The Growing Capacity for Endings
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Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), 563 - 483 BC
At the beginning of the year, which so appropriately falls in the mid-Holy Nights, let's notice our unpeaceful feelings about endings. Endings are death. Living attention is no longer paid to what had been evolving through time. Interest is over. Meaning is complete or can go no further. Or something has reached the point of enough, of satisfaction, of desire met and of destiny fulfilled.
How do you feel about endings, death, enough, over and other states of finality? Do you feel the withering hidng in germinating?
I will be personal here.
I avoid and resist endings. I ignore endings. I rage at endings. I feel the same thing about completions and fulfillments. I live in a mood of constant development and process. For me even happy endings are lacking.
So this capacity for endings needs so much growth in my soul. As I seek this growth, I quake a bit. Where does this lack of peace with death in life come from? Or with satisfaction? How does it keep me from meaningful beginnings, from true vitality? What thresholds push me back not letting me cross? Am I afraid of the tears or afraid of the joys?
These are my emotional feelings.
Now I contradict myself.
If I didn't love endings, I would not be writing a Holy Nights Message about them. I am at the age where I consider completions and "last times." I recognize endings sooner and bless them. Finality seems like an opportunity. I am at the threshold of the end of this life.
I love death as much as I love birth. I celebrate thresholds, transitions and metamorphoses. And witness them with peace, seeing glory. I also feel them as a continum, a never-ending full of endings! Every death is a birth.
Slowly, I am learning to attend to feelings of satisfaction and good enough. I've stopped always wanting or needing more. I can let go.
And all this changes my relationship to the eternal, the infinite, the cosmic and the universal. I imagine being at peace with endings means knowing the peace of now and enough and never again.
Tonight write down your thoughts and feelings about endings. Go to that place of ending hiding in the beginning of the year and ask yourself what you want to end over the next 364 days. And I don't mean "get rid of" or vanquish from your life as in a New Year's resolution to stop smoking or a wish to end poverty and hunger in the world. What will simply or complexly end this year? I am asking you to live into your relationship to death.
Here is a poem with many beautiful expressions but the one I find the most freeing is "Accustom yourselves to death gently." Embrace the little deaths, the endings of the year.
Chorus of the Clouds
Nelly Sachs
We are full of sighs, full of glances
We are full of laughter
And at times we bear your faces.
We are not far from you.
Who knows how many tears you have shed through our weeping?
How much longing forms us?
We are players at dying
Accustom yourselves to death gently
You, the unpracticed ones, who learn nothing in the night.
Many angels are given to you
But you do not see them.
Learn something from the Holy Nights, listen to the Buddha and see the angels.
