It is amazing how the death of a loved one puts everything so swiftly, so suddenly— snap— into perspective. Death is like a chiropractic adjustment where your entire world, just like that, aligns true. People say that following the death of a beloved, you see them everywhere around you. I always thought this sounded kinda phony, like some spiritual woo-woo, but now I register it as legit. And how is it that following great loss we see the world anew?
Today I see my mom in every shifting cloud, in the wind in the tree-tops, on the trodden down earth on the footpath through the garden. Change is everywhere. Everything dances, trembles and shakes as it carries on through its short-lived days. From bones to ash, from daylight to dusk, from in-breath to out-breath, we are made from the stuff of change. Zen master Dogen taught that everything has “impermanence-buddha nature”. Impermanence-buddha nature, all one word.
When change is big, like in floods, fires and plate tectonics it is often a song that gets you through. Accompanying my mother on the long ride across the desert of death it was, simply, the song “Change” by Big Thief. I listened to it over and over, as we are wont to do in times of trial. Have you heard it? You must listen. It goes like this:
Change, like the sky
Like the leaves, like a butterfly
Death, like a door
To a place we’ve never been before
Everything grows by getting churned up, broken down and transformed. The lesson we learn in being with change is to learn to love the hard growth, the cracks, the tears, the ruptures, the shedding, the shifts…all of it. Change keeps reminding us not to grip too hard, not to cling, but to be ready at any time to turn on a dime, to give up what you think should be for what is.
Listen: “Change” by Big Thief
