like Death and the wind
time has its way of reshaping things
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
I have long suspected that while we each carry our own, personal grief, beneath it lies The Grief—a vast, collective ocean made up of all the sorrow ever felt, by all beings, human and non. I believe it is immeasurable in scale, growing by the day, and that many have drowned within. I found myself down there earlier this week, rendered microscopic by its gargantuan waves. I know that this ocean is ultimately an aspect of love—and still, I am stunned by the violence of it. Just as I am stunned by the violence that rises within me as ecocide, genocide, authoritarianism and the warmongering ways of powerful men rage on, seemingly unchecked.
Thank goodness, then, for the lifebuoys scattered across the water’s surface. I swim toward, and gratefully cling to, the Blackbird’s evening song. His flute-like phrasing keeps me afloat, and I sleep in the hope that rest will see me resurface.
Like Death and the wind, time has its way of reshaping things. Repeated encounters with an adversary can offer a faster route to peace than conquest—but familiarity is a complex beast. Wonderful in how it can gradually unlock the hidden depths of a thing; tricky in how it can see us forget what unfamiliarity once felt like.
My relationship with Death has been honed, sculpted, over decades. I relate to it now with a reverence and an ease I wouldn’t have believed possible, once upon a time. And still, I forget. I forget the grip of breathtaking fear that can accompany even the approach of the subject.
Recently, it came to my attention that the Death meditation I shared a few weeks back was, for some, a little on the intense side. And so, with the sincere desire for the contemplation of one’s mortality not to feel daunting, I created a new one, in the hope that this might offer a more peaceful affair.
You're welcome to read the text below, or use the embedded audio to listen as I guide you.
Let us first find your ground by acknowledging the pull of gravity, the sensation of the Earth holding you to herself. Feel the weight of your bones settle, like smooth stones coming to rest in the riverbed. Let the softening of your muscles create a spaciousness between your bones. Create spaciousness.
And now, arrive. Arrive here, to this moment. Gather all of yourself in, to arrive in this point in space. In time. In life. Arrive here, in this body. Arrive in this body that breathes you. Notice how it breathes you.
Notice how, as you read, your breath attends a rhythm. Notice how the cathedral of your ribcage expands as your lungs welcome breath, welcome life. And notice how it softly falls in, to let it go. Let it go…
Feel the rising and the falling of this ancient rhythm, the rhythm followed by every breathing being who has ever lived. This breath is not ours alone. It is shared air. It is the oxygen given to us by ancient forests and prehistoric oceans. Whether whale, bird or human, it is our one, shared breath.
And now, with each exhale, let something go. Allow each breath that leaves to take something with it. Release a tension. Release the need to be anywhere but here, anyone but you. Give permission for every external demand to drift away, like seeds on the wind.
And with each inhale, welcome yourself home. Welcome your unburdened self, home, to this moment. This body. This brief, precious moment of your being alive.
Picture, now, in your mind’s eye, that you are stood, barefoot, in the heart of an old-growth forest. There’s a soft give to the earth beneath your feet. Centuries of fallen leaves create a carpet that holds the memory of a thousand seasons. You stand in a place where endings and beginnings merge. Where time defies logic, and where the boundary of life and death is indistinguishable.
You see a fallen oak tree, and you go to kneel next to the recumbent giant. He who stood for centuries, and now lies host to a city of moss, fern and fungi. Mushrooms emerge from him like passing thoughts, each connecting root systems in the underground web of shared knowing. Nothing here is wasted. Nothing here is lost.
Dig your hands into the rich, dark soil. This earth is made of everything that came before—bodies of trees, wings of moths, bones of deer, centuries of rain. Your hands are immersed in a song of transformation.
Nearby, a small bird lands on the oak. She observes you for a moment, before hopping into the leaves below. She flicks her head, right, left, rearranging her little patch of forest to reveal the grubs and sustenance which this decay gives life to. She is every part of this place. She is the insects her parents fed her, she is the long dead oak, she is the wings which have become the dark soil that you hold—that might one day hold you.
The little bird, satiated, flies to a branch of an ancient tree. Again, she observes you, before she ruffles her feathers and tucks her head beneath a wing. Inspired, you lay down on the soft, shady ground, and here you can sense what the history of the forest floor beneath you holds. You sense how similar you are. How you both are organic matter, layered upon organic matter, shaped by natural forces, constantly in flux. So similar you are, your back body and the forest floor become indistinguishable.
You are of this place, just as the small bird, and the mycelial network, and the history of the seasons held here. Sense how expansive the truth of your connection is. Feel how you are not in nature, you are nature. Feel how vast your real body is. Feel how time is subjective.
You have Spring inside your cells. That which pushes green shoots through snow, that calls the birds to build, that nudges buds to open… Potential lives within you, in idea, in latent action, in hope. You and every shoot reach towards light in unison.
There is Summer in your blood. It pulses through you, abundant, alive with the hum of insects, and the weight of fruit on branch. You are short nights, and long days. You are that which seems as though it will go on forever. Love without condition lives within you, and like the Sun, you give the gift of unwavering attention.
Autumn lives in your bones. The wisdom of release, the beauty of attunement, the humble offering of oneself to a greater good. You are the blaze which signals surrender. You are the beacon of knowing when it is time to still. You are the genius of your cyclical nature.
And Winter…Winter rests in your numinous depths. Here you know stillness. Here you trust the necessity of culmination. Here you surrender to the profundity of the night, of the liminal, of completion.
As you lay merged with the forest, a hawk circles the canopy. He rides invisible thermals. Currents powerful and unseen. Speaking now, as you do, the language of this place, you sense the offering of an invitation. The hawk wishes to share the gift of his perspective.
Your next, deep inhale signals your acceptance, and your exhale bids your awareness to rise up, out of the forest floor, out of your body, up through branch and bow and thickened canopy. Up through blue spaciousness and then—in. You arrive, to see through his eyes. To see how the below is a single living landscape, how the countless trees become one, how rivers thread valleys, how the weather has edges, and how the mountains fold into the soft curve of earth.
From here you see how well he knows the immediate, and the longest of views.
You sense how time awaits his command, how his world bridging wings trace maps older than our human words.
From here, your human body and the complex universe it houses are indistinguishable from the fallen oak, and the sleeping bird, from the forest itself.
From here your worries, and resentments and appointments are indistinguishable from the grubs and the mushrooms, and the moss.
The hawk begins a gradual descent, detail grows and shifts perception, but changes nothing. Slowly you are returned—first to the roof of the dense green canopy, and then branch by branch down, back to the oak, back to the forest floor. Back into your faithfully breathing body.
Just as you begin to inhabit your human form once again, the little bird lifts her head. She observes you once more, sensing a lightness more similar to her own, before she flits away. Leaving you, returned, back to the earth upon which each of your long and fanning bloodlines walked.
Returned to family and to strangers—if such distinctions even hold, in a world so intimately bound. Returned to those who became the soil that grew the food that formed your body, and the beings who breathed out the oxygen that you now breathe in.
Returned to the procession. To the march of life, death, life, death, life, death which beats the sacred rhythm of the cosmos. Returned to where the line between your being and non-being blurs, because you consist of a temporary arrangement of elements. The pattern of you, somehow knowing to form over and again, until the time comes to form something entirely different.
The ancient seas which formed the calcium in your bones. The dying star which formed the iron in your blood. These your lineage and your legacy. Death your birthright and your cosmic inheritance. You, as all before you, a river of change which momentarily maintains the appearance of solidity.
These fractals, these ever increasing circles of life and death, this is how love moves through time.
Note the cathedral of your ribcage as it widens and returns. Sense your sacred heart tending to its rhythm. These brilliant bodies, ours for now and not forever, their meaning and value only increased by their temporality. We hold them, like birds in cupped hands, knowing they will leave us in due course.
Sense the blood moving through your vessels and the solidity of your bones. Sense the stars and the oceans which you came from.
Life awaits you. The stories you’ll write, the love you’ll guide through time, the beauty vying for your precious attention—it’s all here, waiting.
May you trust in the great mystery by which we are each held. May you trust in your being here. And, when it’s time, may you trust your leaving.
Yours in aimless flight…
Your understanding of The Grief as a “vast, collective ocean made up of all the sorrow ever felt, by all beings, human and non” tracks for me. Though deep and vast, it also connects us. Walking in the world the morning after my father’s death, I felt such tenderness for everyone. And for the world.
Your meditation is such a generous offering. Thank you. 💚
Having experienced the death meditation you shared previously a few times, and now this most beautiful new immersion, I found myself wondering: are there two oceans of grief, or only one?
The first, though vast and fathoms deep, stormy, powerful, and crushing - feels somehow crystal clear and cool. A grief that follows the natural turning of the seasons, the cycles of life and death, the ancient rhythm of the ages of Earth.
But the second is darker. Fetid, black currents that pull and swallow. A grief that wracks and ravages, born not of nature but of its breaking… genocide, war, ecocide, biocide, specicide. Where the natural cycle of life is broken and the turning of the seasons and the ages of the Earth cannot restore what has been destroyed…
So beautiful, Chloe. Thank you. I find growing comfort in reading and listening to your words. And apologies, my reflections turned a little dark at the end.