workers in the fields who harvested the cucumbers for the pickles and the tomatoes for the ketchup, the cows who lived briefly for to give you this and the workers whose job it is to slaughter them, the water that streamed from the Boundary Waters to the Gulf carrying chemicals and hydrating the plants and animals you’re about to eat, the sun beating down, the fuel drilled up from another part of the globe and carried to our country to energize the entire process of creating the burger in your hand. Have gratitude for each and every facet of this burger. Eat it with pleasure. Not shame. And then let that gratitude spur you to make a different decision next time.
Resist putting sheets over the roses. Watch them die with wonder, knowing that their cycle is eternal and wise. Tend to what is, this community, this life, this moment. Go out into the garden and find beauty in how it’s changed. Because it will change again.
*This statistic was given by Ostaseski in one of the talks; I haven’t fact checked it.
