This Is It

Spring! How glorious. New beginnings, or at least re-beginnings, as the buds on the trees show signs of getting ready to pop. The other day I saw a plump red cardinal sitting casually in the bamboo and I could feel a sense of excitement rising inside me. Spring pulls us into activity. And, I have to admit that recently I’ve become impatient for winter to end. I’m keen to get out into the garden, go kayaking, smell the cut grass, sit at a street-side restaurant table with friends enjoying the night air. 

But I’m also sorry to leave the winter behind. I love the silence, the stillness of winter, as if the whole world—at least the part of it where I live in the northeast—is doing Shavasana, the yogic pose of lying still on one’s back in blissful neutrality. Shavasana allows you to let go and surrender. There is nothing to do but be present and breathe. We see the essence of the moment in this pose, just as we see the essence of things in the stillness of winter. With the foliage gone we see the shapes of the tress—the branches curving, shooting outward and upward, overlaying each other in some mysterious design, the knobby protrusions… all of it silhouetted against the sky. We see further into the distance, so the larger expanse and contour of the world becomes visible. Sounds stand out with an individual clarity we don’t hear in the buzzing multiplicity of sounds that bombard us in spring and summer. 

Each of these seasonal extremes holds a different truth; both are necessary to understand life. And now I’m beginning to see that they really aren’t separate. They exist together at the same time. Within winter exists spring, not just as potential, but as some subtle distillation of what it will become. And within spring there is winter. I can hold both in mind at the same time; live both. 

I believe this is the path to dying well. By seeing living and dying as conjoined, not pushing one away and grabbing for the other, we get to appreciate the richness and mystery of this miraculous existence. If we lean in to this truth and just meet each moment completely, we will see life and death together without existential fear, but rather with a humble “ahh,” so this is it.