I talked with my son Colin this morning about what’s happening with this blog. I started to tell him the story of how one post went viral — how for the last few months I had projected January 22, the day of exopermaculture’s 4th anniversary, to be the day I either closed the blog down (leaving it as an archive) or ratcheted it way down. As I said this, Colin began to groan . “NOOOOO . . . do you realize how many thousands of people you are affecting, just with your willingness to say what you really think and feel, to go where others don’t dare go?” (I was surprised at his outburst. I thought he saw this blog as just another of his wild mom’s quixotic experiments.)
“Wait a minute, Colin. Hear me out” — something he tells me regularly; both of us with highly active nervous-systems, tend to interrupt each other.
So I told him the rest of the story. See this.
He, of course, was blown away.
What is this well of deeply buried feeling now geysering into the collective at such an alarming rate? It’s not just guns and violence. Not just Oregon posturing and psy-op mass shootings. Not just nearby “sleeping giant” Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center joining in unholy alliance with Indiana University.
It’s this, too. This well of anguished communion that we fall into when we enter the sacred, liminal space/time of a loved one’s “dying” process. And the desire we have, to share our experiences, whether horrifying or blessed.
What I continue to marvel at as I scroll through and “approve” each new comment, each new story of a loved one’s dying:
1. THE DETAILS OF EACH PERSON’S DYING PROCESS ARE UTTERLY UNIQUE.
and
2. THERE’S JUST SO MUCH FAMILY FEELING, FAMILY LOVE IN THIS WORLD!
As one of the now over 500 commentators on this post put it:
“People need to talk about these things. It is hard. It also brings you closer.”
Now here’s one of those strange synchronicities that fill my life. Yesterday at around dinner time I started taking some notes. My first thought: set up a website, Deathing Project, which will feature both the HOW WE DIE post and especially, the commentary that it has inspired.
Oh wow! I looked at my watch. 6:01 p.m. Wrote the time down, planned to set up an astro chart for this moment in the morning. More on that, and the synchronicity involved, in a minute . . .
All of which made me realize, I think of “conscious dying” as “deathing.” And of course, since I love to reframe the meaning we give to certain words (for example, “crone.” See this), and what I mean by this word “deathing” is to make conscious all aspects that radiate from the dying process: not just how we die, but how we are with others who are dying, how we are with our grieving process (for example, see my book, This Vast Being) — and of course, to make more and more conscious how the numinous sacred does or does not interact with soulless technology.
And then, once again, I started ruminating on the connection between the possibly upcoming Deathing Project and the new Baby Picture Project . . .
From yesterday’s notes:
For both, there is the “stripping, or easing, or melting, or evaporating — of the mask, or persona. That constructed “identity” which tends to separate us from our essence, our original innocence, Love’s embrace. For Love is everywhere, the very air we breathe.”
The Baby Picture Project is a deliberate invocation of our original essence. The Deathing Project is the involuntary plunge into essence that confronts us when we “come up against” the universal experience of a loved one’s dying. These two projects have the same intent: “to extract the soul from its encasement.” To live (and die), on earth, as a soul, in an ensouled world.
For the Deathing Project is writ both small and large: surrounded by beauty during the deathing of ourselves and loved ones, and, we must admit, the apparent death, possibly, of our biosphere itself — the birds and animals and plants and trees and stones and mountains and clouds . . .
More from my notes:
The burning away of all that separates. A common fate. Personal and collective destiny, death of the material world as we know it. Nuclear (three minutes to midnight)?
Or better, more aware, the controlled explosion into light of what had been held and hidden in darkness.
An explosion of creativity.
Here’s where we are at 11:52 AM today:
And here’s the synchronicity that attended last evening’s my sudden awareness of the possible website called the Deathing Project. It comes through the astrological chart for that moment, 6:01 p.m., 1/26/16. And what struck me about the chart is the point on the swiftly moving (one degree every four minutes) Ascendant (7° Leo), which just happens to be exactly conjunct Pluto in the eighth house of my natal chart. Pluto: primal process, the inexorability of the life process — birthing growing aging dying; in the 8th house: Pluto’s house, house of death and rebirth. Must I take this moment seriously? Apparently so.
And, oh my! Notice that Mercury (communication) at nearly 15° Capricorn is exactly conjunct primal Pluto in this chart. Mercury moves at a fairly swift rate (it circles the Sun in only 88 days), so will be out of the conjunction within a few days. So that conjunction too, is significant.
Above/Below Synchronicities: between specific moments in the ever-changing energetic pattern set up by the positions and motions of planets in the heavens and crucial events on earth (whether for an individual or a group, whether internal or external: in this case, individual and internal: the sudden intuitive idea to set up a website to “capture” and channel the energies of conscious dying).
P.S. I just now registered the domain name www.deathingproject.com with go-daddy.
