Just as I was beginning to recognize the presence of one guardian angel, I lost the most precious one I had ever known.
It was a winter’s day and I felt a pull toward my grandfather. I left my chores and drove to his apartment. I found him sitting in his favorite chair, apparently talking to someone off to the side, though there was no one there. I had the sense that my Beela was readying to leave us. We had a gentle conversation about his concern for the well-being of everyone in the family.
The next morning, I woke to the call that he had passed.
After learning of his death, I went to see him. He had not been taken by the funeral home yet, so we had some time together. As I sat beside him, my connection to Essence unexpectedly deepened. Cut to the core by his passing, I felt my layers of artifice and conditioning fall momentarily away as a broader universe of perception revealed itself to me, enveloped me, soothed me. Suddenly I knew no distinction between him, me, the sunlight that flooded the room. It was all the same. In the words of Hakomi pioneer Ron Kurtz, I had entered a place we might call Buddhaland. The frivolousness of my waking concerns and those of the culture around me was instantly revealed.
I drove slowly home and felt saddened at what I saw around me—newspapers that commodified fear, people racing about in search of something they already had.
When I got back to the house, I put on a disc that I had once judged as too New Age flaky for my liking: Aeoliah’s Angel Love. What I experienced as ungrounded when I was in a pragmatic state of mind sounded like God’s work in this more timeless space. I lay on my bedroom floor and listened to it on repeat. With rare openness, I deepened into the sounds of angels lovingly floating my Beela up to heaven. I felt his presence in the music. I felt him within me and I felt him around me, and in that moment I didn’t know the difference. Is there a difference? How to separate the alive and the dead from the perspective of Essence?
My grandmother called and asked me to write his eulogy for the morning funeral. But how, Bubbi? He is still so alive to me. I lay on the floor for hours, wondering how to eulogize the spirit that lives on.
A practical voice shouted: “Get to it! Will your Beela be buried without a eulogy?” (Jewish guilt.) I opened the computer, and slowly words found their way onto the page. About halfway through I nodded off. Before a moment could pass, the rear door motion light came on and woke me. I looked out. Nothing there. I went back to work and soon fell asleep. Again, the motion light woke me. I had been at this desk for hours, and the light only came on in the moments after I drifted off. I finished page three and my eyes were closing fast. Yet again the light came on. Again I looked outside. There was nothing there to trigger it. I had the distinct sense that I was being awakened for a reason. Toward the end, I wrote the following words of gratitude:
“There was a quote that guided me over so many hurdles during the last fifteen years. It was in a book I was reading as an undergraduate. The quote was ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.’ Until now, the author was anonymous. But not anymore. I know who wrote it, and more importantly, I know who showed me the truth of it—Beela.”
Not a moment later, the motion light came back on. I read the eulogy the next morning. I had often been very anxious speaking before groups, but I had no such anxiety that day. The illusion of separateness that fueled my anxiety had fallen away. I was floating in golden light, cracked open to a seamless and peaceful universe of meaning. As I spoke, I imagined a bridge from Beela’s spirit to mine, and I saw gifts floating across it in my direction. He had continued to fill me up with his loving kindness for thirty-three years, and now that my tanks were filled, he went on his way. In the following few weeks, I continued to float through this Buddhaland of strangely radiant perception. I felt like an enhanced version of myself, tapped into a magical realm that both transcended and sourced my usual awareness. The most mundane moments seemed somehow perfect. There were still the chores and unpaid bills, but they were lost in something bigger, more meaningful. People who had seemed negative before looked beautiful to me and intrinsic to my being. Even walking to the corner store became a fascinating experience, one eye on the road ahead and another on the heavens above. No difference. It was all part of the same giant swirl of light.
My Beela’s death had given me a glimpse of life as it ought to be— clear, unified, radiant, essential. Each time that motion light came on and startled me back to work, it shed light on the dynamic nature of universal connectivity. In that moment, I knew that I did not swim alone. Some force swam beside me, above me, and within me, insisting that I complete my task. I summoned it, it summoned me, separate voices inextricably woven through a choir of unified light, each looking out for the other. We were in this together. We were this together.
I knew that this Buddhaland was the way home. I couldn’t quite reconcile its unified nature with the idea of individual path, but I sensed that somewhere at its heart were messages about my own unfolding—where to walk, what to do, who to love.
The challenge was staying here. Peak experiences crack us open and give us a glimpse of the possible, but the trick is to master those issues and challenges that keep us from living there full-time. In my usual frame of mind, I would have attributed the motion light to meaningless coincidence, as I always did when I bumped into someone I had thought of just a moment earlier. Struggling to meet basic needs and challenges, my canvas could not accommodate the bigger picture.
Although I hungered to swim here forever, I knew that I wasn’t ready. I had been transformed and I would keep this learning close to my heart, but there was much work to be done first. Miles to go before I could sleep. Miles to go before I could really swim with God.
~A passage from chapter 4 of my first book, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation. Published by North Atlantic Books. Available for purchase at Soulshaping
Beautifully divine💖