Clarity

Sometimes a feeling of the end comes, before the actual end comes. Anyway, you know it is near. That changes things, in some unpredictable ways.  A kind of shroud descends. The world becomes more precious, and each moment is laden with portent.  What crowds into everything is the unknown.

Death is near-by, waiting for the inexplicable time, the corralling moment, when everything known goes bye-bye. Waiting is. Still, the opportunity to fill the end, with all that has meaning, presses. It is a time like no other.

This is what’s happening to me.  I celebrated the New Year with a medicine journey. It turned out that the medicine was about being at the end-stage. Surprisingly, it wasn’t morbid. I was whisked from knowing about death to dying — and the world turned more vivid. Clouds parted. I became more completely me. And a familiar, but somehow freshened clarity, appeared. I am no longer waiting for the inevitable, I am the inevitable.

Dying is a trip. Things are more urgent, while other things, lose their urgency. And urgency isn’t about time, it is about accuracy and completeness. I have so much to give thanks for. Nuances have flags now, and I notice like I never did. Everything shines with a breathtaking clarity. The darkness is even darker, but more intriguing, and more filled with potential.  I love this sense of being blessed to be here, and knowing that I’m passing through. Dissolving into wholeness. There is a tenuousness to things that evokes preciousness.

If I’d have known dying was so good, I would have died sooner.

The end is here. I don’t mean in this moment. I don’t know when, any more than I did before. So, I could still be around years from now. I don’t know. But, I do know that the experience of dying suits me better, than what I’ve done until now. Things are changing. I can feel myself integrating, in unpredictable ways, the end.

Does this mean that while I am alive I’ll live differently? I don’t know. Will I continue doing some of the things I’ve been doing? I don’t know. Everything and nothing could change. Mystery seems to have gotten deeper. The moment seems more pleasantly infused with it. Not-knowing, and being OK with it, thrusts me further into a warm fuzzy unknown. Love somehow permeates it all, bringing with it a strange clarity.

My days are full of “I get to” instead of “I have to” now. There is so much relief that comes with things being over. I don’t have to try anymore. I am free, even from my own unfulfilled longings. I trust that the Universe knows what it is doing. There is nothing so relaxing as letting go.

It won’t be long now. Oddly, I’m more here now that I’m going.