It is time. My husband and I drive into the nearby mountains where the third largest fire in Colorado history raged a few short weeks ago.
The swath of darkness I’ve seen from afar soon resolves itself into blackened tree after blackened tree, acre upon acre of scorched earth. We drive in near silence as the enormity unfolds, each turn of the road bringing new views of the same reality, punctuated by stands of miraculously living trees, their green dazzling to the eye.
We stop at a clearing off the main road. I walk to a group of four burnt trees, and lie amid blackened pine cones on blackened earth. I look up into jet colored branches set starkly against a vivid blue sky. I gaze at death.
Maranasati is an ancient Buddhist practice in which one meditates on the universality and inevitability of death. Such awareness, though, is not intended to be abstract. No, it is to be felt in the bones.
Buddhist Larry Rosenberg writes of sitting through the night with his teacher on an isolated beach in Mexico beside the “bloated, blue and festering corpse” of a drowned fisherman. As they awaited the arrival of the man’s family, Rosenberg shared feelings of fear, nausea, and resistance with his teacher, who encouraged him to simply greet whatever arose.
Though his experience was extreme, Rosenberg writes that maranasati is “not meant to be an exercise in morbidity or self~pity, or in terrorizing ourselves.” It’s just that in turning to face what frightens us, we can finally stop running.
While maranasti involves contemplation of one’s own physical death, life provides any number of opportunities to sit with endings, each a death in its own right. An aging body. A promising job or relationship gone sour. Sudden change with outcomes unknown. Each of these allows us to sit with what is, greeting life on its own terms, whether or not it is to our liking.
On an early morning walk recently, I heard terrified shrieks in the distance. As I reached a break in the trees, I saw into the valley below as a coyote first separated a fawn from its mother, then carried it by its neck off into the bushes. Helplessness, horror, anger and heartbreak rose alongside the awareness that this small body would likely nourish a litter of coyote young.
Similar feelings wash over me now. As I sit up amid the fire’s destruction, though, I find myself moving a bit closer to an in~the~bones acceptance that death is simply part of life. For blades of green are breaking through the charred soil at my fingertips. So soon after such enormous loss, life is begetting life, rising quite literally from the ashes of death.
And so, today this is my prayer: May green growing things sprout always from the burn scars of our lives. And may they lead us back to joy.
Namasté, dear ones,
Leia
Here are a couple of links to Rosenberg, first on maranasati~~
This second one is a short video excerpt of him talking quite refreshingly about what it means to live through difficulties as a fully alive human being, with our emotions intact~~
And finally, there can be a stark beauty in death. Here is a burnt branch heavy with blackened pine cones that came back from the mountains with me, a gift of those four trees. It lives now in our living room to remind me of this part of life~~
