“I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization …that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon…”
What poet and author Ross Gay conveys in his dream, can happen anywhere/anytime; while filling our car with gas, having dinner with friends, attending worship services, exercising, etc., we can be smitten with the stunning awareness that everyone and everything is impermanent, temporary, soon to be no more – ourselves included. This may seem like a morbid realization, but I see it as a dark gift, one that is not pleasant, but significant. In his dream, Gay says that consciousness of mortality left him feeling “such an absolute love for this life.” Is that not a sensation worth the disturbing truth of our demise?
The connection between life and death is expressed beautifully in the ever-popular book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: “If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide to the body of life, for life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” Can we fully appreciate the mystery of life without a felt sense of its inevitable end?
There is so much in our day-to-day lives that we do without thinking, and so many people whose presence we take for granted. Gay’s dream can serve as a wakeup call, an invitation to notice what we miss and to marvel at the fact that we are, for a brief time, alive.
Attuned to Soul 