Dancing with La Calavera Death

8.20.10 Point Mugu

My dear friend Joy Forrest that died on July 29, had many skeletons in her home. None were real ones, most were plastic ones that ranged in size from large to small. She had bought most of them on her buying trips to Mexico for the boutique that she owned. She embraced the idea that she saw in Mexico of dancing with La Calavera, (death). For Joy this meant that if we realized that we were all going to die and were not afraid of it, then we could also really live more fully. So, on several occasions, we took out the larger skeletons and danced around them to Joy's spiritual rave music.

Stephanie and I have had quite a few talks about death while we have been together. She has said that she knows that we are all going to die, but that now that her cancer has come back and that Ovarian cancer is one of the most deadly kinds of cancer, she feels that death is with her much more than for those of us that are not looking so closely at it on a day to day basis. On some days she feels that she does not want to acknowledge it, but keep on affirming her deep love for life as the only way she can get through each moment.

Steph and I went to see Eat Pray Love and we both truly enjoyed it. I told Steph the next day that I felt that one of the themes of the movie was that to really live you have to face the death(s) in your life. You have to forgive yourself and also see that what you might see at first as being hard and painful, actually breaks you open into living at a fuller and deeper level. So, right now I see that this continues to be the gift of cancer, the gift of dancing with La Calavera; to live more fully, passionately, vibrantly, with great gusto into each moment. To bring our out stretched arms vastly around our hearts and pull out all the stops. This is the moment of dying into the new expanded heart, the new life that we can only slightly envision and the moment of truly embracing death.

I told Steph that I feel that she has always lived this way, with her arms and her heart out stretched to life. She has loved so passionately each moment and brought so much joy to others as she has invited you along on her joy ride. I told her that I feel that this is the marker of a life well lived. I said, that I was not sure that it really had anything to do with the amount of days and years that you lived, but rather how passionately alive with love that you did this life. I see that it is like being connected to the power source or to the big S Source. When you are there in the place of love, knowing the current, feeling your heart knowing the All That Is in every cell of your being, and being in the place of gratitude for this knowing, that all becomes wildly alive. Of course you want it to never end. Of course you want to know this is forever, but you also know that change and transformation are part of the package of the All That Is. Death does not become an end to this amazing connection, it is the transformation with the big T, it is the life force moving into a new form. If you truly dance with La Calavera, you truly dance with the big D. You love it because it lets you live life, death and All That Is in a more profound way. Death becomes Living more fully.