Death Guides The Soul Opening
Death is circling me.
It’s something that keeps popping up all around me. At first I resisted it. Now, I embrace it. I’m ready for it.
It’s been years since I came to accept my own death. After enough days, months, and years of thinking of your own suicide, you can’t help but not being afraid of it anymore.
And since I came out the other side of that darkness — a void where I didn’t expect to live to thirty, I just celebrate that I found a way to live and am ready for my death whenever it comes.
At least it didn’t come before I truly lived.
But lately, death has been showing up in a different way — a framing of life and it’s cycles around me. A realization that becoming requires death.
Death had been flitting on my peripherals for days, but today it showed its face fully and named itself as the theme I can’t ignore anymore. An integration waiting for me to step into. More than just a perspective, but a practice — a guide to a deeper rooting in myself and all of life around me.
It was on my morning walk on the trail down the street from my house. I walk on it every day. There, right in the middle of the path, lay a bird twitching, unable to take flight.
It was one of the most beautiful birds I’d ever seen. A parakeet with blue, white, and black feathers. She had such a vibrant sky blue all over her belly, back, and chest; and then this zebra striped pattern on the back of her neck up to her head.
This wasn’t just some wild PNW bird, this was someone’s pet. A bird that had probably spent most of its life in a cage, feeling cared for through the structures imposed by another.
I picked her up and carried her home. After twitching for the first 15 seconds or so, she calmed down and then just kept staring at me as I looked into her eyes. First on one side and then I shifted her a bit and then from the other. I still don’t know what to make of it. There was some connection there I don’t understand.
As I brought her inside, I put her in a soft bed of towels and she seemed to calm down. It was then that I noticed her broken beak — she must’ve hit something hard. A few moments later, she started twitching intensely and then just stopped. And just like that, life passed through her.
I wrapped her in some cloth, carried her up to the big cedar tree in our backyard, and buried her. I shared a few words for her and an intention for her energy and matter to flow into that cedar’s roots.
Walking down from the tree alone, I felt this wave of comfort pass over me. This is life. This is beautiful. This is me.
This is the death of domesticated Jordan.
I don’t even know how to put it in words — it’s an embodied feeling. This breaking of the shackles. All of the stories and internalized pressures of being what I’m supposed to be.
I thought I broke through this years ago when I began re-evaluating and re-making how I defined success, love, purpose. But this death is deeper. A cycle I’m sure to find again down the road as life and death continues to repeat itself through me.
I have spent my life domesticated — tamed in ways I couldn’t even realize.
Earlier today, before this experience with the dying bird, I was writing a poem called, The Death of a Good Guy.
The poem was about how I have been controlled by pleasing others for so long. Always putting others’ needs and feelings ahead of my own dignity, my own power. A perverted entanglement of my own self-worth based on how well I could help another feel loved. And in turn be “loved” by them.
A sacrificing of my own dignity in the hopes that I could help another feel their own. An impossible thing to do — give someone else their dignity. That can only be found and claimed by oneself.
And while that intention comes from a heart-centered place to seed and manifest a world of love, care, and belonging around me, it often comes at the expense of my own length, my own power and strength.
It’s time to let the pendulum swing to the other side a bit. To reclaim my own agency, my own choice in how I build relationships around me.
To lean into the wild side of Jordan — that is so fully present in each moment that he doesn’t have the capacity to always be attuning to the feelings of those around him and appeasing others as best he can.
It’s one of the biggest deaths. An unlearning and shedding of so many things I’ve been raised to prioritize. A re-centering and re-integrating with a masculine that isn’t the toxic one I was raised in, but rather a divine and sacred one that is at the core of what it means to be human.
And it comes at the time I’m letting so much die around me.
In the past three days, I’ve shared more embodied no’s than I have my entire life. It’s our no’s that create space for our fuck yes.
We must clear the forest floor to allow the deepest seeds to sprout through the soil.
“(They) need to mourn the old self and create the space for a new self to be born if they are to change and be wholly transformed.”
— bell hooks, The Will to Change
Later in the afternoon, on another walk, I came across a dead caterpillar. It was a fat one, black on its ends and orange in the middle. I picked it up as I noticed it being all curled in on itself and carried it for a while hoping it would show some sign of life.
I eventually put it on a leaf next to the trail for me to check on when I came back that direction. When I circled back around, it was still there, dead, all curled up.
Could I not just accept, but also celebrate the death of this caterpillar — a life that never even became?
As the right time comes for everything to die, can I embrace it?
And that’s what I’ve been experiencing these past few days — choosing the death of relationships, projects, and responsibilities all around me. And through these acts, I feel myself sensing into something more — something truer and bigger than I’ve ever felt.
A deeper connection to everything around me.
Omens come to me as I see myself as not just part of life and death but life and death itself. Just as that bird was. Just as that caterpillar was.
What I feel this actually creating spaciousness for is my Soul Work. A shedding of the layers that have kept me contorting and conforming to the relational and societal pressures around me and keeping me from fully being and expressing me.
Maybe it can only be these kinds of deaths that allow us to truly step into our sacred purpose. The death of all the old stories, patterns, identities, conditionings, relationships, and ways of being that keep us from fully expressing our authenticities and gifts into the world.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about purpose over the past ten years of my life. I remember the conversation that truly sparked it. I was sitting down for a beer with a close friend at our favorite pub. He was processing the death of his mother. I was in the middle of a big career transition. Out of nowhere, the question “what is the purpose of our lives?” came out of my mouth.
Since then, it’s been a constant exploration, with the acceptance that each of our purposes comes down to us offering the world the fullest expression of our gifts, values, and energies towards what we find to be meaningful.
And recently, someone offered me an even deeper framing of purpose through what she called Soul Work.
Our Soul Work is not just the fullest expression of you in the world, it’s also something that doesn’t happen unless you bring it into the world. It’s work that only you can uniquely do and be.
As I bring that thought deep into my body, a rumbling excitement stirs in my belly. It helps me sense into the larger ecosystem of life all around us. By each of us being born as we are to the time, place, relationships, etc, we naturally — if we allow ourselves to, have a unique role to play — a role that doesn’t happen unless we find and become it.
It’s something that often comes from our deepest pains, traumas, or the moments we’re on the margins noticing things no one else can. It’s something the world needs that only you can be.
“The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift — your true self — is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.”
— Bill Plotkin
This makes me realize that our greatest, most important quest, maybe our only true purpose, is to discover what our Soul Work is and bring it to life.
We each have a role to play. We are needed. The fullest expression of you is being begged to come out.
I believe we are lost without it — not just individually, but collectively.
And the only way we can help others find their Soul Work, is to become and embody our own. An embodiment that inspires and forces others to look into the mirror and reconcile themselves with their own Soul Work or not.
Sadly, looking around the world today, I can’t help but admit how hard it is to find our Soul Work today. With so much to unlearn; and so many pressures and oppressions keeping our liberation imprisoned, it’s nearly impossible.
But in the end, there’s nothing else truly important for us to go for — no mountain or ladder to climb as worthy of our energies and struggles.
And while it may seem impossibly hard some days, the world we are yearning for is right ahead of us just waiting to be seen and experienced.
It might just take a few deaths to be able to get there.
What needs to die for your purposeful Soul Work to have the spaciousness to fully be brought forth?
