I just got off the phone with a good friend who’s in the process of re-entering the world. Her Mom died this month and my friend is only a few days beyond the seven-day Jewish practice of sitting shiva.
Along the way in our conversation, she says something to the effect that she is clearly becoming a different person through this process of her mother’s release. She feels her identity shifting. She is living and being differently.
As Life turns out, my parents’ bodies are still here and kicking. So I claim no expertise, but I suggested that my friend’s use of the word ‘release’ seems helpful and noticed that it seems literally true. Death as release of body and bodily doings. Naturally then, the bodies around us pick-up little bits of the functioning work that we’ve released. As a body, my friend is sifting through and taking on so many of the things her Mom’s body has just let go.
I said something of this to her, as I looked out from my eleventh-floor view of the sunny near north side of Chicago, neighborhood in springtime, school kids yelling on the playground, coats on the ground, jet overhead writing white on blue — and it was immediately clear that life in this physical world really is but a momentary constriction, contraction, compression of the larger Life space… out of which we have been squeezed and into which we will dissolve again. And in between All Space, there is our work, which we take on as it is released to us and, in turn, we release into the hands and bodies of others.
Lifetime as bardo. Workplace too, as daily bardo. All Space as one great hourglass and this life as middle moment. The pulse point between bottom and top. But how can this be? And how is it that Life gets bottom-to-topped so it can run back the other way?
Perhaps that question too comes still from too small a view… perhaps the glass never turns. It only goes on and on and on… one life followed by All Life followed by one more life… world without end… the pulse of One Heart and All Space.
None of which does much to ease the pain of our current constriction, as we are stretched again open to the life just released to our care.