shoji: birth-death

Maybe because humans are very smart, or, well, putting it gently, are very dumb, only through the experience of the opposite do we understand what actually is true or right for us.

We’re not ok in being alone, but we probably feel uncomfortable in a crowd; we don’t have what we want or we have too much going on; we hope for settling up some roots, but having very few options makes us wish for more choices; being alive but with fear of living; searching for a cure, but wishing the strength to give up. And, want we all internally, deeply and foremost live for, Love. Aspiring for a great Love and incapables of loving ourselves.

“In the realm of feeling, the productive orientation is expressed in love, which is the experience of union with another person, with all men, and with nature, under the condition of retaining one’s sense of integrity and independence. In the experience of love the paradox happens that two people become one, and remain two at the same time. Love in this sense is never restricted to one person. If I can love only one person, and nobody else, if my love for one person makes me more alienated and distant from my fellow man, I may be attached to this person in any number of ways, yet I do not love.”

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Erich Fromm

So we need to live through the idea of loss, of pain, of confusion, to appreciate where we are, how and who with. We need to be close to an end, to rethink and miss the beginning.

So maybe opposites are not so distant related. Maybe opposites are part of the same family, hyphenated, inseparable. We do know the closeness of Love and Hate, of Peace and Turbulence, of Forgiveness and Memory, of Life and Death…

In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two.

Through pain and loss we find inner love and forgiveness. We grow, in the sense that, the frontier of who we are expands into a wider reality, an immersion in the world in all its different levels, perspectives.

A warm bed when it’s cold outside…

“Dying is inevitable and intimate. I have seen ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be. This is not a fairy-tale happy ending that contradicts the suffering that came before, but rather a transcendence of tragedy…. I have witnessed a heart-opening occurring in not only people near death, but also their caregivers. They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn’t know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them, regardless of the suffering they encountered. If that possibility exists at the time of dying, it exists here and now.”

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Frank Ostaseski

It really is when we no longer can have, that we miss.

That's why all the highlighted quotes on living in the now, to be present now, carpe diem, for me and you and everyone we know...