Amahoro: Instructions for Living & Dying

Instructions for living are instructions for dying. Instructions for dying are instructions for breathing. The most exquisite meditation only lasts a moment. We are made of moments, some never-ending.

Awakening is beyond instruction, a pearl of sun folded in the gauze of morning mist, like a wound. The grace of palliative care is not tasted in the ashram, the zendo or yoga studio, but on the death bed. Or now, in the crisis of the ordinary heart, the gossamer transition from breath to breath, when we hear a friend say: "The argument between you and yourself is over, dear. Now your work is sinking from the forehead to the chest.
                             
"Your mind has done enough complaining. It's time to place attention here, where the pain is. Your dizziness is just a disconnection from the ground. Feel the weight of your sole, your bare foot touching the wet earth. Plant yourself in the Mother and breathe through your root.
                            
"If your rib cage burns, no need to call it fear. Let this violet pool of sensation draw you home, to the spring between your eyebrows, where voluptuous and slow
you tumble through clear nectar, falling into the center of your original body. Enter the aching and plummet toward stillness. A vast compassion will catch you, dark energy arms, clouds of clustered stars, wordless and resonant with muffled lightning.
                            
"In your belly is a door, the portal of grief and loss. Step through, I will go with you. Why insist on getting smaller? You are using the wrong words, like death. A passing chill on the back of your neck. A dust mote between your exhalation and the next breath. An ocean of silence whispered in your left ear. It would be wiser to use words like opening, mother, musk.
                            
"It is time to honor how spacious you are. Let the hollow in your throat become the sky. Let the crown of your head become an active volcano of silence. No one but you has the privilege of choosing to name this moment beauty, or annihilation.
                            
“Yet the highest work is not to say anything. Just let your eye pour its cup of tears into her gaze. Whose gaze? The one who gives you this breath, the one to whom you return it as an offering. Respire with the rhythm of her breast. The Mother will administer the unction of amazement, daubing your forehead with kisses like the faintest pressure of the spirit on the flesh.

"You will feel the green forest around you, the fragrant kingdom of loam, last year's leaves, the chime of the larva beneath a stone, fellow ferns unraveling their fingers, offering seeds on the morning of Imbolc, when the veil between the seasons, between death and birth, is
a mist turning to gentle rain, rain turning to mist, the sun wrapped like a pearl, and all creatures are shrouded in Grace."

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* Hear this prose-poem read aloud: Link  
* Amahoro is an African greeting and blessing used in Burundi and Rwanda, meaning, 'Peace to you.' Painting by Wolfgang Otto.

2 comments:

Marcia Miller said...

as always, Fred, your words leave me touched to places within that are timeless. Thanks so much for this and so many of your poems.

AKL said...

Love to you, Marcia. Thank you for your work.