My Obituary

 I can’t imagine passing up the fun of writing my own obituary.

Unlike more traditional obits, there will be no narrative of worldly achievements, connections, good fortune, heartbreak and general shenanigans.  Instead, an exploration of the key question one might pose in response to those things.

So what?

Our control over what happens is tiny at best.  Ah, but what we make of it!  That’s where life sizzles.  Specifically, how our experience shapes the way we define reality?

Our definition of reality is, for practical purposes, the only game in town.  It underlies our every opinion, judgment, choice, action, belief, you name it.  Our take on what’s real may not impact our shoe size, but it sure influences whether we’re wearing flip-flops or combat boots.  

Could it be that the biggest gift we offer one another besides kindness is what we infer from our experience about how the universe works?  I think maybe, which is why I’m writing this.

I find no real difference between being dead or alive.  Just as there is no real difference between living in Vermont or Venezuela; wearing a tux or a turban; dancing ballroom or ballet.  We’re always fundamentally the same.  Our essence is spirit growing our conscious awareness of our True Identity: a blessed child of immortality.  Death changes only the amusement park, not the underlying purpose of its attractions.  

It took me a long time to come up with a story about how the universe works that made sense to me.  Here it is in rather simplistic terms because those are the only terms I can comprehend at my stage of awakening. 

I take my cue from sparkly characters like Greg Boyle, Jesuit and founder of Homeboy Industries in LA, helping gang members find a less risky way of living.  He says, “I don’t believe in mistakes.  Everything belongs, and, as the homies say, ‘It’s all good.'”

My life has never changed one iota since birth, or before birth for that matter.  My True Self, my spirit, has but one longing: conscious merging with All That Is––the way, as Khalil Gibran poetizes, a river before entering the sea trembles with fear.  

She looks back at the path she has traveled

from the peaks of the mountains, 

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her, 

she sees an ocean so vast, 

that to enter 

there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk

of entering the ocean 

because only then will fear disappear, 

because that’s where the river will know 

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, 

but of becoming the ocean.

Every smidgen of the universe is designed to serve that becoming, if you ask me.  Whether finding ourselves on a cross-country train trip seated across from the Buddha and Jesus having a chat, or accidentally dropping an ice cream cone on our wedding dress.  Within every event, every moment, is the same gift, the same opportunity, the same call: to grow our capacity to love.  There’s actually nothing else going on so far as I can tell.

Every scintilla of energy ever expended by anyone for any reason has at its core the heartbeat of the universe, chanting: “Only love.  Only love.  Only love.”  If we don’t hear it, it isn’t because we’re unworthy, it’s simply because we haven’t yet cultivated adequately the practice of listening.  

The only difference between me and a saint is the same difference between me and a champion chainsaw juggler: they’ve put in the work.

I find judgments of good and bad to be an entirely self-created delusion.  Every moment is exactly the same: an opportunity to grow love.  Life events, regardless how painful or glorious, even evil, are merely the stage or playground or schoolhouse in which that growing takes place.  And as we know, some of those events are monumentally challenging.  Such as the belief that something other than our own definition of reality causes our happiness or misery.

If I live long enough, I’ll write some backstory that’ll give this obit a little texture. 

The suicide of my beloved, for instance.  Hitch-hiking around the U.S. pretending to be mute so that I might learn from living without my voice.  Time in a seminary looking for God only to discover I needed to look within myself instead.  Graduating next-to-last in my high school class yet getting admitted to one of the nation’s most selective colleges.  Being a recovering alcoholic for three decades and change.  A friend’s remark that the only person he knows who laughs more than I do is the Dalai Lama.  It’s a long list.  

But that list, ultimately, is just color commentary.  Its purpose is to provide a springboard for diving into the depths of that fertile, expansive question:

So what?