FEAR NOTHING, BUT THE FAILURE TO EXPERIENCE YOUR TRUE NATURE…

I have been trying to reinvent myself as a writer, because I get no response from the outside world, it is a daunting and difficult task…writing for the sound in my own ear.

I can’t tell if I am succeeding or wasting my time, and I often have no internal thread to follow either.

These months of solitude have been hard in a very particular way. The first time this happened to me, the drama of my own internal process was so scary, vivid, and demanding I didn’t have the necessary stillness to truly know what was going on inside me. Like so many people who use busyness to keep from feeling themselves when I left my job, had no external demands on my time, I underwent the first in a long series of mini identity deaths. Most of us spend an entire lifetime not knowing that our personalities, the very “me”-ness of us, is just a collection of behaviors, preferences, automatic responses, emotional triggers, and avoidance rituals that were started like a wind up toy in our childhoods, in response to the demands of the adults around us. These mechanisms become so deterministic that eventually we think these early choices are the who, of who we are. I have discovered, over a long and winding path, that nothing could be further from the truth.

Four or five days prior to my mother’s death, she was walking with great effort back to her bed to lie down, and in the most off-handed way, she said, I guess mostly to herself… “I don’t know who I am”. The pathos in that statement almost sent me reeling and the sound in her voice…a combination of surprise, innocence, regret, sadness, and resignation, nearly sent me to my knees. As it turned out, her sudden and deeply sad realization came two days prior to her death.

She wasn’t expecting a response from me, I am not entirely certain she was even speaking to me, and I understood exactly her dilemma. I had felt that way all the time, for the first two and a half decades of my life. Who am I? How did I get here? Where exactly is here, anyway? …and much later… Am I headed in the right direction? If these questions have not darkened your door, I can promise two things…the end will be rocky, and you haven’t spent your time wisely.

It is so easy for us to spend our youth and vigor, expressing just that…youth and vigor, achieving, acquiring, demanding, results and more results, getting and taking. The antidote to this youthful folly is little mini deaths. Dying to the idea that you are the world’s one and only. Dying to the idea that you deserve only the good things in life…and that you know what is, for you, the good. Dying to the notion that your preferences, opinions, personality quirks, and desires have a preeminent place in the scheme of things. Why dying? I don’t know…it’s just the way it is.

Everyone from Biblical authors to Shakespeare counsel that we should die, before we die…sounds like a neat trick, but what exactly does it mean, and why is it valuable?

My spiritual journey has been fraught with the experience of death- in the early going-because I lacked imagination, intuition, and courage; it was fear of an actual bodily death that hounded me nearly mad. As I have said before, in these pages, I had to have baby sitter’s to get through it; both my young gay friend and an elderly woman in the condo complex where I lived, would let me stay with them to allay my anxieties…and much to my shame, I used them ruthlessly, in my neediness and fear.

Reportedly, I even did the actual thing during a surgery in my seventeenth year, my heart quit and apparently getting me up and started again was almost not accomplished. That night, the pain killers they gave me were not enough, and I awoke to a pain in my chest from the electric shocks they had given me that was the fiercest, most virulent pain I have ever experienced. I have broken two bones in my life and passed a gall stone, and those events didn’t come close to the pain I felt from the thumping they had given me.

Once I even went to get an aids test, even though I had not had sex, used injectable drugs, or had a blood transfusion for years and years, but the fear of dying was so constant, palpable, and present, that it attached itself to every hyperbolic, hypochondriacal situation that came down the emotional pike.

So if you think you should get an award for baseless, groundless, anxieties-the trophies are all in my basement-carefully preserved in memoriam, to the times in my life where fear ran everything about my daily existence.

Sometimes now, I cannot believe the quantity and pervasiveness of the fears I used to feel…much more importantly, I haven’t been afraid for years and years. Now, I am not saying that if a bear were to leap off a tree in front of me, that I wouldn’t go screaming out of the forest tearing my hair out at the roots, you bet your ass I would!! No, I am talking about those obnoxious little fears that make you worry about the stove, the doors locked, the bump you felt under your arm, the economy, the neighbors dog, the general decline of western civilization…and oh yeah, the big kahuna…actual physical death. None of these things breed fear in me, at least not today and not for many years now.

Lest you think I might be lying about that last one…I have been a Volunteer Hospice Chaplain and I was present when both my parents died. And in all cases, I found the experience beautiful, serene, calming, simple, quiet, kind, loving, generous, and immanently doable.

There is nothing I saw in the deaths I witnessed, and I pay very close attention, that was scary, ugly, bad, or unworthy of us. From where I stood, death had a grace, gentleness, and an ease that is very difficult to explain. Nothing like Hollywood portrays it.

My father was so busy talking to some invisible someone else, that our presence in the room, his wife and three daughters, was not registered by him at all. His eyebrows went up and down, knitting together in concentration and understanding, his mouth moved in harmony with his other facial features like he was having the conversation of a lifetime. He didn’t speak out loud, but he didn’t need to, for me to see the animation of his last conversation. He neither needed us, or possible even wanted us there.

Statistics say that most people die in the wee hours of the morning, when the family members that having been hanging onto them are finally gone so that they may, just as finally, let go. My dad, charismatic and self-referencing as he was, didn’t need to wait for us to leave…and somehow I knew he would let me see it, something I really wanted to participate in. Having shed my psychological fear of death, through the many and varied small personality deaths I had undergone by that time, I wanted to witness the death of a family member, as opposed to a stranger. To see if it contained the same graces I had already experienced…it did, and many more.

A year later, my hyper shy mother, allowed me the same opportunity. Her death was even more vibrant, for me, than my fathers… I assume that was because of the power of our relationship and its many complex and far reaching aspects. I remember the moment of her death, as being the single most alive moment I have ever felt…and I have jumped out of planes. Nothing in my lifetime has been as pure, real, arresting, or powerful. No… I don’t fear death or even, it’s sometimes ugly stepsister, pain. I am not saying I wish to suffer, but facing emotional pain has been my liberator, even my savior…so I assume physical pain has some value as well…if not, well then, there are always drugs.

Today, the 25^th of June, three well know celebrities have died in this last week, two of them today. It’s interesting how death changes your landscape, I remember very clearly the moment I learned of Princess Diana’s death. Going out onto my duplex porch in the clear California morning sunshine, and opening the paper to see her face with text so large it was almost obscene, pronouncing her death in big, black, bold font. There is a shift that occurs, a rearranging of your topography.

When my sister called to tell me, my niece, only 21 years old had been shot and killed on her birthday. That too, rearranged my topography, of course, in a much more personal way than that of a celebrities passing.

It’s the hole that death leaves that can be so painful, not the dying itself.

With my mother and father, there wasn’t even that much of a hole…particularly with my mother. Our relationship had been so fruitful, so layered, so rich…in truth, in harmony, in forgiveness, in unconditional acceptance…that letting her go, was simple, easy, even right in an unexplainable kind of way.

Gone are the dramatic days, when Death seemed like a maestro, conducting the tempo and pauses of my life. Always at the helm, turning me this way and that, so that I might be exposed, tempered, and baked to perfection. Now Death seems like a companion, who urges me to serve, to give, to find my contribution.

I am 53 today, nine years younger than Farrah-three years older than Michael…but my days are numbered as well. I am not privy to that number, neither are you. The question, to my mind, is not when…but whether…whether or not, we have done what was ours to do…whether or not, we have given more than we took…whether or not, we have overcome our natural tendency toward selfishness and made of ourselves a gift, to the world, to each other, to ourselves. Are we ripe? Are we worth the gift we have had bestowed upon us, the gift of breath, and life?

We need not be famous, talented, or beautiful, to make our contribution. We need only become authentic, real, kind, considerate, capable, and giving.

I cannot speak to realms beyond this one…but here; it is the greater that lift up the lesser. The more mature you become, the more necessary your contribution, there are so many emotional and psychological children wearing adult suits who rule our culture…that without the unbroken line of sages who have given their all, that we might understand…humanity would have lost its way centuries ago. You can always tell the authentic light bearers, their humility shines like a great light, and leads the way for so many undeveloped and underdeveloped brethren.

I know, I have been following the light of just such an individual for a great many years. He too, is not far from physical death…but his life has touched so many thousands that his ripple will echo for decades and decades. His life is the standard by which I measure my own contribution…and find it lacking.

I agree with Sir Francis Bacon, who said, ”Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.” I am in such agreement with this statement, that I might suggest to you that your fear of death is a good barometer by which to measure your emotional and spiritual health. If Death scares the living bejesus out of you, then you are not at home…and it is that absence, rather than your physical death that is the basis of all your fears.

This essay is titled, “Fear Nothing but the Failure to Experience Your True Nature”, your true nature is birthless and deathless, your true nature is the essence of life itself, your true nature cannot be harmed, killed, or given birth to…take your rest here, in your true nature. Be at rest from the constant seeking outside yourself, there is nothing out there to find, everything that has real value was laid gently upon your heart the day of your birth. It is up to you to discover and reveal that truth.

Leonardo da Vinci, a towering genius felt this way about Death…”As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”

I personally, am striving for a life so well used that it will bring with it a “happy death”. Sometimes I am unsure of the best use of my life, but the desire to use it well, is the compass by which I direct my journey.

I bet you think I have no sense of humor at all…it isn’t true; I am told that I can often be quite funny. But it seems in these pages, where I am attempting to leave some sort of legacy that I tend toward the somber and serious, the deeper registers of life's melodies. So, amongst the other minds here quoted…allow me to include this, from Paula Poundstone…”The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling.”

Until Tomorrow…

R.

Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

Fear Nothing but the Failure to Experience Your True Nature…essay by Ronni Miller copyright 2009 all rights reserved, reprinting available with author’s permission. If you wish to contact the author you may do so at ronnidmiller@aol.com