• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

and often a way to support a soul moving on.

Being around dying people and dead bodies is powerful classroom for putting our lives in perspective.

What does natural, spiritual death care look like?

Once someone dies we may bathe them, oil and scent them, brush their hair, and clothe them. We can transform their bed into an altar, with flowers strewn about the body. We may invite friends and family to sing, pray, laugh, cry and tell stories in the presence of the body, and perhaps, the hovering spirit. Maybe we’d just sit in silence. We may pick up a cardboard casket from the mortuary, decorate and write prayers and mantras, on its sides (shipping instructions!). We lift the body into the prepared casket, then load it into our van, all covered in flowers and caravan to the mortuary. When it is time for the cremation, we lift the body into the oven, and praying for good passage, start the fire. The time is coming when it will be common for us to dig the hole for the body and plant a tree over it.

We embrace the opportunity to honor someone’s soul, their life, and this passage, by caring for and honoring the body.

It’s powerful, it’s intense, it’s deep.

It’s also quite ordinary.

It’s what humans have been involved in for thousands of years.

In reclaiming this part of life, Life itself becomes more real and precious.

Having a healthy relationship towards death helps us be more alive.

It helps us to honor all that is alive.

Some may wonder “Is there life after death?.”

Sometimes the more important question is, “Was there life before death?”

It’s a good day to be alive!

Bodhi Be is an Interfaith/Innerfaith Minister, Hospice Volunteer, Funeral Director and Executive Director of Doorway into Light, a non-profit in the field of death and dying. He is the host of a weekly radio program in Hawaii called “Conversations with Death.” Bodhi is a senior teacher in the Sufi Ruhaniat International, the Sufi lineage of Inayat Khan and Samuel Lewis.

He lives with his wife of twenty-five years on Maui where they homestead an organic garden and orchard, watch the sun make electricity, and play with their first grandchild. His Web site is www.doorwayintolight.org.

To Do the Will of God, Come What May

ALICE WALKER

This is what Martin said is important and necessary and what he would do.

I woke this morning feeling the same.

Though my “God” is Everything. Without boundary. Everywhere.

I looked out and a wave was crashing over the reef in front of my house: God. I looked up at the old gnarled tree just by the hedge: God. The hedge itself. Myself so small in the great God vastness as to be almost not here. Not present and yet I am here, present. Conscious.

It is a great gift to be a part of Godness.

It is Love—Godness itself—that gave me this vantage point.

April 10, 2008

CenterHina

Molokai

To What Purpose?

Only to admire, to praise, as I so often feel?

To marvel.

Wonders are endless and though there is suffering—so frequently human caused—there seems little reason to ever complain.

How did this happen? What mystery not to ever know.

So like butterflies we are, ever on our way to lightness, to flight, but without clue to destination.

I find this suits me.

That I am aware of floating through time and space gifted with the bounties of the journey yet not ever owning any of them. It is like living in a dream where everything seems real, solid, and yet we are, all of us—leaves, toads, humans—just passing through.

The Universe, the Cosmos, so vast. Time so vast. Surely we are recycled millions of incarnations as everything there is. Freedom to Perfect!

Seen from this perspective our suffering on this small planet is about learning enjoyment. Choosing peace over pain and destruction. Growing into a comfortable universality. Letting go of pettiness. Dissolving tribalism, nationality, speciesism.

I knew this as a child. That the daffodil might be me. Moondust. Barnacles in the sea. Rocks and bear claws.

Isis knew this. Humanity