To Sit with Life

 

The Soursop tree that my son Garret and I planted  two and a half years ago seems to be dying. Prinsesa's (the name I gave to it after what my parents gave me as a term of endearment) leaves have been turning yellow and dropping to the ground. In the midst of green, her brighter hues stand out. An autumn in a place of only rain and summer. We were elated a few months back that it bore fruit quite earlier compared to the others we planted years before. And then this happened, is happening--Life and its inevitable cycle. I sip my cup of morning black and head back inside. Meanwhile the sunbirds are singing their morning hymns. 

As per brief research, it could mean the Soursop has been attacked by fungus or other elements. One article says it is its natural cycle to drop leaves in the cooler months only to rebirth again in spring. Again, I say to myself, but we have no winter here. Perhaps, it's not meant to be taken literally.  Our December is cooler than in the previous months of the year anyway. No matter the real reason for Prinsesa's apparent demising, my heart is saddened and at the same time, is opened up a little bit more. This is what every heartbreak does after all. If we let it.

I remember Jack Kornfield's recent words, "... It's why we sit in Meditation... to sit with heartbreak and love." To add the word love after heartbreak is a nudge in the gut. When the heart is allowed to break open, it allows love to enter. The kind that compels life itself to move through and pursue its natural cycles of death and resurrection, leading to our only real redemption from our attachment to what is only joyful and aversion to what is not. 

In the shift from asking the question in  poignant touch points in my life such as now, "Why is this happening to me?" to "What is this teaching me?" in the softness of morning light and sweetness of the  sunbirds' hymn just a few trees away from our dying Soursop tree, an eternal insight from another teacher arrives. "We die a thousand times before we actually die and find out in the end there is no death." - Eckhart Tolle

To sit with Life and to die a thousand times. My heart breaks here in the place where there is only rain and summer a thousand times and more. Come spring, or in our place's case, a few months after, our Soursop Prinsesa may be reborn which of course I won't take literally when what it may actually mean is it is I who will have my own rebirth among a thousand other rebirths through heartbreak and love.