I love the lyrics of Hozier's song, Take Me to Church. "Offer me that deathless death" is a delightfully enigmatic and thus widely meaningful phrasing. It could be referring to sexual orgasm, to eternal life, or to those startling little deaths of awakening and reckoning that erupt ecstatically throughout our lives' unfolding. I imagine a deathless death is a liberated one, one that leaves behind no residue or karma/harm, and instead lubricates the whole universe's self-knowing in ecstatic bliss and rapture.
I would like to acknowledge this: Moon Dunes Loons, my signature group ritual space offering this year, is decidedly dark in orientation. I appear to be inviting you to walk squarely into the void: the yonic expanse of dunes on lunar night, sonic silence ringing overwhelmingly through your senses. You are alone and with. You are one and all. You are annihilated and complete. You are mad with sanity. This initiation is the essence of Moon Dunes Loons.
Edgily I proclaim: Let's face our shadows. Let's walk toward the darkness, toward the wilds, toward the night. Let's approach them, because they are us, too. And because if we never do, we shall never integrate them. And before it's too late.
I find liberation in the darkness. I find liberation by turning towards the shadow created—literally—in the posturing of an arrogant society: namely, a society so avoidant and denialist in how it handles death.
Dying: Shadow of an Egocentric Society
Making dying into a seemingly shameful thing, is a shameful attitude, indeed. I don't use the word shameful lightly. I mean it. It is shameful because it is self-ignorant: it forgets how vital death is.
Stephen Jenkinson and B.J. Miller, in online lectures that I've linked at the bottom, speak lucidly about death being aesthetic (beautiful) rather than anesthetic... about attaining dignity through senses and meaning-making in death... about culture's responsibility to integrate death and define it in liberatory, celebratory, revelatory ways... and much more I cannot effectively condense here. Just watch/listen to the talks! ➡️➡️
I am feeling increasingly called to working with the dying and their families. Toward a broader long-term calling of ministry that I wrote about recently, I am following the stepping stones, the current trace signals in my day-to-day which affirm and engorge this yearning at the depth of me. Doing so I find myself pursuing death doula training, en route of a beginner's volunteer hospice training at SCL Lutheran near my home, which I finished today. Despite the training amounting to a dry and grueling nine hour, two-day sprint, this calling and these feelings that guide me inquisitively to death and dying work did not abate.
I feel that this path could teach me about how to let things die when they're really ready to die, in various arenas of my life.
I feel it could teach me how essential death really is to life—how it is anything but its opposite, but rather, its necessary condition, a complementary component, a beautiful angle within life as multifaceted gem.
I feel it could teach me that I actually never have to exist beyond the aliveness and liveliness found here in the present moment.
It's a lot to take on, attempting to expand my coaching practice to a new and mysterious edge called death doula work—which has all kinds of power to stir up the waters of my own embodied grief/loss memory—all the while still actively grappling for ground (the swirl continues) in my personal, relational, professional, financial, and mental life.
And of course it's a lot. Yet also a lot—equally big—is my motive, my drive and my conviction to follow my own will.
Rendered as simple as a child's logic:
I want to help my friends. And I will.
I must keep the faith that they'll want to help me.
And so it is.
A reciprocity as exquisite as a day to a night.
🌌☀️🌌
You see: the more mature I get, the more wholistic I become. I am more inclined to recognize myself regularly as defined by all of my relations, that my "self" is less a separate experience and more accurately a sensual continuum of "all."
Accordingly, I will never cease to desire benefitting others. The only possible path is to grow ever more mature in that praxis.
Illumination and Annihilation: Loving Life and Death, Light and Shadows, as One
I work in community with several amazing coaches and counselors (like Jenna, Eutimia, Fox, Phannie, Marielle, and more...) I admire the way these people embody their own healing so vividly, in each moment. So much so that others are drawn to them magnetically, impelled to follow their subtle desires closer to the light, like a moth to the light.
There are those who are attracted to the warm, washing light. And then, fewer still, are those we who don't fear the darkest of nights.
I have an inkling I will always be thriving "in the shadows" (heh heh) of my brilliant peer coaches, whom I love and revere passionately. It's not because there's anything inferior about what I offer: it's just that I offer people something unappealing, edgy, weird, "off." Because I openly offer people something they don't want:
People don't want their worldviews dismantled. People avoid experiencing anything other than having their assumptions affirmed, most of the time. (I'm sure you can relate—I sure can!)
In this society in particular, we are conditioned to fear ego annihilation—we are taught to react viciously to any perceived threat to our concepts of self—to our sense of self. Which is unfortunate—because there's in fact so much more going on under and beyond our comfortable, "normal" assertions of what everything means.
Actually, people do want their worldviews dismantled. They do but they don't think they do.
They do because it frees them. They don't because they fear the pain of the rite-of-passage as suffering itself.
They do because of the benefits reaped on the other side, that pleasant raw aliveness after ripping off a bandaid. They don't because of automatic reactive resistances, that can mostly be seen through and overcome.
Certain coaching methods may attempt to dissolve someone's blocks by uplifting someone's holy true self (and inadvertantly or vertantly, boosting their ego)... madly, I (sometimes) know better.
I know you can fall apart COMPLETELY and find something outrageously freeing when you hit the very floor of that rock bottom—the fact that you are breathing. The vivid awe-striking truth that you are a process, a sentient process, breathing, alive here and now in this living world.
And in that undefinedness, that holy space, you find unforgettable freedom.
That moment when the darkness IS the light.
Un-wreck-onings
Most, if not all, of our reckonings in life, we can harvest greatly from.
In my typical reckless trickster mode, I squeal: Go ahead and get thrashed by truth you're not ready for! It's a struggle that will feed your spirit WELL.
The truth is more enduring than you, and will put up a greater fight than you, mere mortal. Yet, YOUR truth—the truth inhabiting your core—IS the most enduring part of you, the part that survives everything when all convenient reductions and assumptions get blasted apart.
I guide that way. Off the beaten path. Into utter selfness, beyond ideas of self. I guide into the woods, into the dark, into the shadows, to get to the other side. I guide you in that direction because I know there's nothing to fear there—nothing that isn't illusion, an illusion whose most perfect purpose is to one day be crushed by the light, and die a most holy death.
Which is why working with me is not for everyone. But I do expect it to attract those few bold souls, old and young, who are courageously seeking to live so well they never stop living, as Stephen Jenkinson alludes to—to proceed forth, dying to them "selves" over and over again, wondrously vibrant little deaths that add to the entire sum of life, until their body remembers dying too... Who would live as they die: boldly stepping off the next edge and path, no matter what, in the name of increasing their freedom.
Today, I die to the notion that I'll get this week's newsletter or audio piece out on time.
Today, let me die to the notion that my messy method of emergent sensemaking isn't in fact outrageously well-organized.
Today let me die to the notion that I can achieve anything—even or especially the fulfillment of my unique divine calling—alone.
💀🌱💀
It has has become a tradition in these newsletters to sow reciprocity among us by proffering an ask and a gift:
My Ask
Request a personal invitation to Moon Dunes Loons as soon as possible. You'll receive access to a private page that describes the sacred offering in more detail.
Or, donate to access the Moon Dunes Loons audio series (a one-time gift or a monthly subscription is gratefully accepted). The fourth episode, "Renaturalizing as Freedom" will come out soon.
My Gift
A brief belted rendering of a ditty of mine that's more than half of my lifetime old, one of the first ever ritual songs I ever embodied, "Sky Full of Stars." This bit of meme has not died to history but rather persists because of the particular emotion it seems capable of embodying and invoking. May this song be a medicine to you for when you want this emotion evoked.
And, a bonus gift:
A gentle reminder that if you feel resonant with me and want to explore coaching, our first session will always be offered free. Sign up here to start.
Much love,
C.
