This is it now, I see how you want to escape, to leave it, to leave it all behind. Life, as it appears to you, seems unbearable. You are not just tired, you feel imprisoned in this weak, wrecked body that has lost all its ability to provide you with an autonomous existence.
Nothing in me says that you should stay, that anything should be different, that you should be positive, that there’s hope for anything to improve. And I don’t say anything. There’s this peculiar aliveness in decline, in dying.
Your hand, which can barely hold mine, is cramped. This apparent last path seems to be all about dependence, helplessness. Giving yourself entirely into the stream of life, whatever that may be. Consensual or not, it draws you into its powerful current, it always did. And while you break, this sublime, extraordinary lifeforce might appear like an antagonist.
Your dreaming became suddenly interrupted and devastated when life took a course that felt like a nightmare, slowly suffocating you. When I sit with you, holding your trembling hand, feeling this excruciating fear of decline, and of being annihilated and erased from memory, I could tell you that you are loved, although life’s love is not always a romance, and that your physical boundaries are such a vivid illusion, and that aliveness knows no separation from its appearances. But I don’t. Instead, I am simply sitting with you, holding your hand, sharing breath and presence with you. We are not two but we are not one. Life’s appearance, recognizing itself.
