Closure
With a New Moon in the East
I’m not the greatest at closure. Especially where lunations are concerned. I can pour myself all in at the beginning but get sloppy when the end comes around. So this time I will do a better job and approach the end the way I might approach a beginning. With inputs as crazy and constant as they are, news and social media, moving from words to images, I am trying to understand memory and what parts of myself I want to bring forward and what I want to leave by the wayside of forward motion. And I have decided that there isn’t anything much to do with closure beyond taking the time to bring our awareness to the constant looping of time.
The Buddha had a teaching that was simply, “Good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” Which didn’t mean much to me when I first heard it. It wasn’t until this last retreat I went to and my teacher described that rush to finish up, where I recognized myself. What that means is now I am watching those habits of dropping things because they get tiresome when it takes too long. Aha, Tina, bring some good into the end.
Maybe you noticed some photos of my little chicken scratches of the moon cycle with dates listed? I have been making them for a while as each new lunation rolls around, sharing with you inconsistently. Circles have been a thing, from way back when I was studying the hero’s journey and teaching it to young people. And initially the lunations seemed to be a hero’s journey. But quickly I discovered that’s too contrived. The hero’s journey is a perfectly good formula for framing the story of what happened, but a lunation is about full inclusion. You can’t arrange the time of the lunation into an orderly series of steps. There’s no threshold into a special world, no apotheosis and catharsis. We are always on the road of trials and you can only make it clean after the fact, in the storytelling, in the revisiting and repackaging.
A couple months back I switched the entrance to the lunation to the East, which likened it to the medicine wheel of indigenous cultures of North America rather than the hero’s journey, and that move connected with me. As I understand the medicine wheel it is like an alter create by a series of rock placements around the cardinal directions. The East where you enter the medicine wheel, at least from how I learned it. That is also the place of the rising sun. And that felt right to me, rising as the moon always does in the East, the new moon offers a new start, a new birth, again and again. Natures way of marking time.
So I will play with my chicken scratch lunation drawings with dates and the things I want to experience and the healing I want to inspire as a practice of closure for a while. Making observations and keeping track of good in the beginning, good in the middle and good in the end. Just as each moon has names based on experiences of the seasons, I will do the same in my life as I go, with special attention to closure.
Around the same time as I was pulling this all together, I re-listened to a podcast I first encountered about a year ago. It was an interview between Dan Harris of 10% happier and James Doty a physician of neuroscience who wrote a book about his experience with manifestation as a young man and how his application of it had turned his life around. Being around the young people in the schools made me want to revisit it about a month ago. Someone took the time to teach him a visualization technique when he was 12 years old and it had changed the trajectory of his life. It took me a while to find my way back to it. I couldn’t remember his name or where I had heard it. All I could recall was I had listened to it going to and from retreat. Once I found it and saw that James Doty had died over the summer. I was shocked to learn that he had died only a short time before I started seeking him as if his presence in the spirit world could have prompted my search.
He died after health struggles due to a complication from surgery. I found he had shared a message on Facebook saying what had happened but that he was improving, and yet, he there is still this news that he died. As a neuroscientist, he had dedicated his life to teaching about compassion and how it changes your brain. Through that work he became a good friend of the Dali Lama. And I learned much of this as I searched for some closure after discovering he had died.
Jane Goodall’s recent death happened while I was in Portland traveling with family for a nephew’s wedding. It was another instance where I didn’t hear she had died right away. When I did, again I felt the suddenness of things ending without closure. And then the Netflix show of her last words was released and I was so grateful to have some more moments with her, an actual message from beyond.
When Thich Nhat Hanh died, January 22, 2022, I heard a few days later after leaving retreat. I was grateful for his prolificness and the sharing of his words that followed.
There have been many other deaths that I have recounted here, many people that are not as famous as those others I’ve recounted above, but were as important to the movement of time. Especially in my life, because they were so integral to me. It is from these experiences that I have come to believe that when you die, your energy is released into the world. And for a while there exists a potentiality, a force that will coalesce behind those who share your goals. Those who have gone before give us a push so we can be more powerful in the goals that are for the greater good. That is sort of what Dr. James Doty taught.
And what of the others, the power hungry, the money hungry, those of many who are on display in the world right now, what happens to them when they die?
In her last words, Jane Goodall didn’t wish that they would be reincarnated as a dung beetle, as this came up in her conversation. No, the dung beetle is too merry and industrious. She said, let them come back as the poor, wretched creatures in laboratories that they test their medicines on, at which both Josh and I gasped, but appreciated, that truly would be a life to learn from.
So all of this is to say, as I write this I am pulling the current moon phase journey to a close. The lesson in this one was bringing “good” into the end. As you read this, we have returned to the place in the East where we start fresh again, with the darkness of a new moon.
Ending here with a gratitude prompt from The Happiness Gym. “What’s a positive change you’ve noticed in your life for which you are grateful?” I hope you can spare a moment bringing that exercise to mind and heart.