The other day, Amy brought home some Halloween knick-knacks shaped like skeletons doing yoga. She set them up on the dining room table, and then stood back and addressed them: “The skeleton in me honors the skeleton in you.”
I love this on several levels, because paradoxically, death and darkness can be very funny.
If you’re not familiar, she was paraphrasing the Sanskrit phrase ‘namaste’, which is usually translated something like “The divine spirit in me honors the divine spirit in you”. Yoga culture uses ‘namaste’ as both a greeting and a goodbye, like ‘shalom’ or ‘ciao’.
But the ‘divine spirit’ borders on woo-woo, doesn’t it? Mystical vagueness attempts to invoke awe at the cosmos, but it can also provide excellent cover for bullshit.
A skeleton is the opposite of vagueness. Literally hard and literally inside of us. Even the metaphor the skeleton represents cuts like crystal: when the living flesh falls away, this becomes visible.
At Halloween, values get flipped. All year, we worship light and life. But when the Sun disappears and the world stops growing, for one brief period we acknowledge their complimentary qualities.
We constantly have darkness and death around us. They are part of life as much as light and birth. Without darkness, a world of pure light would blind us just as surely as the night. We require death to live: even the strictest vegan diet still requires the destruction of cells. All the organic matter that makes up every living creature was created by something else that lived before.
A false association between darkness and seriousity gets exposed. A form of humor absolutely exists within darkness and death — just a subtle, rare form. While my brother was dying of cancer, we shared a couple priceless laughs. I worked with some Ukranian teammates during the invasion, and God bless the Eastern Europeans, they’ve elevated black humor to a fine art. “The invasion has been easy to deal with,” they joked, “because we still have Covid to take our minds off it.”
Zen tradition expects masters to write a poem before they die. One master was procrasting. As he became weaker, his students worried more that he hadn’t written anything yet. One morning they found he had passed on, but there was a note scribbled next to his bed:
Birth is thus,
Death is thus,
Poem or no poem
What’s the fuss?
Laugh until you cry, cry until you laugh. Savor the darkness along with the light. Embrace death as part of life.
Have a Happy Halloween.
