Every November, I walk among gravestones. This annual trip to visit the neighborhood cemeteries is a reckoning with the ephemeral and the eternal nature of time. In one instance, reading the dates transcribed on stones, I am awestruck by the brevity of our lives. And yet, there is some deep awareness in me of time’s seamlessness, of lives lost that remain ever still, memory and wind in this crisp fall air. Something transient… and something permanent beyond our short span of individual life.
This year, my ritual encounter with death has been more intimate. In the middle of the night, I am called to attend to the bedside of a woman who has just breathed her last breath. Her lips are parted, frozen open, body still like a figure in a wax museum. I touch her hands, offering prayer, speaking her name, honor for the deceased, comfort for those in grief.
And so we die- with our mouths wide open, the last breath leaving- but to where is it released? The word breath in Hebrew- ruach- is the same as spirit, and the two are linked in age-old faith. The woman in the bed is gone, but it is clear in the lives of loved ones, her spirit remains.
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I am listening to a song by the Indigo Girls….”and when the river eclipsed your life, and sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me, then it was my rebirth.” Singer-Songwriter Emily Saliers wrote this song in 1993 in honor of Virginia Woolf. She was inspired after reading her diary.
I have listened to this song over and over this month; as it describes so clearly my own connection to a historic figure- Margaret Fuller, a fellow Unitarian and contemporary of Parker’s. In November of 1844, Margaret Fuller walked these same streets, and penned America’s first book for women’s equality-- just steps away from the coffeehouse where I sit typing away right now. And reading her letters and diary, I came to know not only her ambition-- but moreso, her longing for justice, for the human equality whose lack had caused her deep suffering, for connection and spiritual union with life.
And I wonder too if words, written in books and diaries, might be a transmitter of breath… a transmitter of the soul.
“The apathy of time laughs in my face…” sings Emily...
“Did you hear me say ‘each life has its place’? “
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I remember my first visit to cemetery when I was eleven years old. It was November after my grandfather died. We went to decorate his grave on Veterans Day. My Grandpa Bill, a WWII vet, had died of a stroke, but I did not feel his presence in that graveyard. Later I knew it through a visit, in a dream.
The soul - the breath- is timeless. My grandfather, my father, and all the other loved ones I have lost remain in memory, in blood, in dream, in the carrying on of life.
I think of those whom I have lost: my grandfather’s adoration of cats and tomatoes he grew from seed; my father’s love for morning prayer, walks in fresh air, and his Howard Zinn outlook of American history; my maternal grandmother’s childlike expressions of delight in ever simple gift; and my paternal grandparents devotion to serving the poor, as they cooked meals for the homeless shelter and brought bags of groceries in place of Christmas presents for each other every year.
I come from a long line of people who taught me sacred ways of living in this world. These stories remain with me always and consciously and unconsciously influence my way of life.
As time goes on, the intimacy grows stronger. I have called upon my ancestors, have felt their presence within me.
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In my time of living on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, I came to know ancestry in another way. There were stories shared generation to generation, and songs- the wail and beat of drums- cast through the night air. There was a soft wind over plateaus made of dust, the way the trees swayed in the breeze. And there was also the haunting echo of women and children’s tormented voices, the tremors of horrific violence reverberating into present day’s inherited wounds. But also, passed down generation to generation, were the ways of knowing and healing this birthright of trauma. The call of the people was to reconnect with their past, their tribal ways, in order to heal these scars.
It seems that living in Beacon, NY for the past seven years, I have come to know place differently, as a transmission of ancestry. I know what ancestral land is, that when something is called sacred it must contain a story. It must be literally infused with heritage, with the stuff of our human lives. I have known some of those souls in cemeteries, others in the written word, and still others in crumbling architecture and mountain air.
Knowing our ancestry is a kind of timeless remembering, of RE-membering. Putting back together- the body with the soul, the timeless soul reborn in new bodies, animating our lies with the stories of our past. This soul- filled world might be our inheritance, might be a place where everything around us is filled with meaning.
To discover our ancestry in its fullest, I believe, we must be mystics-- a term I define as coming into our full aliveness, of moving out of the mind and into the heart, into the sea of oceanic awareness. But it is also a place of full earthly embodiment-- and maybe the place where these worlds meet. This is a place where time knows no bounds, and voices of our past whisper in our ears like long lost friends. The ancestors breathe, they live in our bones, they walk beside us. We have lived before, and they live with us still. They revive us with their presence, and embolden us to walk in footsteps they have tread before, while paving a new way still.
And in that final moment when the breath is released, I know deeply in some intuitive way that the place of the soul’s release is not to some heaven light years away, but into the bodies and lives of all those who surround the departed with love… she breathes her last breath into us. This most intimate of transmissions is a call, as soul enters into hearts as love eternal.
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