I was sitting down with a friend for coffee– we were reviewing our respective years together– 2024. I expressed to her that in the past two years I have had both the most brutal and savage experiences and the most beautiful and magical experiences of my life. Sometimes they are even happening in the same moment. And there has been nothing in the middle.
ZERO things in the middle.
Hot or cold.
Closed or open.
Nothing tepid.
Half-way is not an active principle in this part of the fractal.
She held my eyes in her pools of green in a way that I felt naked and raw– I could feel and hear my heart beat as she said, The Beauty is in the Contrasts.
The Truth has reverb.
Beginnings and endings.
Births and deaths.
The sacred thresholds between bardos.
Oh the savage beauty of these places!
Sometimes one wishes for a slow and balanced respite,
but I am constantly catching my breath in awe.
And I remind myself that one cannot conceive of light without darkness,
That hot and cold are not opposites, but degrees of ONE thing.
Even beyond that, they are relative– if our hands are freezing, even lukewarm water will feel like it’s burning. So what is it?!
Our fields of experience both perceive and emit the phenomena.
It’s not a monologue… It’s a dialectic.
We are the light, the crystal and the rainbow all at once.
The light speaks through the crystal in the language of itself in fragments.
…
And just one moment of perception can capture the fullness of EVERYTHING. The Fullness of The ONE thing…
The day after Christmas, I sat down on the floor to play the singing bowls at the foot of a hospital bed that hospice care had installed in the middle of our living room two days before.
There hasn’t been time to get a Christmas tree or bring to life the magic of the traditional holiday space… yet here we sit around my father on his deathbed, midwifing him through the veil as we decorate him together with the felt sense of our memories.
I sing to him through the Heart, holding his unique being there in its fullness and expressing my gratitude for THIS LIFE.
For the beauty of my childhood.
For his mantras.
For the ecstatic nature of his being.
For the hundred journals and ten-thousand spiritual sticky notes he left for me to find, tucked away into a vast library of Shaivist scriptures and watercolor how-to books.
For the love and longing that always lived in his heart.
For the love and longing he passed to my heart.
For the Flame he lit with his.
When I finished playing, my six year old son and I embraced him as my mom held his hand and he took his last exhale.
Heart.
Beat.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Expand.
Contract.
Suffering.
Grace.
Birth.
Death.
All two sides of the same door.
The sacred thresholds.
I take my shoes off and wash my feet in flower water.
Oh the savage beauty of these places!
Let me surrender to the Spanda, these sacred pulsations,
Dancing like a sea plant
Ensorcelled by the rhythmic pounding of waves.
I can hear them now…
They are impossible to distinguish
From my breath.
In Ecstatic Memory of the Mighty Bruce Allen Gold
December 3, 1952 – December 26, 2024
Life partner, husband and best friend of Barbara “GhiGhi” Gold
Known to Gurumayi as “Niranjan”
Known to Bodhi as “PaGhi”
And known to Jess as “Dad”
