Honoring Life, Celebrating Spirit

One of the most difficult experiences we will go through in life is the experience of confronting grief, which only occasionally is a close second to the experience of raising teenagers. In either case, there is no remote with a fast-forward button or a clever app for escaping it. Grief is an in-your-face proposition, and while there are many ways to circumvent grief, there is only one way through it. I was reminded of this last night when I joined close to 200 other intrepid souls who gathered together to collectively grieve the loss of a mutual friend.

I know that out in Joshua Tree, the fourth annual celebration of Bhakti Fest is blissfully underway, and I am not there. Earlier this year, a friend and I made tentative plans to drive out to the desert together to participate in one of the festival's four days. We were going to saturate our ears and our auras with kirtan. The Fates, however, took a pencil to our calendar and offered us not only alternate plans, but a different take on celebrating Bhakti.

As I have explained in an earlier post, Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion or the path of love. This path is intended to lead us toward devotion and love, ultimately, of big "G" God, but it demands that we, first, develop our hearts so that we are then able to use this open, expansive organ to love all that has been created here on this very human plane. On a certain level, Bhakti yoga is a celebration of spirit, and last night, in the family home of our deceased friend, we came together in just such a celebration to mourn, or murmur our memories, to pay tribute to a spirit we cared for and learned from while he lived his life here among us.

If you look up the word mourn in the dictionary, you will see that it comes from the Greek mermēra, meaning care. This is what I dearly love about dictionaries: The good book then urges further investigation by suggesting "more at MEMORY." Under memory is the reference to this shared Greek origin, but there under memory, and first in the long list of derivations, predating even the Greek, is the Sanskrit word smarati, meaning he remembers. Et voilà! This is what we do as mourners. We come together to share what we remember. In honoring our dead, then, we are likewise honoring all of us alive with memory. We are mourners and survivors, and we need to tell our stories to one another. We need reminders of our collective memory because, then, we'll recognize, too, that our tears and the ache in our hearts at the loss we feel so profoundly at this moment, is not a singular burden.