In the time of darkness we have never been closer to the light.
—meister eckhart
Death and Dark Nights
in the Garden:
Reaching Spiritual Maturity
Sooner or later you may find yourself in a dark night where it seems that all of the light suddenly vanishes. An illness arrives. A loved one dies. A marriage falls apart and faith disappears. Doubts creep in, and it’s easy to lose hope and wonder, “Why bother cultivating a spiritual life when it affords no assurance that all will work out?” When the dark night arrives it’s like the arrival of winter in the secret garden. But even in the dark chill, things continue to grow silently out of sight.
When death crept into my secret garden, it challenged my spiritual maturity. I assumed that if I cultivated my inner life and deepened my relationship with the Divine, the path would be always happy and carefree. If I did all of the right things—listened to my inner gardener, ate properly, exercised, followed my conscience in making decisions—then I would be free of illness and catastrophe, I thought. All of life would be a constant joy and run smoothly. Spiritual practice must be like an insurance policy, right? my mind reasoned in a stock-exchange way. If I meditate, fast, eat right, etc., then I will receive a life without any problems. This seemed logical, a fair trade, a proper exchange. But logic and exchange are not the currency of the soul.
My dear friend and housemate, Giovanni, cultivated a secret garden too. We shared meals and friends, walks and talks, meditations, parties, and a trip to an ashram and a hugging saint. I couldn’t make sense of a dream that warned me to be supportive of Gio, but to keep an emotional distance. Burdened by huge financial obligations and an unfair separation from his daughters, he slumped under the weight of despair. But he loved salsa and he’d started to dance regularly. On this particular Saturday night he invited me along. He flirted with women, shook his cute Swiss-Italian butt, and made us laugh with his dark humor. The scene marked a sign of hope that the heavy pall of depression hanging over the house for months would soon vanish.
I left him on the dance floor and drove home to a deep and restful sleep. Then a shot rang out at three a.m. The explosion rattled the windows and cut through the deep silence of the night. I lay frozen in bed, afraid to move. I lived in an upstairs apartment in the house and knew immediately that a living nightmare was unfolding. The sound of footsteps and low voices echoed outdoors. Was it a murder? Terror paralyzed me until I recognized the voice of Gio’s father along with his stepmother. They lived in the house next door. They pounded on the door downstairs, and when no one responded they opened it with a spare key. A terrible scream broke the silence. In a few minutes his dad stood at my door, pale as the moon.
“It’s Gio,” he said. “He’s shot.”
My mind couldn’t comprehend it. The words didn’t translate into any sort of reality that made sense. “Call an ambulance!” I said, and I began to run down the stairs before Gio’s dad grabbed me.
“No,” he said. “Stay here.” And then through silent tears: “He left some notes.”
The shock of his suicide acted like an earthquake in my world. What happened?! I imagined that beautiful, sensitive man in a pool of blood. How could he have left his precious life and his lovely children? I wept.
Why bother to make all the efforts to cultivate this sacred inner place as we had both been doing if tragedies continue to strike? Why cultivate a better life and work with guiding values if they will not protect from pain? These thoughts whirred through my mind as friends called to ask about Gio and express their frustration at not having been able to help. Many felt guilty. In the aftermath and the silence of the big house we had shared, I felt Gio’s presence and his regret. Nothing had been solved by his choice. And I missed him terribly. His children missed him too, and I felt an empty hole in my heart.
In that time of transition and deep questioning, I reread the story of Rama. Rama, a beautiful, powerful, and sweet Indian avatar, fought against the ten-headed demon, Ravana, who abducted his wife, Sita. Rama sought to protect his future kingdom through virtue and right action. He grew up in peace and wealth; yet on the day of his coronation he became an exile from his own kingdom and was sent to live in the forest for seven years for no fault of his own.
He walked peacefully away from the luxury of jewels and silks and wore matted hair and simple clothes into the forest. The avatar eventually conquered Ravana and reunited with his wife, the kidnapped Sita. At the end of his exile he returned to his kingdom, where under his rule even the gods envied men and women for their paradisaical lives. I loved the beautiful story of Rama’s kingdom and imagined a paradise on Earth. How beautiful to have lived under his rule, I thought. But in the end even Rama suffered decline and left his physical body.
In the secret garden, decline and death of the body and the physical realm are a natural part of life. In a new phase of spiritual maturity and growth, I realized that no amount of prayer, meditation, or devotion would prevent pain, suffering, or mortality. Though we deny it, illness, decline, and decay remain part of the natural ebb and flow. Imagine a world where nobody died? Overpopulation would choke out any hope for a quality life. In the garden, decaying compost acts as fertilizer to the life of the flower or fruit that follows. Material forms change, but cultivating the connection with the Divine creates a foundation, a solid ground to stand firm on when things seem to fall apart all around.
I don’t know why Giovanni chose to commit such an act of self-destruction. He faced many challenges: threats of loss of his home, a deepening custody battle for the kids, financial strains, and the untimely death of his mother. But no real explanation seems to account for the ultimate tragedy. The grief that surrounded his demise led some friends who traveled with us to India to question the purpose of maintaining a spiritual practice at all. Some of them lost faith in the Divine. If spiritual practice doesn’t protect against pain and shore us up against death, then why bother, some asked and turned bitter. Some people even turned away from their spiritual practice. Pondering in silence, I discovered that despite deep grief and sadness, my heart remained attached to the wise inner gardener and the divine source of all life. My mind focused on the still waters beneath the surface of the physical world and not on the rough waves at the top.
When I scuba-dived deep beneath the Mediterranean, the rough weather could not move me. The currents rushed fast and furious near the surface by the boat, but deep below the sea, grass danced gently and the waves could not buffet me much. The same happened in the storms of life. If I stayed deep inside, tried to help distraught friends with encouraging words, and watched the tears flow during moments of meditation, the calm reigned. In a little while, acceptance arrived and the storms passed. Calm eventually returned to the surface too and life continued. The secret garden reveals that this is the way of nature in its eternal cycle of birth, life, and death. All physical things pass. But the spirit never dies.
Months later, I watched orange-robed monks express this message of the transitory and ephemeral nature of life through art. They tapped metal cones of bright sand into a design that became an exquisite and intricate sand mandala at the Manor department store in downtown Lugano. For a week they sat on a square wooden pedestal that resembled a large shelf among the stationery, Swiss milk chocolate, and stuffed dairy cows sold to tourists. It looked as if anyone might buy one of the smiling, calm Buddhist monks and take him home to put on their shelf.
As their work continued, grain by grain, a circle formed inside a square until a delicate, ephemeral healing mandala for the goddess Tara appeared beneath their brown hands. So careful and conscientious, they drew out the design and filled it in—tap, tap, tap—while consumers dawdled and sought bliss in candy and clothes. On Saturday after a consecration with mantras and chants, a ritual whisk of the brush turned the vibrant yellow, green, red, and blue mandala into a pile of gray.
The entire, perfectly organized work of art transformed into a dull, shapeless mass of sand. Through a week of intensive work, chanting, and silence, they revealed the process of life as it became a mandala. It organized into an intricate form, which lived a short life and then experienced dissolution. Their final ritual confirmed the life cycle. They released the mandala sands in a nearby river, where they washed toward the sea as a reminder of our own journey toward the vast ocean of consciousness.
Rather than find my faith shaken by Gio’s suicide, in the end I accepted the divine play and understood that mysteries and reasons exist far beyond my small view of the world. At the same time, the inner waters had been tested and the power of my inner life stood firm and affirmed, like a giant oak tree. Light returned and the blossoms that had begun to wither in the darkness once again opened.
So the answer to my question about whether cultivating a spiritual life will protect from pain remains twofold. No, cultivating a secret garden will not protect from life’s difficulties. Challenges will continue to arise. Life as long as we live will be filled with worries and problems. And yes, if we remain focused inward and continue to cultivate the secret garden, we will find protection and refuge from mental madness and despair. The pain fades more quickly as peace and joy quickly take the place of suffering. Moments of inner reflection offer quiet refuge from the storm and allow for solutions to arise and periods of calm to prevail. Serenity, even through life’s ups and downs, becomes the nature of the well-tended inner place of the soul.
This gentle acceptance of life’s troubles signaled a move into spiritual maturity and spiritual practices like meditation and chanting provided tools for coping. Holding a spiritual perspective affords a view and Self-confidence that someone who focuses solely on the material world is not open to receive. It provides a profound sense of the mysterious and incomprehensible movements of life and a way to feel at one with it and accept. For me it signaled a move into a deep connection with the mysteries of the Divine Mother as she began to appear and light the path.
Peace or Pieces in the Garden
In periods of challenge and crisis, if we allow ourselves to get caught up in the material madness of life, then making sense of events escapes us. Fear takes over as we identify ourselves and others as the body only. By retreating into the secret garden and looking from the spiritual perspective, we may find it easier to accept that an invisible hand works from a higher place and in a way that we cannot possibly fathom with our limited abilities.
A friend injured in a serious car accident as a teenager found himself fully healed from the physical injuries. The arm that doctors had intended to amputate healed and he came out determined and strong-minded. Yet the question “Why me?” paralyzed him. He put his life on hold for twenty years to look for the response to a question that no one could answer. His entire identity revolved around being the victim of a car accident and he announced this to most any new acquaintance in their first five minutes of meeting. If he had been able to shift his perception and accept the event as a way to learn essential life lessons and develop his courage and tenacity, it would have completely transformed him.
Sometimes the practice of surrender or acceptance is the way to find true peace of mind. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed intensely for a change in what he foresaw coming—and added, “Your will, not mine.” He prayed for a change, but he also accepted the outcome. In the silence of your secret garden, do you have “whys” that haunt you and block your path? Can you surrender them at the feet of your wise soul-Self or your image of the Divine and let them go? Sometimes these questions hold us in a state of paralysis as we await answers that we must instead live into. What difficult situations and problems are you ready to surrender now? If you’re ready, enter into the core of your sacred, secret garden with your unanswered questions. Put them in a letter or a package for your wise inner gardener and surrender them to her. Let her pass them on to a higher place where all merges in peace and bliss. Sometimes unexpected blessings and even answers arrive to help us to understand some of life’s mysteries.
Mourning Something Lost
Rituals help us to heal. They help us to acknowledge the changes in life, bring to light and resolve buried feelings that may accompany the death of a loved one, and allow them to heal. This is a good time to take a moment to think of a loss that you mourn but have not fully acknowledged. It may relate to a relationship, a possession, a job, a person, or something else. Reflect on it a moment. You may want to write about this or share it with a friend. Make a symbol of what you’ve lost on a piece of paper or visualize it in your heart. Let your feelings well up and accompany the symbol. Light a candle for it, mourn it, and then let it dissolve into the Divine Light.