the divine meditation newsletter: a year to live
A newsletter contemplating the divine in the everyday
I’m living this year as if it were my last. I’m doing it with a group of folks, inspired by the Buddha’s teachings, who invited us to contemplate death as a way to be more fully alive. The class is based on the book, A Year to Live by Stephen Levine. These words on the back cover sealed my “yes” to this year of spiritual development:
“It is an exercise that gives us the opportunity to deal with unfinished business and enter into a new and vibrant relationship with life [...] so whenever the ultimate moment does arrive for each of us, we will not feel it has come too soon.”
During our first class, teacher Vinny Ferraro asked us to imagine we had received a terminal prognosis – we would die by the end of this year. (For some folks in the group, they don’t have to imagine, this is their experience.) I sat with it, remembering that the end could come at any time. After the initial numbness and denial, two things of note happened:
A calm desire to move towards connection. ‘Oh yes, I will go to Jax’s house tonight! And maybe I will flirt with that person next time I see them!’ What struck me is the desire for connection was not accompanied by a feeling of scarcity or desperation – a script perhaps associated with “time’s running out!” It was a simple, open hearted yes.
A readiness to express the creative work that I want to express out of this body. It was a gentle, “let’s begin.” This guiding voice also offered, “you don’t need to know what it’s gonna be, or what it might all add up to.” I’ve stopped myself countlessly from writing and creating, all because I struggled to dignify doing it publicly, if there was no (false) sense of certainty attached to it (ex. for a successful book or project, I have to wait until the astrology is better, or, and this is a big one, that no one in the world will say anything bad about it). “Sorry, wrong planet” as I heard meditation teacher Jack Kornfield say, which has become a kind of short hand for me, in response to the belief that we could be human and avoid the pain of rejection.
If you’re reading these words today, it’s because I’ve decided to ‘get out of the way’ and write.
In this year to live, there is an ongoing genocide of Palestinians, the horrors of which grow more and more catastrophic with each passing day. There is not a person in Gaza who is not hungry, with one in four people who are starving. For months, US-ians like me have watched Palestinian journalists livestream their own genocide in English, showing us the power of our very attention to save lives. Their messages to us, a painful reminder that within the greed, hatred, and delusion of this world, our very awareness is not created equally. To find my way out of self-hatred and shame to be on the tax paying side of these atrocities, I contemplate, ‘what if I chose this incarnation?’
What if I chose this very existence? This consciousness inside a South Asian child raised Hindu, with parents traumatized by a genocide in Bangladesh, their pain raising me with Islamophobic beliefs, a culture of sexual abuse, and the social inequality of caste, their wise survival response bringing me here to be birthed and raised on colonized indigenous land stewarded by formerly enslaved Africans, where I’ll grow up to stop traffic with queer comrades shouting, “everyone for everyone, ceasefire now!” for a Free Palestine.
I don’t have proof (!) I simply have a resolve to live this life as if I chose it, all “10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows” of it as the Buddha described. It’s from this embodiment that I’ll work for the liberation of all beings. As I write, it becomes less important whether or not I chose it. It matters what I do with it and what healing comes through it.
Last week, I woke up from a dream with this clear knowing: Palestine will be free in our lifetimes. Most of us will live to see it. And the clarity of this freedom, deemed “too complicated” and too polemic for too long, will have shifted our cultural DNA. Freedoms once called impossible will no longer feel so impossible. In other words, “Palestine will free us all.”
I don’t know a person of my generation who is not being stretched, changed, and broken open by the last four months. And I mean change in the Octavia Butler sense, that “all you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”
In the years to come, may we contemplate Octavia Butler’s wisdom, and do our best to not reproduce the harm we have been changed by. To paraphrase my therapist, what generates safety is not the belief that “bad people” so different from ourselves cause harm, but an awareness that we too are capable of harming. Each day, we are learning what living as witnesses of a genocide funded and normalized by our government asks us to heal and change, in ourselves, our families, our communities, and beyond. None of us are exempt from feeling our pain and making a daily choice to write a healing story from it.
Reader, these are the words that come, as I begin a year of meditating on my death, and touching into the preciousness of this life. I hope to keep sharing with you from the heart, so that when the time does come, I’ll know it won’t have come a moment too soon.
With love,
sumi