Death, the last visit

by Marie Howe

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you'll know that it's started.
It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and
it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arm around you, it will hold you as long as you've ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you'll smell mud and hair and water.

You'll taste your mother's sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you'd spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you'll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
or so sweet and slow you'll scream give it to me give it to me until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won't ever come undone. 
Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you'll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing ever felt this good. 

^{Copyright © 1988 by Marie Howe}

On Greeting Death

It’s the days surrounding Samhain, a time when the elders say we are closer than ever to the world of the dead. And in the Northern Hemisphere, this is a time when we slip fully into the dark half of the year. The nights are noticeably longer now, noticeably colder. And we can’t help but get to thinking about that very long, very cold night coming for us all.

Isn’t this the reason for Halloween? For a thousand spooky movies wreathed in orange and yellow leaves? Now is a time for considering mortality.

Tibetan traditions built an elaborate bardo system to understand the many chambers you will enter into and exit out of after the moment of your death. For them, the key is how you embrace the passageway into the bardo.

It’s, I think, the right thought: how do we relate to Death?

More specifically, how will you greet Death as it comes walking up to the foot of your hospital bed, the machines around you beeping louder, faster? How will you greet Death as it slips into the backseat of your car while you set out for just another day at the office?

Isn’t that what so much of this spiritual work is for? To answer this question? To prepare us for this greeting?

But it’s difficult to face it directly. It’s hard to sit zazen and think: This is all so that I can let myself die.

Yet in a way, it is.

Coming to terms with death must take a lifetime, or many lifetimes, to achieve. And to come to terms, we would need Herculean strength, Mercurial cunning, and Martian resolve.

But maybe not. In the relational arts, we practice how to relate in a conscious way, cultivating the resonances that produce the exact music we are looking for—songs of connection, love, truth, and play.

The relational arts, and perhaps Circling most of all, teach us to acknowledge the full range of choice before us in any given moment. Even as epinephrine pours into our blood and turns on all the patterns of constriction and conflict, even as stories enact the deepest choreography of trauma and pain inside our minds—we learn to bring choice here into the present.

And when we talk about greeting Death, we are talking about a moment of relating. We are talking about a moment of choice. No matter how our flesh might yearn for just one more hour in the sun, can we make a choice to greet Death without constriction and conflict?

How might we do that?

I think we must do what human beings have always done before the great powers of creation and destruction.

We bow.

But to learn how to bow, to really prostrate ourselves in front of mighty powers, we must first embrace the power that is our birthright.

It takes a monarch to truly bow.

Become the King and Bow Low, Oh Lord

In the painting above, Frank Dicksee captures what it means to bow, both its fullest expression and its ultimate end.

He shows us a king in golden armor, surrounded by the adulation of beautiful women, the loyalty of brave soldiers, the wealth of an entire nation at his feet.

Let us see him, though, with eyes that see the dreaming of a king—not the reaction we might have to real monarchs sitting on real thrones. Let us see him as a grand vector of dharma, able to wield his power and grandeur in true service. Let us see him as an embodiment of what glory we all may rise to if we were to taste that moment of self-approval that gilds all the universe with inner light. Let us see him as what we might all become when we are crowned: fully willing to see and exert our strengths with both justice and mercy (a moment where we are also crowning in another sense, being born to the world anew).

As soon as we accept the crown and scepter of our position, we see what no one else can: the full eminence of that which is not golden, which is not covered in flower petals.

That is what the painting above shows. The king’s eyes do not admire his wealth, his adoring populace, his ready soldiers. His eyes look up to the power of death, here signified by the Christ.

Christ on the Cross, an image of death and death overcome. Overcome by what? By the understanding that our physical, earthly bodies are, at all moments and in all places, suffused with God. Jesus is the man. Christ is the Godhood. And Jesus Christ is what we might become when we are crowned—a moment when we can see ourselves as fully sacred and fully profane.

Christ takes us to the abyss, that yawning chasm between the knowable mysteries of existence and those greater mysteries that are the pillars of existence and beyond. His throne is the act of self-overcoming, of ego destruction, which is to say the Cross (a form where the vertical line of heaven intersects with the horizontal line of earth). His crown is the full recognition of the Hermetic principle of polarity—for when we give one man the king’s bejeweled crown, we are, at the same time, creating a world where other men will be condemned to humiliation and death.

Christ on the Cross, then, is the last outpost where an understandable symbol exists. Beyond this image lies the unimaginable abyss—a death, either real or metaphorical.

As kings and queens coronated by our own inner completion and approval, we are naturally brought here, to bow at the feet of the only being who is greater. Because while we have completed the inner work of acceptance, what we have left is annihilation. Just as the yogis and buddhas and gurus of every generation say: to reach enlightenment requires the destruction of the ego.

This is why, no matter your power, you must bow to Christ on the Cross. And if not him, whatever other symbol you can find that points to this process of annihilation.

Christ on the Cross is, above all, a memento mori. Christ on the Cross is, before anything else, an embodiment of the mystery of death (and rebirth).

If this is the last scrutable spiritual attainment, then something else becomes clear.

Death is the doorway.

It is the door that Jesus took to ascend. It is the doorway we all must pass through to ascend.

Death takes from us even that which we are not willing to let go. Death removes our ego, no matter how hard we clutch to it. Death takes us over the abyss, kicking and screaming.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Crossing the threshold of the doorway can be a much more peaceful experience.

How?

We can bow to Death. We can surrender to its power, its sacred mission. And in bowing, we put ourselves on the Cross. We initiate the annihilation. We resolve the duality.

Watch our interview with Robert Kandell, who tells us about his journey to self-approval:

If you prefer, listen on:

• Episode 28 on Spotify

• Episode 28 on Apple Podcasts

The Art of Bowing

In Islam, bowing is down throughout the day. These deep prostrations point toward Mecca, forming the day in a rhythm of lowering oneself and holding up what is highest.

In many parts of Asia, bows are a standard greeting for one another. It’s the instinctive way to encounter another person.

But what does all this bowing mean? How are we to bow?

In a recent Circle, I had the honor of sitting before someone as she pirouetted her way into deep red—that range of reaction and trigger where making mindful choices becomes almost impossible. Stuck in some mixture of sadness and rage, she quietly spoke what was coming up for her. Every story, frame, sensation. And I was one of three humans who sat and listened to this, watched this. And, according to our practice, we welcomed this.

Is this not what it means to bow?

To set aside the urge to change what is happening. To simply witness and allow it to be exactly what it is. This is bowing as I know it.

At its heart, bowing is a very simple relational move: a physical gesture that signals we acknowledge and welcome the other. It does not claim to understand. It does not do anything.

By lowering ourselves, the bow also brings us in touch with our own humility. It reminds us to set our own standing and image aside to make way for whatever might arise between ourselves and the other. To do that, we move toward the ground.

Some cultures take this to the extreme. The kowtow was once the ultimate act of bowing saved for the likes of elders and Emperors in China. In this bow, you press your forehead to the ground—a return to the earth, making as much space as possible for the other to rise in their dignity.

The bow brings us back to that cruciform map of enlightenment. In bowing, we make ourselves the horizontal line of the material plane, to be suffused by the ethereal quickening of spirit that stands upright as the vertical line.

As a relational practice, few are more mind expanding than adding the bow to your everyday toolkit. Deep bow to the tulip poplar beyond my window that I see standing in the haze of October sunlight as I write this. Deep bow to the energies that set matter off in a blaze of creation leading to stars and gas giants and mountains and anthills and the ants that live inside. Deep bow to dog who snores away her afternoon in the other room. Deep bow to the reader who, in the future, drifts their eyes along these very words.

And, finally, at some point in my future—deep bow to Death.

Death who eats. Just thinking of your certainty and silence halts my breathing. You have pulled every king from his throne. You have touched or will soon touch every single person I’ve ever loved. In this great reclaiming, my body has always chosen to clench, to shudder. So great the power, so terrible the inescapability. But this constriction and conflict is a choice.

There all along is the other choice, one that opens up everything: to bow to Death.

Additional Resources

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