15: Tiny little lights in the dark

 

That night I crawled under the rosy colored sheets in my little room in Brooklyn with such a peaceful feeling of watching it all from two steps away. I was doing the crawling, but also I was wasn’t. I wasn’t this body. I felt the lightness of the simple cover on my skin, I felt the humid heat of the room in the warm summer night, I watched the night fall outside the window, slowly turning from deep blue with clouds the color of ripe peaches to deep black sprinkled with stars. And at the same time I knew that the only thing that was real was this glowing, expansive, timeless light that seemed to originate from somewhere just underneath everything else. It was beautiful beyond belief.

This night I slept on my bed number 4 out of many. It was a mattress for two, placed directly on the hard wood floor. I took a second to notice the irony of sleeping single lady on a bed made for two, before sprawling out to fill all of it myself. The sheets were exquisite, the room bare, one wall was raw brick, the others painted in subdued greys, on the book shelf were works of Virginia Woolf and Hemingway. There was only one window, but that window opened onto the back yard and the iconic New York fire escape.

Earlier that day I had looked out the window and up the stairs of it, daring myself to climb out. The red patches of rust on the black paint and general low maintenance of the iron fire escape had kept me on the window sill instead. I had the window wide open, no fan in the room was working to dissipate the heat. I was good with that, I would have turned it off to hear the night.

This night the window had stayed open for awhile. I could hear the cars passing on a street a few blocks down. A siren from a police car. The neighbors laughing, a cat moaning in the dark. That night sleep came deep and strong.

The next morning the spell had lifted as fast as it arrived. Still in bed, I couldn’t move. I physically could not get out. Entirely immobilized by pain, I desperately tried to lift my right hand off of the sheets. I couldn’t. It made me so scared tears started rolling down my cheeks and into my ears, because gravity; I could not move my head to help the water flow past and onto the pillow instead.

- I’m dying.

The sentence came as if it had materialized straight out of the air itself. I felt the truth more than consciously understood it.

I knew, I was dying.

I felt the walls of the cells in my body wither like an old-growth tree with marks of a deep knife-wound in it’s bark.

But to my complete confusion it was like a second set of cells existed right next to the first ones. The second set was vibrating with intense electricity and light. It was like they were shimmering. Alive, but somewhere else, not entirely here, not in this reality, not on this plane of existence. Like two planes of reality were merging, and the first plane was dimming into death. While the other was taking over, but not in any malicious way. Just a new one. It was odd.

I felt the dying - I felt the newness. I felt how the cells that were bowing out of this version of the theater of life were so old. They were tired.

And suddenly I realized that this moment was the repetition of everything all the time.

We do die. Not just once.

All. The. Time.

Every second of the day, we die.

Suddenly I felt how the light blew me open from the inside. It was not white, it had no color, it was not of this place. It was knowing:

If we die all the time – we are also always born into freedom.

When you know, you are going to die, there is a point, when Fear falls away.

You look at the ultimate, Death itself. And you accept what is.

The freedom of that is what welcomes you home to where we go, when we go from here. Where we were before we came here.

I know, not just from reading other people’s experiences from being on the brink of death. I know because I was myself.

When I committed suicide, this is how it was for me. It was the exact right thin, I was exactly where I was supposed to be. It was contrary to popular belief on the subject never a 'choice'. Never. It was a thing that happened. 'I' doing nothing, as little as I decide anything else on the large scale of anything in this world. In that moment when death was imminent, I simply felt peace. I accepted that, well, this was it. And I was ready. It was peace and radical beauty beyond description. Only apparently I wasn't allowed but to exist in that space of freedom only a little bit that one day.

Now I realized, I never left. I only thought I did. 

I realized that this Light was there all the time. Constantly. The only thing dimming it, was the human tendency to either forget or deny.

But this was impossible to deny: When we die every minute, we are also given the constant gift of looking at death, overcoming the fear, and then taking in the deep knowing of the freedom that lies beyond - every minute, all the time, every day.

Every second of the day is where that freedom waits. This second, you are already dying. Not in ten years, not tomorrow; NOW.

Even on the very real non-abstract cellular plane; You die. All the time. None of the cells that make up your body today were there seven years ago. And yet so many hold on to the belief that we are the same as we used to be. We’re not. I’m not. We're always new. Always gone. Constantly changing. Constantly dying. And constantly being re-born.

That was the second thing that hit me: Rebirth does not have to be a convoluted thing that may or may not happen when we leave this existence. It is happening now as everything else is:

That ancient story of Jesus, waking up from the dead and walking straight out from his tomb in a Jerusalem cave? This was it. He was telling us this: That we DO all experience being born again. Re-incarnation. Raising from the grave, from the dead, into this physical body. All the time.

Every second of the day, you are already dead. You are already released from all the things that define you. All you may feel hold you back.

We’re dying. We’re dead. And then we’re reborn. To a new life. All the time. Every single second.

So.

We're also always set free. Free from all the limitations we put on life. 

If you knew you were going to die - not only knew, but fully understood on a completely conscious level - what would be the one thing you wished you'd done, while you still could? What would be the one thing you wanted to do? List your things right now, look at them, take it in. And then do it (unless what you want is to harm other people. Then definitely do not do it, and get help instead).

I know for me, that was mindblowingly simple; I wanted to go to the Met. And so I did. But not until I could stand on my feet again after the complete mental overload of doing a yoga intensive even with the best teachers on the planet on the steady diet of Pedialyte and crackers. 

*

A few days later I finally managed to explain to myself that the fire escape was perfectly safe.

I had edged myself over the low window sill of my little room, onto the thin rails of rusty metal, looking out on the wildness of the back yard. Now with a pillow in my back I was congratulating my food-poisoned self and my fear of heights of an adventured well done.

The yard was almost dark. It had been another one of those days, where I had been asleep unable to move all day. In a few hours I would be back to sleep again, not because I wanted to, but because chronic illness contrary to popular belief has a will of it’s own. And this never ending food poisoning wasn't helping. I was just thankful to at least be somewhere else than under covers even for a few moments.

Underneath me a cat walked gracefully through the high grasses and jumped onto a couch the color of years worth of street dust. Somewhere a different cat howled its sorrows into the darkening of day. To my left I could see the top of clouds colored pink towards the yellowing sunset. The color reflected off of the building to my right; a deep, glowing warm yellow. I was enveloped in it.

The yard was nothing but weeds covering the ground and patches of dry dirt. The neighbors yard had rows of light bulbs, unlit. I could hear the angry hiss of an A.C. The muffled constant hum from traffic on Franklin Ave. An occasional motorcycle spending up. A neighbor pouring ice cubes into a glass. Another one yelling. The A.C. stopped, and there the trees. Swaying gently in a breeze I couldn’t see, except for it’s gently moving the tree-wall of branches. They were all around, in a perfect half-circle from the building I was leaning up against and out to the one in front of me,  just beyond the backyards. And tall, the tree tops reaching at least up over the three story buildings, the outer branches almost within touch. I was sticky with sweat from sleeping all day, the general illness of this little body had done me in. A whole bottle of baby blue Pedialyte next to me, together with a box of crackers; It tasted soft, and like something was working.

The sunset has turned a soft pink now against the deepening blue of the sky. I could make out a table in the yard. The kitten was sleeping on the dilapidated sofa. The air was cooling down, but it was still humid and soft on my naked arms and legs.

Wait, what was that? Did I just…. What was that? Wait. There it was again. What the heck, what was that? I squinted my eyes and leaned forward to catch a better look. But carefully, so I wouldn't accidentally just fall through a crack to rusty to hold. There! There it was again. And there! It was like these tiny sparks of light, like itty-bitty people striking matches. All over the yard. In the bushes, in the shadows under the bushes, on the torn pillows in the plastic chairs down there.

- It must be garden lights, I thought to myself. Like, some very fancy garden lights that apparently could be everywhere at once with no apparent system to their blinking lights. Both under bushes and on torn, old pillows. Who would think to put garden lights on their torn, old pillows? I’d never seen anything like it, but then again I was very far from where I was born.

No, wait. Oh. There, it was in the trees now! All the way to the very top of the trees just a foot in front of me. Tiny lights flickering; Light, darkness, light, darkness. Mesmerized I stared trying to catch a glimpse of one of them as the light switched on.

Suddenly it was right in front of me. Like in front of my very own nose, so close I could have touched it. I just stared dumb-founded. What the heck was this magic? That’s when the penny dropped; It was tiny, living things. I had heard of this. I racked my brain for the word, and there it was floating up from the dark: Fireflies. I was looking at the magic that was fireflies. They were everywhere. Tiny little lights in the growing darkness, as the day dimmed into night.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and that moment I remembered that no matter the agony of the darkness, there will always also be this: The incredible immensity that is the Light. Or in this case many little ones at once. 

There is always also light.

As the fireflies settled down and their light stopped, I looked up to see the first stars on the sky still lighter than the now completely dark trees. The yard itself beneath the tall trees now descended into impenetrable darkness.

I knew as I had know before. As I knew when I hiked deserted backroads at Midnight with no one else around. As I knew when I sat up alone in the small hours of the night, always the night owl, listening to the calm breathing of the world: 

If we don’t allow for the dark, if we don’t lean into it - we will never see the light and the magic. The darkness isn’t evil, it isn’t bad, it’s just a different experience. And on it’s back drop does the most magical things become apparent. As in a womb, the darkness can be our protector and friend and the place where good things go to think of more.

No firefly would soar in the brightness of the sun. No star twinkle if the night wasn’t soothing and dark.

The darkness isn’t the enemy. It just is. And even in the deepest of darkness; There is always also light.