DEATH & WATER
Fog-Snow
Creation-Dissolution
Part 8 of the WATER Photographs project
_________________ Prelude __________________
The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water,
and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating
the depths of the element with darkness.
Edgar Allen Poe, from his story
The Island of the Fay
The Island of the Fay
"Black shadows in a deep, green, heavy water"
Gaston Bachelard admired the writing of Edgar Allen Poe, for whom "Death is what is human," for whom "A life is described through death." Death, for Bachelard, is a special kind of water which he characterizes as Heavy Water. Indeed, he devotes the second chapter of his book Water and Dreams, An Essay On the Imagination of Matter to "Deep," "Dormant," "Dead" and "Heavy Water." He writes that Heavy Water is "more profound, dormant, and still than any other deep, dormant, or still waters in nature." Deep and Heavy waters, he says, "absorb suffering." Water is an "invitation to die:"
In the world of primary images . . . [water fulfills] an essential psychological function:
to absorb shadows, to offer a daily tomb to everything that dies within us each day.
Thus water is an invitation to die; it is an invitation to a special death . . .
This water, enriched by so many reflections and so many shadows, is
a heavy water . . . the universal hydra for the imagination . . .
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
Introduction
My dad died in August, 1955, just weeks before I turned ten years old. I actually experienced his death in a fever-pitched, dream-like state. And directly associated with his death, I experienced an epiphany which awakened me to the realization that I wanted to be a photographer. After my dad died I asked my mom for some darkroom equipment for my Christmas gift, and before New Year's Day, 1956 I was developing film in our basement and making contact prints. It's clear to me that my dad's death was instrumental in awakening me to my destiny with photography. Since his death photography has been my constant companion. (See stories #5 and #6 in Death, Art,Writing.)
In 1987, thirty some years later, when I met Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, living head of the Siddha Yoga Path, I came to a realization that her grace had always been an intimate part of my entire life. Her grace has been my constant companion; her grace has guided and protected me, always. (Protection is a curious word, I know. I remember Gurumayi saying once in a talk that the only protection we really need is from our mind.)
*
I had an extraordinary experience associated with my mother's death as well. (See story #19 in Death, Art,Writing.) And as I was working on this project, Death & Water, I was once again--unexpectedly--touched by Death. I have written in some detail about the experience in my Dedication to this project, which is included below, just preceding the Afterword.
Following this Introduction you will find a list of my online photography projects in which Death has a dominant thematic presence; then I have provided a sampling of images which have been drawn from those listed projects. Water in its various forms appear frequently in my Death-themed photography projects, and water is the primary subject matter in two of my most important and favorite Death-themed projects: Death, A Meditation in Photographs and Texts 11- 2016 and Creation-Dissolution of A World.
Fog and Snow are forms of water, and for me there is a strong relationship between Death and my images of Fog and Snow. Fog is the dominant subject in my Creation-Dissolution of A World project. Fog functions as a metaphor for both the dissolution of the physical world and the disintegration of the ego, that psychological mechanism which separates and hides from human awareness the greatest of Truths: our Unity of Being, our Oneness with the Creator and all of Creation. The ancient yogic teachings say that when we transcend the ego, we transcend Death and merge with the divine Self. In my Afterword to this project I offer a selection of quotes from an essay by a modern day yogic saint who experienced his own death in meditation. After that experience, he wrote, Death no longer existed for him.
I have included below brief introductory statements about Fog and about Snow, and then provided a collection of Fog and Snow images drawn from several of my online photography projects. Snow, like Rain, is for me a particularly sacred form of water because of the way each snowflake takes a unique, luminous, angel-like symmetrical, crystalline form as it emerges from the Heavens and falls to Earth. I love the many ways in which snow transforms the apparent world with its whiteness, and the way it invokes or mirrors some holy place within me.
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Though I consider this project to be the concluding chapter of my WATER project, I have decided to add a brief Epilogue to the collection of eight projects. The Epilogue will allow me to write a few "final words" about Water, and it will provide me an opportunity to offer some grace-filled words intended to function as a Benediction. ~ Welcome to Water and Death : Fog & Snow : Creation & Dissolution.
WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles
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My Death-Themed Photography Projects
Death, Art,Writing
Creation-Dissolution of A World 2017
Regarding Giacometti's Fear of Death 2017
Death, A Meditation in Photographs and Texts 11- 2016
And see its companion project:
Broad Brook Photographs: 9-10 & 9-11 2016
Death and Snow Angels 2016
The Departing Landscape 2007-2012
Early morning fog over the North Meadow Pond, Fall 2013
Since I view Death as a potential experience of transformation, it should not come as a surprise that my photographs of Snow and Fog are often about the way these forms of water transform the apparent world. Many of the images pulsate with visual rhythms that provide an Imaginal hint of the eternal recurrence of creation and dissolution.
As you will notice in the sampling of images to follow, snow has provided me with something like a tabula rasa. Its luminous fields of whiteness have inspired and encouraged me to use the transforming power of the photographic medium to generate imagery in extra-ordinary ways, ways that have provided me with access to what Henry Corbin calls the Imaginal world, the realm of being that exists between the inner and outer worlds; the unknowable "place" where symbols originate, where the spiritual becomes physical, and the physical becomes spiritual. Indeed, the symbolic photograph is a messenger from the Imaginal world. It conjoins inner and outer corresponding images into a visual form of Unitary Reality which provide me with "News" of the "Universe," images radiant with the divine light of grace, the Creative Power of the Universe, the divine Consciousness of the Self.
In my picture-making world, snow may be rendered in black&white tonalities, in translucent blues, in warm-hearted Golds, and in tonalities turned "inside-out." Grace comes in all forms and all colors; and it is grace which transforms a photograph from a record of outer appearances into a symbol radiant with the ineffable, interior light of the Imaginal world.
Symmetrical photograph from "The Rising Sun Project"
click here
Symmetrical photograph from "The Rising Sun Project"
click here
Symmetrical photograph from "Snow (pt. 3) : Photographs from the Silver World"
click here
from "The Eye of Shiva"
click here
from "Alone"
click here
from "Snow: Postlude To An Exhibition"
click here
from "Grace, Photograph, Symbol, Universe"
click here
from "The Pulsating Uncreated Heart"
click here
from "Snow: Homage to Callahan"
click here
Snow, 2019
And see its companion project:
Broad Brook Photographs: 9-10 & 9-11 2016
Death and Snow Angels 2016
The Departing Landscape 2007-2012
A Collection of
Death-themed Images
from the projects listed above
Please note: you can click on the images to enlarge them;
and below each image there is a "click me" sign which is hyperlinked
and which will take you to the project from which the image was first published.
Death, A Meditation in Photographs and Texts 11-2016
Death, A Meditation in Photographs and Texts 11-2016
Death, A Meditation in Photographs and Texts 11-2016
"Things suspended in black water," Visual Poem for The Departing Landscape
The Hudson River, Faint Photograph, The Departing Landscape Series
Persephone, in the Underworld, Land of the Dead, washing her feet in the river of sorrow.
click here
Color Diptychs : A visual Contemplation on Death
click here
"This is the secret of Resurrection. There is a continuous ascension of being . . . and their ascending never ceases because the divine descent into the various forms never ceases . . . it exists in every moment. It is the deepest purpose of human existence to journey from the outward to the inward and so 'return creation to its origin.'”
I am struck especially by Corbin's statement about the deepest purpose of human existence: to journey from the outward to the inward and so 'return creation to its origin.' I feel that this is what my Creative Process in photography and my practice of yoga has been all about. Making and contemplating photographs--images that function for me as symbols--has become for me a form of mediation, a means of seeing inwardly with the "eye of the Heart." Indeed, at the very center of the power of any symbol there lies the radiance of grace, a divine luminance. Only grace can return us to our Origin of Creation, that Unitary Reality, that Oneness of Being which is otherwise known as the divine Self, or Siva.
I invite you to see these related projects:
The Light of Creation : Two Theories of Manifestation
Homage to Giacometti part 6: Vision, Re-Vision
Creation-Dissolution of A World 2017
Giacometti's Fear of Death
click hereColor Diptychs : A visual Contemplation on Deathclick here
from the project "Creation-Dissolution of A World"
Fog
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My project, Creation and Dissolution of A World explores the transforming mystery of Fog and its relation to the cosmic cycle of Creation, Maintenance, Dissolution, Concealment and Grace. Grace is the means by which the ego's control over our dualistic sense perception and our world view can be transformed, unveiled, so that the Truth of the Oneness of Being becomes recognizable.
Fog is an ethereal form of water. It envelopes and imbibes whatever it descends upon. I think of Fog, which consists of infinitely small water droplets that surround even smaller particles of dust suspended in space, as a metaphor for the veil that obscures our perception of Unitary Reality even as it invokes within me a feeling of the mystery that belies all worldly appearances.
When I become absorbed in Fog, my vision of the world dissolves. I feel as if I've become suspended in space, disoriented, disembodied. And I have had similar experiences when the whiteness of snow and the brightness of light merge in just the right way transforming my seeing and sense of being in the world. In these moments of ego-perceptual dissolution, time and space become suspended; everything becomes eternally still and silent.
These kinds of experiences, which juxtaposes two radically ways of being in "the world" temporarily override the power of my ego, providing me with an alternate view of being that appears more whole and luminous. Such is the transforming power of grace which gently gifts me with these brief tastes of my own inevitable "Death," these brief glimpses into my own interior light, the light of divine Consciousness.
Fog is an ethereal form of water. It envelopes and imbibes whatever it descends upon. I think of Fog, which consists of infinitely small water droplets that surround even smaller particles of dust suspended in space, as a metaphor for the veil that obscures our perception of Unitary Reality even as it invokes within me a feeling of the mystery that belies all worldly appearances.
When I become absorbed in Fog, my vision of the world dissolves. I feel as if I've become suspended in space, disoriented, disembodied. And I have had similar experiences when the whiteness of snow and the brightness of light merge in just the right way transforming my seeing and sense of being in the world. In these moments of ego-perceptual dissolution, time and space become suspended; everything becomes eternally still and silent.
These kinds of experiences, which juxtaposes two radically ways of being in "the world" temporarily override the power of my ego, providing me with an alternate view of being that appears more whole and luminous. Such is the transforming power of grace which gently gifts me with these brief tastes of my own inevitable "Death," these brief glimpses into my own interior light, the light of divine Consciousness.
*
I discovered--synchronistically--several years ago two remarkable similar Theories of Continuous Manifestation in which alternate views of realities flash "on" and "off" repeatedly, indeed so rapidly that they are not perceivable with ordinary sense perception. One originated from an ancient Islamic Tradition; the other from an ancient Hindu Tradition. Each suggests that the world is being created and dissolved, hidden (veiled) and re-created (revealed) in unimaginably brief and perpetual cycles of recurrence. This eternally flashing-forth process of creation and then dissolution provides one with an opportunity to enter into the space between those two opposing modes of being. This interim space and time that Henry Corbin calls the Imaginal world is a "place" of perfect stillness and silence, a "world" that transcends duality. In the Imaginal world it's possible to perceive and recognize a Truth that in the world of dualism may be too subtle and too difficult to behold by the ego and its ordinary limited sensory means of perception.
These eternally repeating cycles of creation and dissolution are related to our process of breathing, which consists of a continuum of in-breaths and out-breaths. One of the traditional yogic teachings regarding meditation consists of focusing on the space between the in-breath and the out-breath. The Meditation Masters tell us that when we consciously enter the space between the breaths we will encounter a transcendent reality of perfect stillness and perfect silence, a Unitary reality which is the very Origin of our existence and who we Truly are, which is often referred to as the divine Self.
One night, when I was a young child growing up in Ohio, I experienced a taste of the idea of recurrent creation and dissolution. My Uncle Bob was driving my cousin and me home through the dark on back country roads, and as we drove through vast fields of endless rows of corn, soybeans and cabbages I experienced a series of disorienting perceptual moments in which I became overwhelmed by light and then abruptly enveloped in darkness.
Over and over again, as the car entered and exited patches of fog on the road, the car's headlights would reflect their light off of the suspended cloud of water particles in an explosive effulgence of brightness; then in the next moment, as we passed through the fog, it was as if I would be swallowed-up in darkness. As my eyes tried to adjust to the darkness, I would sometimes be granted brief glimpses of the peripherally illuminated rows of crops nearest the road. I became fascinated by how the rows of crops seemed to dissolve into total darkness as they grew further and further away from the road. Then another unexpected repetition of bursting of light and blinding darkness would occur as we entered and exited the next patch of fog.
When we finally arrived at my cousin's house in the country I was both relieved and a bit terrified as I looked up and saw the infinite number of gently twinkling stars suspended in a space of silent stillness too vast to comprehend.
The philosopher Tom Cheetham addresses the theory of recurring (perpetual or continuous) creation and dissolution in his excellent book The World Turned Inside Out - Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. Here are a few quotes from his book:
This manifestation and annihilation occurs eternally, perpetually, instantaneously, and in all the hierarchy of worlds from the terrestrial upwards. The interpenetration of this world and the others means that "this is the other world," or rather, "this already is the other world."
Cheetham then quotes Henry Corbin, from Corbin's book Alone with the Alone:"
*
One night, when I was a young child growing up in Ohio, I experienced a taste of the idea of recurrent creation and dissolution. My Uncle Bob was driving my cousin and me home through the dark on back country roads, and as we drove through vast fields of endless rows of corn, soybeans and cabbages I experienced a series of disorienting perceptual moments in which I became overwhelmed by light and then abruptly enveloped in darkness.
Over and over again, as the car entered and exited patches of fog on the road, the car's headlights would reflect their light off of the suspended cloud of water particles in an explosive effulgence of brightness; then in the next moment, as we passed through the fog, it was as if I would be swallowed-up in darkness. As my eyes tried to adjust to the darkness, I would sometimes be granted brief glimpses of the peripherally illuminated rows of crops nearest the road. I became fascinated by how the rows of crops seemed to dissolve into total darkness as they grew further and further away from the road. Then another unexpected repetition of bursting of light and blinding darkness would occur as we entered and exited the next patch of fog.
When we finally arrived at my cousin's house in the country I was both relieved and a bit terrified as I looked up and saw the infinite number of gently twinkling stars suspended in a space of silent stillness too vast to comprehend.
The philosopher Tom Cheetham addresses the theory of recurring (perpetual or continuous) creation and dissolution in his excellent book The World Turned Inside Out - Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. Here are a few quotes from his book:
This manifestation and annihilation occurs eternally, perpetually, instantaneously, and in all the hierarchy of worlds from the terrestrial upwards. The interpenetration of this world and the others means that "this is the other world," or rather, "this already is the other world."
Cheetham then quotes Henry Corbin, from Corbin's book Alone with the Alone:"
"This is the secret of Resurrection. There is a continuous ascension of being . . . and their ascending never ceases because the divine descent into the various forms never ceases . . . it exists in every moment. It is the deepest purpose of human existence to journey from the outward to the inward and so 'return creation to its origin.'”
I am struck especially by Corbin's statement about the deepest purpose of human existence: to journey from the outward to the inward and so 'return creation to its origin.' I feel that this is what my Creative Process in photography and my practice of yoga has been all about. Making and contemplating photographs--images that function for me as symbols--has become for me a form of mediation, a means of seeing inwardly with the "eye of the Heart." Indeed, at the very center of the power of any symbol there lies the radiance of grace, a divine luminance. Only grace can return us to our Origin of Creation, that Unitary Reality, that Oneness of Being which is otherwise known as the divine Self, or Siva.
I invite you to see these related projects:
The Light of Creation : Two Theories of Manifestation
Homage to Giacometti part 6: Vision, Re-Vision
Creation-Dissolution of A World 2017
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A Brief Collection of
Fog Photographs
Please note: you can click on the images to enlarge them;
and below each image there is a "click me" sign which is hyperlinked
and which will take you to the project from which the image was first published.
Please note: you can click on the images to enlarge them;
and below each image there is a "click me" sign which is hyperlinked
and which will take you to the project from which the image was first published.
"Fog and a Park Lagoon" Images of Eden project
"Fog and a Park Lagoon" Images of Eden project
Early morning fog over the North Meadow Pond, Fall 2013 
Early Morning Fog hovering over the South Meadow Pond
"Symmetrical Photograph : Costa Rica, Cloud Forest"
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Snow
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I love the way snow transforms the world; the way it gives visible form to the Wind. I enjoy watching snow flakes fall silently from the Heavens. Sometimes, when the crystalline flakes seem to become suspended in space, I too fall into a Timeless meditative state.
"Snow Covered Rock" from the project "The Siva Sutra Rock Photographs"
I love the way snow gently blankets the earth revealing the presence and soft forms of things hidden just below the surface. And when the snow is deep and heavy, I'm fascinated by the way the world I though I knew becomes hidden, buried beneath the crystalline particles of light.
Snow provides Persephone with a sign that her time to begin her descent into the Underworld has once again arrived. Each Winter she must travel to the "Land of the Dead" to serve Hades has his Queen. She rises to Earth again in the Spring to be with her mother Demeter and to insure that the land will be fertile, and that crops will be plentiful for the Fall Harvest. (click here to see my "Persephone Series.")
Snow provides Persephone with a sign that her time to begin her descent into the Underworld has once again arrived. Each Winter she must travel to the "Land of the Dead" to serve Hades has his Queen. She rises to Earth again in the Spring to be with her mother Demeter and to insure that the land will be fertile, and that crops will be plentiful for the Fall Harvest. (click here to see my "Persephone Series.")
I have often experienced a sense of disorientation when snow and sunlight merge into an overwhelming field of enveloping luminosity. I loose my sense of identity; my ego is silenced;
I have experienced a little taste of what the Sufi mystics have termed Fana, which means "to die before one dies."
I actually enjoy this experience--when I have been graced with it. I like the way I become awakened by these brief glimpses into some brilliantly transcendent aspect of my own Unity of Being. The experience serves as a refreshing reminder that my ego is never really in control of my life, and that "Death" is not only inevitable but also an experience of transformation which could be exciting and liberating. Death, I believe, offers me an opportunity to experience face-to-face the Unknown, the mystery that lurks behind life's apparent surfaces. Death is something I look forward to even as I can sense my ego's fear of being dissolved. Death is something I must prepare for, now.
I have experienced a little taste of what the Sufi mystics have termed Fana, which means "to die before one dies."
I actually enjoy this experience--when I have been graced with it. I like the way I become awakened by these brief glimpses into some brilliantly transcendent aspect of my own Unity of Being. The experience serves as a refreshing reminder that my ego is never really in control of my life, and that "Death" is not only inevitable but also an experience of transformation which could be exciting and liberating. Death, I believe, offers me an opportunity to experience face-to-face the Unknown, the mystery that lurks behind life's apparent surfaces. Death is something I look forward to even as I can sense my ego's fear of being dissolved. Death is something I must prepare for, now.
Since I view Death as a potential experience of transformation, it should not come as a surprise that my photographs of Snow and Fog are often about the way these forms of water transform the apparent world. Many of the images pulsate with visual rhythms that provide an Imaginal hint of the eternal recurrence of creation and dissolution.
As you will notice in the sampling of images to follow, snow has provided me with something like a tabula rasa. Its luminous fields of whiteness have inspired and encouraged me to use the transforming power of the photographic medium to generate imagery in extra-ordinary ways, ways that have provided me with access to what Henry Corbin calls the Imaginal world, the realm of being that exists between the inner and outer worlds; the unknowable "place" where symbols originate, where the spiritual becomes physical, and the physical becomes spiritual. Indeed, the symbolic photograph is a messenger from the Imaginal world. It conjoins inner and outer corresponding images into a visual form of Unitary Reality which provide me with "News" of the "Universe," images radiant with the divine light of grace, the Creative Power of the Universe, the divine Consciousness of the Self.
In my picture-making world, snow may be rendered in black&white tonalities, in translucent blues, in warm-hearted Golds, and in tonalities turned "inside-out." Grace comes in all forms and all colors; and it is grace which transforms a photograph from a record of outer appearances into a symbol radiant with the ineffable, interior light of the Imaginal world.
A List of Snow Projects
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The Rising Sun : Prelude To An Exhibition March 9, 2018
Snow Photographs: Homage to Harry Callahan and All My Teachers April 11, 2018
Postlude To An Exhibition: May 21, 2018
Postlude To An Exhibition: May 21, 2018
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A Brief Collection of
Snow Photographs
click here
click here
click here
click here
click here
from "Snow: Postlude To An Exhibition"
click here
click here
from "The Pulsating Uncreated Heart"
click here
from "Snow: Homage to Callahan"
click here
Snow, 2019
Snow, 2019
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Dedication
Remembering and Honoring our Beautiful "Guru Gita Kitty"
Bella
(2001 - February 15, 2019)
Snow, Valentine's Day, February 14, 2019 . . . for Bella
The Water of the Guru's Feet has the power to take one
smoothly across the ocean of the world.
Sip the Water of the Guru's Feet
to obtain knowledge and detachment.
The Water of the Guru's Feet is the holiest of water.
(excerpts from verses 13, 14, 17 of the Siddha Yoga Publication of the Guru Gita)
On March 15, 2019 Gloria and I needed to make the decision to euthanized our beautiful cat, Bella. Thirteen years earlier (in 2006), Gloria had found Bella in a holding cage for animals available for adoption. I will explain below how we came to adopt Bella.
Gloria had recently completed chemotherapy, had retired from her school social work job, and had decided to do some volunteer work at a Humane Society shelter in Milwaukee. We had recently lost our cat, named Kaiya, who became ill with cancer while Gloria was going through her chemotherapy treatments. It certainly seemed to both of us that Kaiya's death may have been the result of a parallel process, that Kaiya perhaps became ill with cancer so that Gloria would survive. Kaiya was a close and loving comfort to both Gloria and myself throughout the rough times of Gloria's cancer treatments. I have fond and comforting memories of Kaiya sitting near me in the mornings when I meditated.
In any case, by the time Gloria started volunteering at the Humane Society, she was feeling a strong desire to adopt another animal.
Gloria and I had been practicing Siddha Yoga together since 1987, and by 2006 we both had formed a very deep interior connection with our Siddha Yoga Meditation Master, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. One day while Gloria was at the Milwaukee Humane Society Shelter, she heard (inwardly) Gurmayi's voice say the name "Bella." Shortly thereafter Gloria saw Bella in one of the holding cages: she was available for adoption.
When I went to the Shelter to see Bella, I too fell in love with her. I experienced a deep, quiet longing in her golden eyes that was irresistible. Bella was about five years old when we adopted her. We learned from the shelter that she had been adopted by at least two previous families who had returned her to the Shelter after some time. We could not imagine why anyone would want to give Bella up; she was the most loving, caring cat . . . and an excellent mouser too!
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From the beginning of our involvement in Siddha Yoga, Gloria and I would do a "call and response" chant on Sunday mornings named the Guru Gita (The "Book" or "Song of the Guru." I wrote about the Guru Gita in the Epilogue of my last project, The Bathers.) It takes about 8o minutes to perform the complete set of texts and chants on the recording we have in which Gurumayi leads the "call" group. The text of the Guru Gita explains the mystery and power of the Guru, it celebrates the grace of the Guru, and expresses gratitude for the Guru's presence in one's life.
When we chanted the Guru Gita at home, Bella would almost always come and be with us for the chant. Gloria would be sitting in a rocking chair and I would be sitting on the floor in a cross-legged meditation position. After we got ourselves situated (and sometimes, even before we were ready) Bella would climb up on my (or Gloria's) lap and curl into a ball and then listen as we chanted the Guru Gita along with Gurumayi. Bella usually spent some time with each of us during the chant: she was an "equal opportunity kitty." Interestingly, Gurumayi and Baba Muktananda would do this too: they would begin the chant by singing with the "lead" or "call" group," then later they would switch over and chant part of the time with the "response" group.
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Two years after we adopted Bella, in 2008 we sold our house in Milwaukee and moved to Canandaigua, NY where we live now (2019) in a house overlooking the beautiful meadow with two ponds that I have photographed so often. When we drove from Milwaukee to Canandaigua to meet the movers at or house, I took Bella in our old Saturn, because it had air conditioning, and Gloria drove our old van which did not have air conditioning. Bella started crying and complaining as soon as she was put in the car. After a while I got the idea of playing Gurumayi's recording of the Guru Gita; and that was the only thing that kept Bella quiet and at peace while we were traveling in the car. The two-day car trip with Bella (totaling 15 hours driving time plus an overnight stay in a motel) was filled with the constant presence of the Guru Gita chant.
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When Bella became quite ill in February, 2019 she stopped eating, became dehydrated, weak, and withdrawn. She would hide in the large bedroom closet next to where we chanted the Guru Gita every Sunday morning.
When we took her to our Veterinarian, a blood text indicated a serious infection which was treated with a 14 day anti-bacteria injection. She did better for most of that time, but after the two week period she got quite sick again and couldn't eat. The results of a second blood test presented the Doctor with conflicting and confusing data. After talking things over with our compassionate Veterinarian it became quite clear that the time had come to euthanize Bella.
Though it was a heartbreaking decision to have to make, the entire experience nonetheless seemed pervaded by palpable feelings of grace and love. We played the Guru Gita for Bella throughout that last visit at the Veterinary Hospital. Bella passed away hearing the chant with Gurumayi leading the call group. One of the verses of the Guru Gita says: "at the time of death, repetition of the Guru Gita brings liberation."
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The first Sunday after Bella had initially stopped eating and became withdrawn, we were quite surprised when she came out of her hiding place in the closet and joined us in the bedroom as we started the Guru Gita chant. She was very weak and disoriented, but she allowed me to help her get up onto my lap. She curled up into a ball, as always, and stayed with me through the entire duration of the chant.
That morning's Guru Gita chant with Bella was an unforgettable experience for me. After Bella got up on my lap I began experiencing our entire bedroom becoming permeated with a palpable feeling of divine presence. My heart opened and I felt love overflowing within me throughout the entirety of the chant. Every word, every note, every minute of the Guru Gita was pervaded by love and by grace. I felt totally united, inseparably One with Gloria, Bella, the chant and Gurumayi. It seemed as if Bella's effort to be with us for the Guru Gita, and her very presence during the chant, had served as both a magnet and a conduit for the grace of the Guru Gita and Gurumayi's grace.
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The Sunday following Bella's passing, while Gloria and I were chanting the Guru Gita, I had a very brief, though totally spontaneous inner vision in which I saw myself and Gloria lovingly handing Bella (who was wrapped in a towel) to Gurumayi. It was a beautiful and reassuring experience for me, and for Gloria too when I told her about my vision,
*
Gloria and I experienced an intense period of grieving after we euthanized Bella. There were frequent and unexpected waves of sadness; we missed Bella so much. But more than sadness, there were overwhelming feelings of love and gratitude: for Bella's presence in our life and for Gurumayi's presence in our life. Even as I write these words, I am listening to the Guru Gita. This has served me as a way of maintaining a kind of spiritual grounding as I experience those strong feelings of grief. And performing and listening to the Guru Gita has served as a way of remembering Bella and sending her the blessings of the chant, blessings that will help her to journey on to her next life's destination.
Gloria and I have been consciously trying to not let our feelings of love (and sadness) to hold Bella back from moving on. In fact, in a half-joking kind of way, the thought did occur to me--after having that vision of handing Bella over to Gurumayi--that one day, in a forthcoming life, perhaps Bella would become a Swami.
*
Bella was an extraordinarily kind and loving animal. She was a blessing for Gloria and for me, particularly in the way she became such an intimate part of our Siddha Yoga practices, and in the way that her death connected us to Gurumayi. We will always be grateful for the love and joy and beauty she showed us and so many others who became enthralled by her gentle, loving attention to them. Bella's presence in our life, her process of dying, and our grieving after her passing have been a very real and palpable experience of love and grace. It is with great love and gratitude, then, that I dedicate this project to our beautiful "Guru Gita kitty." (Here are some Pictures of Bella.)
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Afterword
"The Grace of Dying"
Just a day or two after Bella started getting really sick and withdrawing into seclusion, Gloria and I received a book from an old friend, Dick Knapp. He had sent me an email more than two weeks earlier in which he told me he had sent a "mystery gift," and asked us to let him know when it arrived. It took much longer to arrive than we expected, perhaps due to a series of snow storms. Strangely, before it arrived he wrote a second time asking us to forgive him for sending the mystery gift . . . but he never offered an explanation for the apology.
I was surprised to see--when it finally arrived--that the "mystery gift" was a book entitled The Grace of Dying, A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation authored by Kathleen Dowling Singh. When Dick sent us the book, neither of us were consciously aware that when the book finally arrived Bella would be in the beginning phase of her process of dying. This "meaningful coincidence" is yet another example of synchronicity, something I consider to be at the very heart of my Creative Process in photographic picture-making. It is also worth noting that Bella's death occurred as I was in the process of working on this final WATER project.
I mentioned earlier that I was blessed with extraordinary experiences associated with the death of my father and the death my mother (see my personal stories #5 & #19 in Death, Art,Writing), and just recently, Bella's passing. As I think back over these experiences, each was an experience of grace and of love. Such is the mystery and the power of grace: the grace of the Guru, the grace of my Creative Process, the grace of love, and the "grace of dying."
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Kathleen Dowling Singh (1946-2017), was a hospice worker for many years, a psychotherapist, a Dharma practitioner, and author of several books about grace. Her first book (1998) The Grace of Dying, A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation is written from the perspective of her personal experience in each of these areas, with an emphasis on Transpersonal Psychology and Buddhism. She says in her book's Forward that she had "labored with devotion over this work, attempting to shed light on the intimate relationship, the essential unity, of dying, contemplative practice, and spiritual growth."
For Ms. Singh dying is a process of transformation that runs parallel in many ways to the process of meditation, which essentially is a process of dissolving or transcending the ego and merging with the Source or "Ground" of All Being.
She refers to the process of dying as the Nearing Death Experience. In her hospice work she had been both a witness to and an active participant in her patients' process of dying. She writes: "Nearing death, people begin to manifest the quality of merging. There is an end of separation, a cessation of duality. This suggests that in finally coming face-to-face with the Source of All Being, we recognize that we are looking in a mirror."
Early in the book, when she summarizes the many characteristics of the "Nearing Death Experience," Ms. Singh defines what she means by grace in terms of qualities. These qualities include relaxation, withdrawal, interiority, silence, the sacred, transcendence, knowing, and merging. She writes:
"[These] qualities are not ordinarily known to - or experienced by - our separate sense of self. They are the qualities of grace. . . of expanded states of consciousness or identity. The very presence of these qualities suggest that Spirit is their source."
Later in the book she defines "grace" like this:
Grace is the end of illusion, the realization of a far more expansive and complete sense of being, the peace that quite literally passes understanding. The word "grace" itself finds its derivation in the Old French word for "kindness." Michael Murphy calls it "the process by which unitive knowing, self-transcending love, and other extraordinary capacities emerge in us, during which such capacities appear to be freely given rather than earned, spontaneously revealed rather than attained through ego-centered effort." The word "grace" has the connotation of a blessing, a quality of the sacred, and implies beauty, ease, and fluidity. Grace seems endlessly responsive to our longing for it. The word 'gratitude' has its origin in the same source, just as the qualities of grace and gratitude have their origin in the same source. That source is Spirit, the Ground of Being. Grace is the experience of finally, gratefully, relaxing the contraction of fearful separation and opening to Spirit as our own radiant splendor: knowing it, feeling it, entering it, as it enters us.
(pg. 110, HaperOne paperback ed.)
"Does Death Really Exist?"
I respect Ms. Singh's book. I often found her words based in personal experience and extensive research comforting as I moved through my grieving process during Bella's process of dying, and then after her passing. Ms. Singh quotes many inspiring quotations from Traditional Wisdom sources throughout the book, including the words of saints and leaders from all the major religious traditions, as well as the words of modern day teachers.
A Saint, "Great Being" or Sadguru (True Guru) is one who has attained, in the greatest depths of his or her Being, the answers to these essential questions: "Who am I?" "Why was I born?" "What is the goal of this life?" My wife Gloria and I have had many direct experiences of grace from the living head of the Siddha Yoga Path, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, who received the power of the Siddha Yoga Lineage from her enlightened teacher, Swami Muktananda. Baba founded the Siddha Yoga Path at the command of his Guru, Bhagavan Nityananda.
Baba Muktananda wrote an important essay, Does Death Really Exist? which was published by the Siddha Yoga Foundation as a small booklet. I keep the booklet on my chest of drawers as a constant reminder that I must live my life in the conscious awareness of both God and Death. Practicing Siddha Yoga has certainly kept me mindful of God, the Guru, and the divine Self. And as I've already shown in this project, I have often focused my Creative Process on the theme of Death, for I consider the making of photographs (photographs which function for me as symbols) and the contemplation of symbolic images a yogic practice, a form of meditation, a mean's of accessing and giving visual form to grace--that ineffable form of Self knowledge. In other words, the making and contemplation of symbolic photographs is indeed for me a means of preparing for Death.
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In his essay Does Death Really Exist? Swami Muktananda tells us that our time on this planet is brief and that we must use Time wisely by asking the question, "Why was I born?" and actively pursuing the answer. The yogic scriptures teach over and over again that this life is a rare and privileged opportunity to know the Truth of one's own inner, divine Self. Everything that is born must die, and this gift of life can be used as a means by which we can prepare for Death, meet it face-to-face consciously and with a surrendered, open and welcoming Heart.
I will conclude this Afterword with the words of Swami Muktananda from his essay Does Death Really Exist? I consider his words, and the words of all Great Beings or True saints, to be filled with grace, the purist form of knowledge. Their words thus carry a blessing for us, often in ways we cannot understand, for their words come from deep within their direct experience of God, their Union with the Absolute. Swami Muktananda has written beautifully in his spiritual autobiography The Play of Consciousness about his experience of Death while in a deep state of meditation. I invite you to see my photography project based on those writings. (The Blue Pearl)
The following excerpts are from Does Death Really Exist?
If one wants to die peacefully, one must begin helping oneself long before one's time to die has come. A Great Being once said "There are two things you must remember all the time. One is God, and the other is your own death."
One day the body will drop away. In this world, everything that comes also goes. But the Self does not die. The inner Self is ageless and unchanging. Death cannot reach it. Therefore, live with this awareness: "The Supreme Truth lies within me; the flame of Supreme Truth is shimmering and shining inside me." That light is the Self.
The Self is indestructible. It can never die. A person who knows this is not afraid to die; in fact, he welcomes death.
The world is without beginning, and so is our store of Karma. . . The accumulated store of our past Karma is inconceivably vast. It is this past Karma which brings us happiness and sorrow, pleasure and pain, and which binds us to life. We are born, and we die. We are reborn, and we die again. . . .
How can a person free himself from this wheel of death and rebirth? He can do so only by going within and, through meditation, discovering his own inner Self.
In meditation we discard our individual ego and merge with the Self. The ego is a veil which hides the Self and keeps us bound to the body. The ego is nothing but our sense of limited individuality, our identification with the body and the mind, with our sex, our family, our country, our position.
When one realizes that God dwells within as one's own inner Self, the fire of that knowledge burns all one's accumulated Karma.
Individual existence is a thin veil, and supreme bliss lies just beyond it. Tear off that veil. Hunt death, and then see what happens. . . The truth is that it is our own ego which is death for us. When we have gone beyond the ego, death no longer exists.
Our ego brings us again and again to our death. In order to conquer death we have to transcend the ego, to overcome our limited individuality. We have to realize our identity with the Universal Consciousness. We have to merge with that Consciousness, just as a river merges with the ocean. When a being has attained this state of oneness, he has gone beyond death.
One who remembers God constantly will attain the state of God at the time of death. One who meditates and prays every day has no fear of death.
[Muktananda concludes his essay like this:]
May your awareness turn inward. May you live with the knowledge "I am the Supreme Truth; pure Consciousness lies within me." Through the fire of this knowledge, may death die for you.
Your own,
Swami Muktananda
from Does Death Really Exist?
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This concludes part 8 of my WATER PHOTOGRAPHS project.
To visit the Epilogue of the WATER project click here.
This Project was posted on my blog's Welcome Page
on April 2, 2019
WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles
Welcome Page to my The Departing Landscape website/blog which includes the complete listing of my online photography projects dating back to the 1960's, my resume, contact information, and more.
