How do you say Goodbye?
We say it almost every day. Sometimes it's just a word in passing to someone you'll see tomorrow, sometimes it's the last time we'll ever tell a person that without knowing it is. It's the latter I'm concerned with here.
Many of us have already faced this at some point in our lives. For those who have not, it's only a matter of time. But what is time, really? Can it really be measured? Can it really be felt, time? How long did it take to emerge from your mother's womb? How long did it take to journey across the room, or across the country, to be with someone important to you? How long does a true conversation last with someone you love? I say truly, these things are timeless! They all are.
One day we are born, one day we grow, one day who we were is gone, the molecules in our bodies that were there before are completely recycled, rebuilt, and restructured. Days are just time, one time the Earth spins and returns to a place it never was before.
I'll never forget the last time I was at the Lake in Wisconsin, right around the time my son was size of a lentil in his mother's womb, and I happened upon my grandfather, Dave, sitting in his office, who had just put down a book, I forget what it was. He told me Alex, I've come to a conclusion about spirituality and religion, and there is nothing else, there is only Love. The Universe is made of Love, and that's it. And I nodded, because I knew he was right.
Nothing special, nothing extra. Nothing outside of us. We are it. Love is what surrounds us everywhere and always, whether we accept it or not, it's just there. Love is what makes life, and life is all we are in an otherwise lifeless and chaotic existence of stars exploding in far-off spaces, dust collecting and merging together to form new planets that none of us will ever see except through a telescope, when the vibrations that reach our eyes have traveled for thousands of years at the speed of light across unknown galaxies. How else are these things in our world here, except as things to be seen, heard, felt as living, conscious beings?
So we have to ask, if these things arise together, phenomena and being, and only exist for each other's sake, are they actually separate at all? Is there really an experience and an experiencer? We all were born out of an act of love, we all grew up because of acts of love from others greater than ourselves, and thus we are here now, alive and breathing, nourished, sheltered, with clothing on our backs and most importantly, the capacity to love one another.
To see an end as a beginning, we simply need to take a step back from our immediate selves. Does a drop of water worry about when it will evaporate? Ask a wave on the ocean, what will it tell you? Whooooosh.... CRASH.... again, and again, but never the same twice.
In the same way, events in this life seem to repeat or have patterns, but in the big picture, it's all one big beautiful, chaotic wave, made up of a collection of smaller waves, with even smaller waves inside them, all composed of drops of water, where even one drop is great number of water molecules making it what it is, as it crashes again and again into rock, over eons and eons, gently crushing them into pristine sandy beaches, creating tiny bubbles floating on the surface of the deep ocean, being formed by the chaos and popping so quickly no one could ever keep up, but can only listen to the subtle and unique sound it all makes, vibrating through the air as it reaches your inner ear, becoming sound waves, shimmering across your neural cortex that dissipate as soon as they arrived, just like those bubbles.
Love is what makes our sense of time and self disappear, it's what makes us do things that make no sense, it's what makes us forget about living and dying, it's what keeps us grounded in what's happening now. It's a bedtime story, it's an embrace that seems to last forever but never long enough, it's a lullaby, it's teaching someone how to play, it's holding someone's hand when they are sick, it's making dinner, it's saying a prayer, it's the Sun rising with loon calls echoing across the water. These events are not random!
Those of us who have ever lost all sense of Love, find ourselves trapped in our own loneliness, isolation and sadness, a prisoner of our own minds, belittling ourselves and others by thinking we are just separate things that will live forever, and never change.
My grandmother Bea was someone who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of this Love. She gave it to everyone around her incessantly, this intangible, inexpressible, infinite thing that you can never quite put your finger on, but you know it's there, because you feel it, because it's literally what is maintaining your and my entire existence, it's the same force that holds the atoms in our bodies together, what helps us through illness, old age, tragedy, loss, and death itself.
My mother tells me that when I was a boy, I once said "There are too many goodbyes, and not enough hellos."
We have all lost someone and had to say goodbye, whether we knew it was goodbye or not. But if we step back from our immediate selves, death of one person is not a finality, not a goodbye, it's an opportunity to discover a new version of ourselves, not as one person, but all of us who are alive now, remembering and cherishing, as one gigantic crashing wave of vibrations: flesh, blood, synapses, emotions, voices, beating hearts ignited by the fire of Love itself. All of us will never be who we are forever, we are changing all the time, we are change itself.
So, the best way to say goodbye, is to say "Hello". Meet yourself and this world exactly as it is, because there is no other time, no other person, no other way it could be. No inside, no outside, no beginning, no end.
Goodbye Gomma, Goodbye AhAh, Hello us. Let us not sleep in sorrow, let us wake up and meet things as they are with our eyes open, our hearts ready to carry this Love on as long as we can. We need to love ourselves, and we need to love each other. We ARE it. So say Hello. That's how you say good bye.
Say Hello!
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