Cutting Through Tragedy
When death has a new significance for us, so does life.
We will never be the same after the calamity knocked on our doors and took so many of us abruptly — yesterday Brazil recorded more than 3600 deaths by Covid. As human beings, we know that death is always on the way, or at least we should. But the psychological mechanism that in our minds insists on putting this event in the remote future is weakened now, in the midst of what we are experiencing. This is good news for our humanity: death makes us human and brings us closer.
This has long been lost in our culture. The extreme individualism and the toxic division installed in our organisms removed us from our humanity, from ourselves. If we are to survive as a civilization, that needs to be rescued and cultivated. Human beings without humanity are not human. Our connections make us who we are. This deviated individualism advocated by the cult of success and personality is in the genesis of the great disease that has affected us and Covid is just an expression of that.
When madness takes control of our collective actions by destroying the environment — our larger body — in favor of meaningless consumerism hidden behind economic concepts that camouflage greed and arrogance, for example, we can remember death and instantly bring our sanity back. We are vulnerable beings. It is not real to act as if we are going to live forever or to pretend that we are the owners of this land. We don’t own anything, nor do we own our destinations. Our life is an expression of the relationships that sustain us at all levels, starting from ourselves and towards the whole. Understanding our place in existence organizes us as beings and communities.
We need to learn to respect the land we step on but starting with our bodies. Honoring them as sacred temples, we will come to discover the infinite body that we are, far beyond our corporeal borders. It encompasses all existential dimensions, earth, and space. May this understanding generate love for the great body: the earth is our mother. To love the earth is to heal the earth. To heal the earth is to heal ourselves, our world, and society. May all this death be not in vain. It’s time to heal ourselves! We will go through the tragedy and rise again more human and connected.
For those of us who have lost a loved one to Covid and for those of us who have had Covid and who know what it’s like when your lungs can’t get enough oxygen to breathe, death can be more real and present now — I speak from what I’ve experienced in the past few weeks. I recognize that we are not the same and that is why our responses to the immediacy of death will not be, either, but I want to share that I welcome this as a new opportunity for love. I have gone through other rites of passage before, but nothing resembles this crossing, especially because it touches deeply into our collective dimension. My felt-experience is diluted among innumerable experiences of others.
Being hospitalized with covid taking oxygen while my mother was also facing covid and the complications of advanced lung cancer was like swimming simultaneously in mine and our shared experience of darkness and calamity. I feel it deeply impacting my compassionate response — I may never have felt so human as I do now, nor so close to you. I cannot separate what arose from my mother’s death and the possibility that I would not recover. It is but one integrated response.
The love I feel from here is real, its depth, care, and need for openness. It is not a love that resembles the bliss of meditative states, nor does it have anything to do with romantic love. It is about valuing the fragile opportunity of this delicate human life with a living presence. The wish to make life a little more beautiful while I still have time for it.
Sense and purpose can be intellectualized, but true love and compassion are too visceral to be explained. I wish we could all learn to feel what we feel without fear or censure. Feeling and perceiving is the door to healing, body, and soul. Feeling and perceiving, we awaken and awaken, we discover love. With love, we can live each breath as if it were the first and also the last. Because in fact, it is so. If we dare to see things as they are and not only through the filters of our past thoughts and conditioning, we will know what it means to say that each moment is truly unique and magical.
Today I feel the need to share, to talk about the time we have. Time deceives us: sometimes it seems so long that we forget that it is decreasing by the second, but at other times it proves to be non-existent. Death is the limit, the inexorable marker of the passage of time, the impossibility of relativizing. Wiser not to count on time, to recognize that we have no guarantee about what comes next or not.Since there is no time to express our hearts and be who we are, we had better do it now. Thus, death can transform our lives, bring us closer and humanize us.
Whoever you are and wherever you are, I extend my heart to you. Let us look together at the immense pain we are going through, with the eyes of our hearts. The heart is the center from which we can see beyond appearances, fear, and doubt. It has never been more important for us to discover an understanding that transcends words and gives us the encouragement and confidence to move on until darkness dissipates. May the future of a new birth be shaped in our horizons. May the sunshine high in our skies again. May we be able to breathe freely and embrace each other without reservation while we carry out the essential interconnection that unites us from beginningless begin.
