I wake at four these days, my heart a May Pole of connection with my ancestors through my brother’s passing on April 14th.  He is here weaving beauty and love in and through my heart.

When embalming, the Egyptians left the heart inside the body because they believed the heart was the seat of wisdom and in the afterlife it would be weighed to see whether the person had led a good life.

I believe now the heart is stretched when someone we love passes, strengthened.  It is as though breath moves more clearly and openly through nose and pores, and in that, we notice more.  I’m seeing birds in trees and roses hidden within green growth. I feel the world peering at me, peeking, as I look, hear, smell, touch, taste.  I’m receiving the world around me, expanded in my brother’s passage, his leadership in growth.

In that, I’m with the well-known quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Eyes opened, heart touched, I wiggle in receptivity, grateful to be led like a child by those who go before.

The day begins to light and birds are singing.  It’s as though their notes draw the light. Which comes first, light or song, and what vibrates in me now?

It’s been thirty-one days since my brother passed.  The curtain he opened, the veil, feels fragile today, as I continue to navigate two worlds, my own and what he now explores.

There is expansion in my chest, and my arms stretch a little wider as though encompassing more than I know.

In the book “In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying”, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche shares how, with death, the elements let go, earth, water, fire, air, space, and I recall my visit to the Everest Memorial in 1993.  I felt elemental as though I understood. I write about it in “Airing Out the Fairy Tale”.

Reverence waved within us like the prayer flags overhead as we entered the Everest Memorial. It’s a circle, a sacred site where those who have died on Everest are honored and remembered with cairns, simple piles of stones. I hadn’t expected the Taj Mahal, of course, yet I was shocked at the efforts to honor human life in an area so bare, with nothing to spare.

Celeste, Sante, and I separated, each drawn to explore different sections within the circle, each needing to find our own way to honor and grieve. The wind blew icy cold. Something new entered my bones. Not fear, or even grief. I stepped out—or was brought out—of humanness, into something more elemental.

The book “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin came to me as I stood there. Set in the Australian outback, it’s an exploration of the invisible pathways by which the Aboriginal ancestors sang their world into existence. I felt that in Nepal, as though those who’d died were winging their way through stars, as though the expansiveness of death was impersonal. It was as if the vastness between and within atoms was tangible. I could believe we sing the universe into being as we tune into the vibrations between the cells. We are tuning forks.  

I’m with that now, awareness of the elements and how they come together, in this moment, in me. I’m awake, my song within, my heart a cauldron brewing what comes as I open to this day, this birth, each day, a birth and celebration of what’s new and wakes. I walk out into my yard, greeted by leaves, trunks, stones, and the twittering notes of birds.

As I document the days since my brother’s passing, today I wake feeling a change. I examine the reasons.

First, there is something about Mother’s Day.  I see photos of the mothers of friends, comments, love offered and shared, and I feel how our mother and my brother are once again one.  I find comfort in that.

Second, I am reading an amazing book, In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.  At the age of 36, he leaves his identity, privilege and prestige, discards his roles and robes to explore as the Buddha did what “we” really are, the living and dying happening in each of us all of the time.  

Reading this book, I understand why I feel my brother so here, so nestled in my heart even as he invites me to look a little more widely and wisely at the wisdom he explored when he was here in a physical touchable form, and as he is now.  

As I’ve said, my brother comes to me as various birds.  Here he is as a Great Blue Heron crossing the road, a road we all share.