Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
By: Mirabai Bush, Ram Dass / Narrated By: Mirabai Bush
Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
Good primer on Dass, plus some good work on grieving, some great work with practices
I was first turned on to Ram Dass whilst a late-20-something rambunctious seeker of guidance and universal love. Though I was brought up with the teachings of Christ (I bolted from the Catholic Church, tho’—too crotchety!), and I think he has given AWEsome words to live by, to guide oneself, I thought the planet needed more, and I hoped my Soul could kinda step up its game and expand to encompass all.
You sorta feel the same thing? Well, with Walking Each Other Home we get plenty of everything that Ram Dass has been saying for so very long. We get snippets of jaunts stimulated by hallucinogens and early drug culture and mind-expanding episodes—no need to get offended; just listen or dismiss. We get discussions on Life, Soul, being completely a part of the world.
Plenty on love, love now, love forever. Ram Dass is especially close to his beloved teacher who died many years ago, preferring to feel the man always by his side rather than letting go and forgetting. When told: Yeah, great—but isn’t that only imagination? Dass responds that imagination beats “factual” knowledge hands down any moment of the day, any day of the week. Knowledge is confined to our itty bitty world with all its flaws and limitations, whereas imagination is what seeks to move throughout the universe, embracing, being inspired, acting in joy. I dunno, I prefer to keep my passed loved ones close as who on this planet WANTS to live such a finite life as to prefer their energy, which is constant, no longer exists?
There’s PLENTY here in this book that I’ve heard before, seeing as I’ve dabbled… uhm, okay, maybe wallowed…? in his words before, but after losing Serena, then Wootie, and now The Miss, I found lots of new and refreshing concepts, and I certainly enjoyed chapters 60-61 and on, which deal with the reality of living with the harsh and heartbreaking reality of Grief even as you attempt oh so valiantly to co-exist with pain or to humbly offer it to Spirit.
I listened to the first part of the book after I’d left work early to sit by Missy, hold vigil as she struggled in her last few hours. As she dozed, the words about how death is ignored in our culture, deemed unpleasant, sort of rolled over me as I’ve heard them from Ram Dass before, as I’d heard them from many many others through the years. But by the time The Miss was going to receive the sedative at home, I’d just finished concepts of uniting the world with the universe, and that was good. And by the time we’d come home from The Pet Loss Center, arms empty, those chapters? 61 and on?
They were just what I needed? There is joy in having loved and having let go.
It’s an ocean; and as my sister says: You drown for a while.
But then you float.
And may you love again.
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