The Shrine On The Bedside Table

Answering questions on Death and Spirit from my 5 year old daughter

“I don’t want you to die before me Daddy”. I pause and take it in. Her soft skin so young and fresh, her eyes as open and as deep as all eternity occurring at once. I kiss her forehead, hold her cheek and smell her hair. I’ll know this scent forever, it is hers alone. It rests in her warm pyjamas and the ruffled pillow on her bed.

She knows that she will die too. Each night before bed she arranges her mother’s jewellery on the bed side table into swirls of necklaces, bracketed by bracelets and dotted with rings. She’s says it’s for God. She pulls a leaf off the house plant on the chest of drawers and lets it blow from her hand as she holds it out the window, closing her eyes, her small lips silently moving as she prays the secret prayer of a 5 year old who’s self-awareness has revealed the great inevitability of life’s shadow.

It’s hard to put into words what it is I want to tell her but I try nonetheless. I ask her where she was before she was born to see if she can still remember. That maybe that’s why she creates shrines having never heard of, let alone seen one before. That maybe somewhere inside her is a memory of what she really is and where she really came from that causes her to pick the leaf and send it off into the wind, carrying her prayer wherever it is to go.

I know that feeling too, the pain of inevitable loss that makes all life possible. And the sense of being that bears witness to it that is neither stained nor tarnished by life nor death but simply is. The witness who has seen a thousand deaths for whom each is like walking through a waterfall, The witness who is, as simply as a galaxy, a sun, the wind or the leaves that blow upon it. I see in her the beauty of the universe unfolding. I see her as a wave on an infinite flooding tide; I see her not as this one body sat here on the bed beside me but as a momentary frame in a much longer eternal process of becoming. Her reach stretches back into the infinite past as it does the infinite future but all I can see of it is this moment now, forever now.

She is the creative force of the Universe. She is loving awareness. She is the Sun and every galaxy that ever was or will be. She is every dream and every dreamer. Her voice is the Universe speaking, her touch is the Universe feeling this moment. The Universe in her is the Universe in me. We sit here now, the Universe both, seeing each other in each other’s eyes, a flash of truth, a momentary remembering in an endless game of hide and seek.

She sees her loss of me as the loss of a part of herself and she now knows it’s inescapable.

I remind her we are Spirit, that we have many lives and bodies, that we are exploring, creating and evolving. That she is a way for the Universe to know itself. That deep down, no one ever really dies. That we knew each other before. That we dreamed this life together and we no doubt dreamed many more besides and that in this one, I chose to have the honour of her love as  a daughter and she chose mine as her Dad.

That there’s no need to ever be worried or scared because deep down, that awareness, that Spirit, that witness is the only thing we can ever attest to be truly real, without it we simply would not be and yet here we are. And that the greatest mystery and gift of all is that there is something instead of nothing - this is all we can ever say is real.

Our ‘I am-ness’ is the only thing that is ever real and it is inseprable from All That Is because it is an expression of All That Is and therefore eternal.

Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Therein lies all the peace, freedom, joy and love of an entire Universe.

She’s only 5, my word she’s only 5.

So I don’t say this to her in so many words but instead hope she could feel it in the tone of my voice, the way I looked at her and the way I held her close as she drifted off to sleep.

Goodnight my Love.