At the end of May, I gathered online with students, dear colleagues and my mentor in mindfulness-informed palliative care, Michele Chaban to mark the closing of the Mindfulness Informed End-of-Life certificate program at the University of Toronto. It feels like we grew a field of dandelions over the last 9 years. The flowers have gone to seed. The seeds are now dispersing in the wind. We don’t know what will come next, but we know there will be something.
Much wisdom, and a few tears were shared. Some stay with me even now:
Dying is relational
Be in the mystery
There is only the trying
Do not succumb to the socialization of despair
My colleagues also spoke about Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching, ‘a cloud never dies’. He teaches that when you look into a cup of tea, you are seeing a cloud. You may have seen the cloud in the blue sky yesterday and noticed that it is no longer there. You may think, ‘oh the cloud has died’. He teaches that the cloud has not died. The cloud has become the tea in your cup. At least 70% of our bodies are also clouds. And as my colleague Kelly Butler, shared, “this makes the whole idea of endings a little less certain, a little less solid”.
This teaching reminds us of both inter-being, and the illusion of endings. In times when I feel disconnected from the life around me, or am experiencing other types of suffering that feel stuck, I try to re-member and feel into my deep interconnection with life. I find a potent way that invites this, is imaging the life cycle of water and air through us and around us and over time.
I imagine how the vapor in my breath was once the ocean. My tears were once snow. The tea in my up was once a river. The water in my body, inside a whale. The water from my shower, on top of Sagarmatha (Mt Everest).
Earth’s water has been continuously recycled for over 4 billion years! (What?!). Water molecules are ancient. The same is true for the air we breathe, which is around 350 million years old and continuously refreshed by photosynthesis (thank you phytoplankton and trees!).
With each breath we take, we are mathematically guaranteed to be inhaling multiple molecules that once passed through the Buddha’s lungs. Breathing, knowing I am breathing in and knowing I am breathing out, connects me to ancient history and every living being on Earth. With such deep inter-connectedness, how is it that we can feel isolated or disconnected?
As Pascal Auclair has taught me, “the conditions are such that” … we forget or perhaps never knew. Society, as most of us know it, perpetuates hyper-individualism and consumer capitalism, encouraging us to see others and the earth’s elements as commodities rather than to live in deep co-existence with them. Materialism reinforces the idea that the finite, visible world is all that is real - a cup of tea, is just a cup of tea.
However, physics and Buddhist teachings have a striking way of intertwining. Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings are echoed by chemist Antoine Lavoisier who observed in 1789 that nothing truly disappears. Every atom that makes up our bodies, the air we breathe, and the objects around us have been here since the beginning of time and will continue to exist, constantly shifting forms.
In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes - Antoine Lavoisier
Meditating on our interconnection with water and other elements can help us re-member our belonging. Indigenous writers, scholars, and knowledge keepers have also generously helped bring attention to our inter-connectedness. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book, Theory of Water and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s many publications come to mind.
As I write this, I am breathing my grandmother’s breath. My descendants, whether I meet them or not will breath my breath. How might it feel, when we are missing a person who has died or is far away, to take a moment to breath in and know you are likely breathing in the same molecules, which are now becoming a part of you. Or how might it feel to take a sip of tea, knowing it was once a river that maybe your loved one also drank from?
We truly belong to each other.
In wonder and impermanence,
Celina
