The second half of life includes a conversation with death, which is difficult for me, and tears help.
It is a conversation between my embodied soul, with its sense of entity, and the vastness of the absolute, quite beyond entity.
The two are one, but the two are different, as I know even now – for sometimes, in particular moments, entity gives way to non-entity, personal life gives way to endless life, and this is a cause for both fear and wonder.
I cannot speak lightly of the matter, all eager to be free from this life. The thought of death brings sadness, for it is my particular life I will leave and the next paragraph is difficult to write.
I will leave my family, my history, friends, the sky, fish and chips, this aching with laughter, my chair, my piano, touch, roses in autumn, sex, appreciation, writing, kindness, whisky, hot baths, a robin in the snow, the fire on a cold night, a train leaving on time, carrying me home.
It is not annihilation I fear, but the loss of these things which my soul entity, this clothed and struggling life, loves to high heaven.
So there are tears at such leaving, a contraction of hope… self-pity and a scream.
Though my embodied soul and the absolute are one, there is no distinction; made for each other they could not be less at war…and as the soul shell melts, this surface being gives way to a warm dark flood, a black light of intimacy that is the absolute.
This is a death but not death.
It is a death to love become attachment and delight become entitlement.
It is a death to jaded joy, to a worn out body, to mannered behaviour and a mind made small by labels and structures, when neither truly exist.
A death but no death… for beyond my structured soul, a deep and pervasive melting and mending, my soul now un-bodied, a more original truth, something freed, a shaft of cobalt blue in this vast mystery.
Some Simon beyond Simon, though, in truth, he was always there and with me now.
And yes, I cry at the thought; for I love my constraints, blessed in them and through them.
So there are tears…and a beyond the tears.
