Sounds like love

beauty walk Sandra Butel love death memento mori Todos Santos Carl Jung Richard Rohr goodbye grief — *We are all the same underneath it all* Photo by Sandra Butel

I am Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk.

beautywalk is my search for truth and insight as I take in the sights and sounds of the world around and inside me. It is about courage and love and curiosity and choosing to face up to the truth of reality as it is and not how I would hope it to be.

Second half of life

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.

Maybe it’s the ever deepening wrinkles I am noticing on the surface of my skin as my ever increasing moments under the sun continue to leave their traces. Maybe it is the rise and fall of the waves that I am watching as I rest a moment on my borrowed beach chair and contemplate the joy of my latest boogie board rides upon them. Maybe it is just part of what Carl Jung identified as the purpose of what he referred to as the ‘second half of life’ or what Father Richard Rohr refers to as the process of our later lives of ‘falling upwards’ towards our truest selves. Maybe it has something to do with all the losses that I have experienced in my life over the last 10 years. Maybe it is more about being in this country where death is seen as such a part of life and there are days put aside in the year to honour and celebrate with those who have gone before. Maybe it is all the skeleton forms that I see in all the shops around the Pueblo Magico of Todos Santos that remind me how all of us are but rickety bones once our skin and ego and external signs of status and wealth have been stripped away.

The first one

It began with the end, in the corporeal form, of my oldest brother Broderick. Broderick was a bright light; funny, charming, talented, and he really cared deeply for his family. He was the oldest and I the youngest, and I always felt safeguarded by his fierce big brotherly love. There is a photo of us together, me sitting on his lap in my Dad’s leather easy chair, an impish grin and a wide open mouth on my toddler face, him stone faced with that look of, ‘Don’t you mess with my sister,’ written across his furrowed almost adult brow. Behind that look of protector there was also a deep sadness that I did not understand at the time.

His life couldn’t have been easy. He grew up in a small town (same as me); his Dad was his high school principal (same as me) and his Mom was his teacher (same as me). It wasn’t easy to be yourself in that space and he was the first to go through it; he was the one who set the path for the rest of us, he was the one who learned just how far he could lean into his authentic self. In small town Saskatchewan in the late 50s, it turns out that it wasn’t very far.

It took a long time for him to come out. It wasn’t until he was well into his 4 year degree in commerce at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon that he even hinted at an inkling of what was really going on inside of him. My parents didn’t know until the diagnosis and the first thing my mom said when she learned he was gay is, “I’m going to watch him die,” tears running down her cheeks.

She wasn’t wrong. We all watched him die, one painful moment, 1 tablespoon of Ensure at a time carefully noted in a lined notebook, somehow feeling sure this loving spoonful would hold off the inevitable. I took what was left of the courage of my shaky little heart and asked the question that nobody really wants the answer to, “Is he going to die?”, and was met by the homecare nurse with platitudes of, “We don’t know what is going to happen,” when really what I needed was to be told, with kindness and with truth, “Yes, my dear he is going to die, and from what I have seen before in my work, it will likely be soon.”

He was my larger than life brother and a fellow Gemini, my family having two Taurus, two Virgos and two Geminis in our mix, and I felt the loss deeply. I remember at the time thinking that there was no way I would ever be able to see beauty or light or make sense of the loss of my beautiful big brother.

It turns out I was wrong. It turns out that I, like all of the rest of us suffering humans, felt great grief and incomprehensible loss that eventually softened enough to allow me to go on.

Death comes for all of us

I am reminded here of the parable of the woman who was grieving her lost baby, and the wise elder who told her that the baby could be brought back to life if she could bring him a mustard seed from a family that had not suffered loss. Turns out that in spite of her efforts, she realized, much like me, that there is no such thing. We all suffer loss and death eventually comes for all of us. There is no amount of wealth or prestige or self-care or biological luck that will allow any of us to cheat death. Death is just a part of life.

What can death teach me about life?

Lately I’ve been delving a little into the practice of contemplating my own death. There are several spiritual traditions that have this as a part of their ongoing practices, most common is the Buddhist practice of meditating with a corpse or maybe just a skeleton. I can picture the images of writers and philosophers as they hold a human skull in their outstretched hand and speak about the truth of what they know for sure. I am reading a book called Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, by Joanna Ebenstein, which is all about practices that we can use to fully contemplate the irrefutable fact that someday, and we can’t know when, we will no longer walk on this earth.

Savouring every bite

I settle myself in for what I know will be a long voyage of pondering, taking one step at a time on the road towards my own acceptance that someday, sooner than I would like, I will no longer gaze upon the awesome beauty of a blue sky with a scattering of paint stroked wispy clouds, or hear the sounds of truck wheels on a sandy bumpy road, or see the sight of two dogs playing on the beach as the waves crash endlessly into the shore. I will no longer smell the sweet scent of freshly baked Oaxacan chocolate lava cake as it is served up to me on a table overlooking the sunset and the sea as I sit side by side with my beloved life partner. When I order it, the waiter pauses to say, a hint of question in his voice, “Just so you know, it takes 15 or 20 minutes for this to come. They bake each one fresh, so it takes a little longer.” He pauses again, as if waiting for our decision to be overturned, as if knowing that for most people the waiting will be just too much to bear. For me, the waiting comes to me as an invitation; an invitation to walk upon the beach, little Tucker on a leash behind us as we gaze upon the awesome pinks in the freshly darkening sky.

When it comes, at just the right moment, it is sweet and warm and covered in fresh vanilla ice cream with one large strawberry. We savour it, one luscious taste sensation at a time, the ‘mmms’ harmonizing in my higher and his lower notes into one marvellous melody. Francis turns to me when we are halfway through and says, “This is the second time today that the wait was worth it.” It takes me a moment to remember, and I travel back in time to our seats at the little market across the road from our place where we had freshly made oatmeal pancakes this morning. They had been worth it too, and we enjoyed them with the comfort of warmed up peanut butter and sweet maple syrup drizzled on top.

The forest and the trees

As I ponder the eventuality and irrefutable truth that I too am going to die I notice how much this has to teach me about living my life. Picture this: the blackened ash, the red oozing exposed flesh of hundreds of palm tree trunks, the heavy weight of lingering smoke, the pure blue of a cloudless sky. Francis and I make our way down the uneven slope of sand and rock from the edge of yet another washboard surfaced road to the site of the recent devastating fire at San Pedro de las Palmas halfway along the coast line between Todos Santos and Pescadero. There is no official report on the cause of the fire but we have heard from some locals that there is suspicion that it was intentionally set; some question of wanting to develop this stretch of scenically desirable coastline.

We walk, silently and slowly, the heavy weight of salt-tinged water pressing against my eyes and nose as we take in the sensory information of all that has been lost here in this beautiful place. This is one of the ‘not to be missed’ beaches that has been recommended for us to visit while we are here in Todos Santos. We put it off for the first few days and then we heard about the tragic fire and watched from afar as the lingering clouds of smoke billowed into the blueness of the Baja Sur sky. It is with a sense of reverence in my heart and my gaze that I enter into the quiet of the scene around us, sensing that we are here to show our respects for what this place had been before. Hundreds of palm trees of various shapes and sizes gather together in a grove that speaks of suffering and years of gains that now have been lost. There is a sense of the community of trees sheltering together in place, bringing comfort to one another with their proximity and their shared grieving.

There is a beauty here in the aftermath; the green of new life shines forth amidst the largeness of that which is no more. I can not help but think of the Phoenix and its rising from the ashes and of how it relates to what I know about the growth that has come in my own life from that which has been destroyed by the fierceness of a metaphorical forest fire burning out of control.

Francis takes it in stride when the straggly troupe of wild horses appears at our side. He says, “Oh yeah, someone told me there are wild horses here.” I am less nonplussed, not having had the opportunity to pet sit with these grand beings and put my fears of their strength and largeness behind me like I have done over the last few years with dogs. The brown coated steeds of various sizes and shades are very curious and comfortable with us as they walk quietly beside us, the largest one coming close enough for me to touch, if only I had the courage to reach out my shaking hand for a stroke on the soft fierceness of her long elegant face. One curiously bends down low enough to gently sniff this tiny strange fellow four legged friend that is attached to me by a leash. I can see a large R branded on her back left hindquarter, someone having claimed her at one time. I imagine for a moment how she broke free of her tether; how she said, “Fuck this shit,” built a new life and gathered the other horses around her to pass the time. I pass my phone to Francis so he can capture this on video knowing full well that an iPhone photograph is not going to do this magical moment justice.

We walk on, subdued by the scene around us, each wrapped up in our own thoughts of what comes next. I am back in my death contemplation, seeing how well nature is manifesting the endless life and death cycle all around me once again. I focus my attention on the green of the fan shaped tops of these now skinless trees. I see the hope that these new shoots hold within them; the potential for future growth, of a more vibrant life than what they had been expecting as they went about their business, being a grove of palm trees gathered near the sound and smell and vibration of waves as they rose and fell and then rose and fell again.

What hope there is in this moment; in seeing and believing that whatever ends will come to pass (as they most surely will again), new beginnings will forever follow close behind.

As we head back towards the truck, my feet dotted with tiny grains of sand and the coolness of the Pacific Ocean where I have waded, we pass a couple walking towards us with their dog. After greetings exchanged back and forth between us, Francis turns to me, a smile upon his lips and says softly, “The horses didn’t come to greet these people like they came to greet us. How lucky we are to have been in their presence for a while.” I nod my head, the gratitude of the encounter made even more poignant by the realization that it hasn’t been offered to everyone.

Death’s smile

We stop in the village of Todos Santos on our way back home, taking the time to check out a few of the galleries and shops that have most drawn our attention as we passed through over the last month on our way to somewhere else. We are coming to the end of our time here and I want to make sure to see all that there is to see before we go. A visit to the artists’ collective “La sonrisa de la muerte” (death’s smile) reminds me again of the Mexican belief in the connection between the living and the dead. How lightly they hold the grimness of this reality; how they make jokes about it and how every single being has been made into its skeleton form. I wonder to myself if it’s like that trick when you’re nervous to imagine everyone in the room in the audience being naked. I wonder if by taking this one step further and imagining all the beings around us losing their skin or fur or fins and being exposed for who they really are inside like the interior of those pine trees whose bark has been burned away in the heat of the fire we will be more able to see how much we have in common with one another. Once we remove all pretense; get rid of all the external things that we use to cover ourselves then all that will be left is essence, pure essence.

The truth is that we are all born, we all live our limited and much too short lives, and in the end we all die. Not knowing if there is any form of after life we must live for the moment, take our courage in hand, grab hold of the opportunities that present themselves to us and hang on for the wonder of the ride. This concept comes to life in one of the sculptures that Francis and I see on our walk about the town by the well known Baja Sur artist Benito Ortega Vargas. It is a genderless figure cast in bronze with the winged tail of a whale and a body coloured the turquoise blue of the ocean, their eyes softly closed, hanging tight to a shooting star that they hold in their outstretched hands. As Benito tells us in his lyrical soft spoken tone this piece is all about finding our north star and then closing our eyes and letting it take us where it will. As with all of his pieces this one is about bringing hope (esperanza) to a world that is so full of chaos. What a gift it is to take the time to stop to look at the beauty that is offered all around us and hear the words of those who make it.

It sounded like love

We clean the house, wash the sheets and towels, pack our bags and prepare for the drive to drop off the dogs and Leo the housekeeper at the owners ranch ½ way towards Cabo San Lucas and then on to San Jose del Cabo for our journey back towards our home in Montreal. As we drive away down the bumpy sandy roads Francis stops the truck and calls for me to listen. “The dogs are howling,” he says. A lump in my throat as I listen, my heart calling out to these beings that have become so dear to me. A series of messages to my friend, the homeowner, “It has been such a beautiful adventure - thank you for sharing your special place and animals with us.” Then 30 minutes later, “Leo (the housekeeper) and the dogs are safely at the ranch. My heart is full.” One last text as we wait for our first flight to Mexico City, “We could hear them (the dogs) howling as we drove away. It sounded like love.”

This is Sandra Butel and this is my beautywalk. What’s yours?

What if you were no longer in denial of death’s certain arrival?

How would you live your life today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

What actions would you take, what words and gestures of love would you offer to yourself and to those around you if you knew your time was limited?

Resources for Further Study and Personal Growth

I am here with my never-ending search for truth, my human heart and my Professional Coach Certification (PCC) from the International Coaching Federation to be of assistance to you in your own journey of finding your own place of equilibrium. I have over 500 hours of experience working with clients and am sure that the time we spend together will bring immense value to us both.

For a free consultation with me all you have to do is book yourself into my calendar. We will spend some time getting to know one another and by the end of the 75 minutes it will be clear if a coaching relationship with me is what is needed in your life right now. There is no pressure here to buy, simply an offer from someone who has been through a whole lot of challenges and come out the other side. A little stronger, a little more humble, a little more ready to lend an ear.

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