november: forgiveness
monthly theme: [death]
Forgiveness is often its own form of death. If we can lay to rest our resentments, shame, and unmet expectations of ourselves and each other, then our past actions can decompose and compost into our future and present selves and communities.
This is true too when we lose a loved one. Although my thoughts on this particular “loss” are non-dualistic, ever-evolving, and rather woo-woo, it provides for us a potent metaphor for our grief, relationships, and every other form of loss we experience on this planet.
“Consider the medicine that moves through you--the offering you can now make to future generations as a lesson for them to honor their grief and interrupt systems and patterns causing suffering.”
- Michelle Cassandra Johnson; “Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief”
The deceased leave us their legacies and memories so that we may pull nutrients/wisdom from their lives the way mushrooms recycle organic matter on the forest floor. To an extent, nothing ever really dies. A tricky sentiment to toe considering how, culturally, we seem to take the phrase at face value and never dive further into the concepts of eternity and mortality.
To forgive does not mean to forget. So too, grieving and accepting someone’s death does not mean our love for them gets buried 6 feet under. But how do we know when grieving ends (and does it)? And when do we learn how to let parts of ourselves die off?
Often, we hold onto beliefs (or relationships) because they ease our pain. However, I’ve found over and over again that the more I cling to anything, the more it becomes a hindrance when confronting my necessary growth and adjustment to the ever-evolving nature of reality. Which brings up the idea of loving something enough to let it go…
Because American culture refuses to contextualize death in its true form and power, we have a very difficult time understanding the dimensions of life, beauty, and fullness it opens up. For death is not just one state of being. It is not merely the darkness, but also the times when we are alive and full of light.
We can either spend time resenting our cultural norm to air on the side of maladaptivity and toxicity (white supremacy and imperialism to keep an Oligarchical few in power) OR we can forgive ourselves and our ancestors for shying away from the enlightening and humanizing work before now (empathizing with the necessity for survival or pipe dreams of assimilation). The first option creates a reactionary loop in which we are destined to eat our own tail. The latter, however, is a generative process of reincarnation and adaptation.
Without forgiveness, we might as well be wholly embalmed in our past understanding and ways of life, locked in a karmic coffin of “it’s always been this way.” But stepping up to the challenges of our day to accept the truth and the divinity of our own mortality is to live and die sustainably, for the greater good.
The Western construct of mortality through the lens of capitalism always seems to make us believe that we simply don’t have enough time--in our days and within the span of our lives--to do such work. To slow down and contemplate our mortality is to waste company time. Feeling the weight of human existence while on the clock can be incredibly expensive. It’s as if our collective unconscious has been having supply chain issues for generations.
With the economy as our guiding principle, contemplating death often heightens our awareness of our limited time on this earth. If we do not have the emotional tools, awareness, and support, we might end up on the other side of these thoughts much worse for wear. So please walk through these doors of death with patience, care, compassion, and forgiveness for yourself. It is not an easy journey to traverse the underworld. But I simply don’t see any other way through this first-half of death that we call life.
There is no agenda or timeline. In fact, I know you have all the time that you need to do this work because it is why we are alive--or at least one of the better meanings to life that I’ve found. Simply to experience and exist--the full understanding of which lies not only within our ability to die but the inevitability of its timing.
Forgive yourself (and your communities) for denying this inherent truth of our humanity, that we cannot take any of this world with us into whatever lies beyond. And maybe this truth will allow you to forgive others more easily as well, humanizing each of us as we traverse the grief and fear of such a temporary and finite existence. Through this understanding, may you wake up each morning reborn and understand the sacred nature of the dying process in all areas in which it exists in our lives.