Extinction

On my wedding day, my father said, "I wish for you an extinction, so you may know what it means to lose something forever."

I lost my father on Oct 21, 2004. And my marriage, too, ended three years ago. Both my beloved dogs, Great Danes named Peanut and Lucy, died within a year of one another, on the heels of our separation. Still, I don't think these losses are what he meant. Not exactly. My father always struck me as a brooding man. I always knew that beneath his full throttle laughter and impish ways he was a pensive, contemplative man to whom words were more than mere information currency. I suspect he meant something more unruly when he wished extinction my way.

Our wedding guests were no doubt taken aback, since extinction-as-blessing is not exactly champagne and cake conversation. What ever happened to "May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be at your back" and other light Celtic blessings? Ah, but we are the black Irish, the dark and moody ones who bless marriages not with rote and flowery passages...but with extinctions (the glass was still raised, of course).

Losing oneself in the midst of growth is in fact extinction. It is a permanent, irretrievable loss of something we once took for granted. "I AM this, I AM NOT this," is nothing more than the fluctuating mind stuff (or chitta vritti for you yogis in the house). The tighter we cling to something, the more insecure we become, the less anchored we are. Ungrounded, floating, fearful, needy, dependent, we clutch and grip and try to wring from some experience an explanation--no, a definition of what we are. Of who we are.

And then one day it just dies. It simply passes into time and space like a dusty fossil, lying down with the weight of all the neediness, all those expectations, all those hopes and dreams (the glass raises again). So, it folds into the layers and layers of time until its simple imprint--a memory, a taste, a touch--is all that is left.

Then we know, in one moment, extinction of the self. Total obliteration of the identity we have labored so hard to protect, to defend, to define, to project, to perform.

Gone.

Blip.

May the road rise to greet you, may the wind be at your back…

Letting go of who you (think) you are and have been is a lot like any other death, really. Not at all dissimilar to the death of a parent, in my experience. There was a being that gave shape and direction to my every thought and action, and that being is no more. And whether my father died or I died, I know not. Whether my marriage failed or I failed, I know not. Whether my dog (my child, my friend) was devoured by cancer or I was, I know not. Because in each instance of loss, I have let go of some part of myself. I have offered up and released some heretofore "essential" part of who I "am."

Sometimes I feel as though nothing remains, as though the extinction has been final. As though the species has been wiped out, off the map, without hope of return.

Maybe that sounds macabre, but in fact I feel a giddy release in acknowledging that small extinction. I feel joy and liberation even as I feel grief and insecurity (we broody types happily embrace the simultaneity in all things, comfortable with seemingly disparate emotions flooding in at once--this explains whiskey).

The truth is (in this moment, and only now), I quite agree with my father that to lose something forever is the only way to know the limitlessness of ones own heart. To lose irretrievably someone or something you love, is to learn what love was in the first place. And it isn't the soft puffy cloud kind of love you meet here. It is the raw, in your face, peel back your skin, and dilate kind of love you find splitting the seams of your heart. Heart meaning core, meaning center, meaning self. 
Love is being broken open into infinite scattered illogical pieces that equip you to keep rebuilding an even larger, more vulnerable space to keep holding love.

If you keep insisting on rebuilding the same small shape, carefully cupping yourself around the same tired edges, you just end up with ever greater pressure building and building. You must break open, die, and expand.

And that's just a black Irish fact.

I keep a watchful eye on the silverback gorillas, the blue whales, and the polar bear. I watch ice caps melt and wonder how many fish will be left in the sea by the time I turn 40. But tonight is my own steady, certain extinction that captivates and scares me. It is the irreversible moments, the actions or words I can't take back that haunt me. It is the face in the mirror that looks less and less familiar, and more and more independent of me.

Somewhere along the way, I let go of something, and she is running wild in my life like she is the last of her kind. she keeps breaking my heart and patching it back in ever larger contorted shapes, and she keeps leading me to water I can't drink.

If Einstein was right, this moment too will fold back on itself, and I should as likely remember the future as the past. And in that case, a true extinction would in fact become a birth--a temporary thing that cannot sustain itself through time and space. I strain my memory searching for the future, but so far all I see is the same old image--reproducing herself into each and every moment. But I suspect the future requires someone different than the woman sitting and writing tonight, or the bride whose father wished upon her an extinction.

I imagine the time and space, the ecstatic and harrowing experiences ahead, don't make sense anymore for this particular limited me. I guess that means it's time to die.

Again.

Yet there is also a kind of presence that has more to do with the dissolution of the boundaries. I could call it a merging with the fabric all around in the vibrations of sound, the elixir of scent, the feel of the air around one’s skin and the earth beneath one’s hands and feet the feel of my heart beating into the earth as I lie on my belly in cobra (and where does the air leave off and my body begin, where does the earth leave off and my body begin…there is no exact point of separation…one is always already the other).

It is in dissolving the boundaries of self and other, of skin and breath and time that we allow for a presence denied to the living. In this letting go of the form that is tied to a time and place, there is freedom, liberation. Perhaps this is, in part, the lesson of the corpse. The lesson of death and dying. Beyond all the hackneyed hallmark gibberish about death teaching us the value of life is the underlying message that in death, in the many, mini deaths of each moment and each transition, life is freed from the prison of a moment, a job, a relationship, an illness, a time, a body.

The grief of loss is not really for an individual, or even the singular loss. The real power of grief is that the individual loss serves as a doorway that ushers us into the transformational brutal, raw, liberating, sacred experience of GRIEF, wherein we remember our connectedness. Though it feels like separation from the one we love, the actual feeling, in my humble experience, is the raw memory of our connection, our union. Perhaps this helps to explain why loss can be so transformative and renewing even as it seems to break us into a million irreparable pieces.

No, it isn’t the individual loss, which we certainly mourn. The death of one dear individual also triggers past losses. We hear this all the time. Grief is like a spiral, we revisit the losses again and again on anniversaries, in meaningful locations, in the smells and sounds that recall our loved ones back to us.

But grief is also remembered each time we go there. Grief is a place, like the underworld where Persephone must go for a time each year. The body itself retains the memory of those other cut threads, and when we are faced with the death of another relation, the experience itself, which is stored deeply in the cells, renews and dredges up that past. We FEEL the similar feelings and our minds recollect those past losses.

Still, I think I mean something other than that even. There is something on the tip of my tongue, and I suspect that is precisely the point for which I am grasping--it is beyond language, description, and even intellect. Because grief undoes them all, leaves us without words, or without adequate words. Leaves us broken and shattered, formless.

Yet grief also transcends time and space, freeing us from the limitations of who and what we happen to be at the most recent moment. Lifted up out of the mundane perspective, for even a moment, we realize and remember that simultaneity of all experience, feeling everything at once...or at times, devoid of feeling or sensation as though one has been pulled deeply into pratyahara, senses withdrawn and still like the cold quiet of a new moon.

Individual losses take us there, into that experience where anything and everything is possible, real, and alive. But to actually feel that oneness, that union, that sense of absolute infinite possibility, there is also an unraveling of who and what it is we think we are.

I used to think the transformation that seems to follow loss was merely the result/effect of one’s life being turned inside out and upside down, being thrown into the air when the ground beneath crumbled or the rug was pulled up--when what felt stable and secure is suddenly (or in some cases, slowly) removed. In that uncertainty and instability, we not only feel the fear, anxiety, and despair of having “lost” someone we love and what that relationship meant to us...but we are also afforded an opportunity to lose old perspectives, seeing our lives (our countless habits, hang-ups, expectations, and projections) in a fresh way, from a new (albeit wounded) angle. So for years I have understood the “gift” (an admittedly hackneyed spiritual term) made available by loss and grief; it seemed to me that the rug being pulled out from underneath me not only made me adept at recognizing there are no rugs, but I also began to see how these experiences gave me a completely new perspective on what was happening and whether or not that life was aligned with a deeper sense of Self.

So my own grief and loss has propelled me into new identities with staggering speed and depth. I have gone from college English comp instructor with a house and a husband to a wandering gypsy of sorts, teaching yoga and writing these words, to...what exactly? The point is, it doesn’t matter what I am constantly becoming and unbecoming, it isn’t so much about the roles or shapes or forms I take, but what those forms, shapes, and roles allow me to access and remember.

I guess what I am getting at is that I realize that grief is not just an emotional state or a process, but a continuous experience of consciousness that is characterized not so much by sadness as by transformation.

Yes, the sadness is tremendous in the wake of loss, but I don’t feel that grief is about sadness alone, or reconciling oneself to sadness. I don’t think grief or the grief process is solely about letting go or honoring or making peace or moving on. Grief can sometimes serve as the fire that burns away everything false and limiting. And much as we grieve and miss the individual, there is also a recognition that something persists long after their form, and ours, has been changed and dissolved.

There is a recognition, in other words, that the relationship was never contained by the interactions and exchanges between two forms, as though our love for another is merely an exchange of currency. Because in order to harness that connection, we would be dependent on the forms, which means we would be dependent on separation...and in death that separation is not actually furthered.

In death, that separation ends. Dissolves.

Blip.

And then, we remember.

And we access that ancient memory.

And there is the possibility of a freedom that feels like pain, ecstasy, destruction, and birth.

Each individual loss undoes us as individuals. We lose footing, we struggle to maintain the mundane routines and roles that quite frankly “make us who we are,” whatever that means.

But the individual who dies does not in fact leave us or become more distinctly separate from us. The individual loss ignites a deep awareness (so deep in fact we may not even register much less name the felt sensation) that there was never ever any separation. Grief for that one being, that one loss, compels us to merge and go beyond separation.

The individual loss undoes a sense of individuality and draws us into the felt experience of union.

My father is in the sand and currents and brush of a Rocky Mountain river. He is extinct, lost forever into something larger and intangible. In the trout scales and river eddies and dusty trails, the sage smell that fills me with an ache, the fading wildflowers whose spines begin to break, and the rustling feathers of crows in the trees...that is where my father has gone.

Never, ever to return to me again as anything more, or less, than that. And lately I see shards of myself in such places. I catch glimpses of my own life, scattered like so much afterthought. I find myself dangling like a question mark.

To cease, to stop, to let go, to surrender. To grow silent, to grow still, but still to grow. And grow and grow and grow, beyond what I am or who I was or what I think I ought to be. To grow beyond bride or wife or lover or daughter or sister or teacher or friend.

Expand beyond until that shell is dead, dust, an imprint in memory I hold like the desert holds the memory of the sea. Knowing the sea, too, will always remember the body of the desert.

And extinction is losing something forever...but what is forever to the desert and the sea?

The road doesn't always rise to meet me, and the wind has as often blown in my face as been to my back. Perhaps my father was simply being practical, wishing for me something certain at a time when irrational or naive wishes are tossed like so much wasted rice. To wish a death for someone is in fact a very pragmatic thing. It's to wish for someone the most authentic and predictable experience we can have.

But to wish an extinction, ah, well that's different.

That's wishing complete surrender.

That's wishing you the ability to let go of something forever when its time is done.

Glass raised, that's wishing the desert could bid farewell to the sea.

And that just makes me want to fold into myself and grieve because you know it could never be any other way. But the beauty is knowing the sea and the desert were once one body, one word, one place. Like he was here once, and once I was him. And now it's just me, and I’ll keep splintering into pieces, deserts upon deserts of fossilized memories. Just waiting for the tide to roll in and wash it all away. Waiting the way the desert waits for the sea.

Patiently.

Because extinction makes one patient.