You Are All of It
a sharing of some writing by Clare Dubois of TreeSisters
Note from Nicole: the originator of the StartOver.xyz Game and one of the co-creators of the Learn to Die website, Clinton Callahan, brought to my attention this writing from a July 2024 Facebook post of Clare Dubois.
In this writing, Clare describes her experience of drawing close to death, and allowing herself to face further toward it.
I am sharing this here (a message is on it’s way to Clare to check for any resistance from her) and linking it to the How to Die website to spread more widely, because of the extraordinary value she brings through this writing.
You can visit the TreeSisters website here.
Clare wrote:
“My partner Mark brought a dreadful bug back from the East Coast a month ago. If it wasn’t Covid, it was its first cousin and boy did it have its way with us. I feel like I literally lost three weeks timewise, and yet there was such gold to be found in that feverish slog. Boy was that such a thing.
“During the six nights where I barely slept, sitting up coughing solidly from 8pm until the following morning, it turned into the most extraordinary practice of breath management, focus and prayer. The only way to not cough was to literally hold my breath, and focus on every sensation that took my attention elsewhere to soothe my system. Unexpectedly, that practice constantly took me to Gaza, so much so that my night times literally felt split between two worlds.
“I couldn’t get my head around how impossible it would be to be as sick as this, but be in a living hell of bombs and starvation with no way out. Worse, to be in a hospital, completely incapacitated, only to find that illusion of safety bombed out from under you. Every time I steamed my head, or drank a healing tea, or sucked on another throat pastel, I was painfully aware of the enormous privilege of those actions. The basic and vast privilege of safety.
“I had access to everything I could need even if nothing seemed to help my lungs. My bed felt like a palace. My roof felt like a palace. I found myself endlessly moving my legs and feet between the sheets, to try to distract my lungs with the surprising pleasure of cool linen, only to find myself bewildered that I had so much when so many are living in circumstances that it’s almost impossible to conceive.
“My practice and my prayer became the conscious act of sending everything comforting that I could give myself, out into the ethers of Gaza. Trying to wrap cool linen around children’s bodies. Trying to become the roof. Trying to be the bed. Trying to include and embrace and soothe and comfort. Trying to share every moment of awareness that I had with them. Letting them know that I was aware of the desperate unfairness of their situation, and that I wasn’t looking away. That I was wide awake and sitting with and in the contrast, transforming my useless guilt and perception of privilege into a love that could somehow provide calm and care for traumatized bodies over there.
“It’s not something I’ve ever done before in that way, or anything that I’ve been aware of beyond my own discomfort when that sick. It’s actually hard to write about or put into words, but it touched and changed me in unseen ways. I’m so aware that there is no real separation between us and them, although our situations are impossibly different. Care, awareness, presence and love felt like a bridge of immediacy, where all that I was feeling could reach them as if they were in the next room, or next to me in bed. Not something I could seemingly do during daylight hours as easily at all, but through the seeming endless coughing fits of the night, that bridge was alive for me almost all the time.
“There is something to be said for the altered state of illness, when nothing quite functions as it usually does, when the edges of everything feels blurred, and you’re purely at the effect of your physiology as your immune system does its thing. It felt as if the constraints of linear time within my own body broke down, allowing me to tunnel through the strata of epigenetic layering holding all manner of limitation in place. Like you could just focus your attention somewhere, and everything between you and that would dissolve, serving up extraordinary memories that belonged to other people or other lives. Creation itself felt as mutable as I believe it to be, but rarely feel it to be. Mutable felt intimate, and although incredibly unpleasant much of the time, it felt like places of lovelessness became available for love. As if one could press love in, and the unlove would loosen and waft away like old cobwebs in the wind. The so-called tangible started to feel illusory, as if nothing really is fixed, and as our minds let go of buying into the pretense of real, reality can also dissolve and allow for deeper mysteries to be accessed.
“I wanted so much to try to write about this as I was going through it, but it’s so hard to find the words, or to convey what that quality of intimacy feels like when awareness starts to shift between the worlds. But that nighttime practice seems to have left an aperture still open, although the illness itself is largely over. It’s like it opened a gateway for me that is still permeable. I don’t think reality has shifted, but something in my experience of reality definitely has. Beyond the concept of ‘we are all one’ or ‘everything is now’, to a much more tangible, felt experience of that truth.
“We tend naturally to cringe away from pain, but there can be such a profoundly moving intimacy that blossoms in the space when you open to embrace it. Love seems to line the inner skin of every longing and the wail of every void, and love truly seems to be the truth of our souls. The soul longing to know itself through the experience of loving in the face of the darkest shadows.
“Embracing all.
“We can, because we are it all.
“It’s all here, all now, all available, all loveable.”
Clare was also a guest of the RAW ~ Radically Alive Women ~ Edgecast with Julia Neumann (excerpt).
