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Death Letter To Loved Ones

Here is a transcription of a “Death Letter” that came to me as stream of consciousness in a hypnagogic state while in bed about a year ago. I posted the audio recording on youtube.

What would that letter say to all the people whom I love when my physical body no longer exists?

The first thing I would say is,

that I love you.

Very deeply.

In totality.

I love you.

I love every bit of you.

I love your body.

I love your soul.

I love your mind.
I love your heart.

I love your emotions.

I love the way you interact with the world,

your personality,

the words you use,

and the times of which you are silent.

I love when you are waking,

and I love when you are sleeping.

I love you in all seasons.

Bu I most especially love you when you are…

when you are having a hard time.

I most especially love you when you have doubt of the future or regrets of the past.

When you feel your own pain and sorrow. The cracks in who you are.

I love you.

I love you from the aesthetic of wabi sabi,

where I honor all imperfections as beauty.

I love you.

I love you in such a way that brings tears to my eyes.

With that love,

I can never go away.

Because love is the the essential energy of existence.

Love.

It is the thing that transforms periodic elements into life itself.

Love is God.

Love is the invisible that animates everything.

Love is what allows us to exist.

And so with the amount of love I have for you…

I am in the ocean.

We, in these physical bodies, are simply waves on top of the ocean.

Simply drops of water in a waterfall.

We come from the same source.

And we end in the same source.

I want you to know that I am around you

and inside of you.

I want you to know that I am the clouds.

Shifting shapes.

You can know me by watching the clouds.

You can know me by listening to the wind and feeling the wind kiss your face.

I am the wind.

You can know me by having your bare feet on the ground.

Foundation. Solidness. Ground reference.

I am the soil.

You can know me as the seasons.

The seasons are as my emotions.

Rise and fall.

I am the seasons.

I am the moon watching.

Always watching.

I am the moon.

I am the birds. And especially the ravens, crows and bluejays.

I am especially those birds.

I am the magpie.

I am in the sky.

And I like to laugh.

I like to make jokes.

I like to play and I am curious.

I am the birds.

I am the trees rooted deep in the ground.

I am the trees of which you can lean upon.

I ask that you respect the trees.

Honor the trees.

I am the trees.

I am the forest.

I listen through the trees.

I am in words.

I am in all words,

but I am in especially the words of the Tao Te Ching.

I am in the words especially of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

I am in the words of Henry David Thoreau’s books.

I am in those words.

I am in music.

I am in vibration.

I am in song.

I am in chanting.

I am in the song of Santana Soul Sacrifice.

I am in the song of Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child and Hear my Train Coming.

I am in the song of Chopin.

I am in the song of Erik Satie. Very much.

I am in the song of Jon Hassell.

I am in the song of Miles Davis.

I am in the song of Skip James and John Lee Hooker.

Yes.

I am in that music.

I am in the music of drum circles under bridges and at festivals.

I am in the fire in the center of the circles.

Transmuting, changing and evolving.

I am the old nails holding up the old barns.

I am in the photographs of loved ones past. Long ago.

I am in the window panes. Especially the ones of which the glass is sagging.

I am in the teakettle about to be poured as tea.

I am in lockets.

I am in handmade pottery.

Right inside of it.

I am the frog with a coin in it’s mouth.

I am the two ducks by the door.

I am the color pink.
I am the color green.
I am the color brown.

I am the color orange.

Yes. I am the color red.

And I am the color blue.

I am the night and I am the day.

I am the arrow.

I am the springs dripping from the edges of mountains.

I am in the center of flowers blooming in Spring.

I am the bumblebees doing their dance.

I am in the smell of lilac, and wisteria and rose.

I am many tastes.

But I am especially the taste of Lomatium.
The root of Lomatium columbianum specifically.
I am the taste of Artemeisa tridentata. Sagebrush.

You can see my form in the smoke of sage.

In the smoke of mugwort and cedar.

You can hear my voice in the bubbling of mountain creeks.

You can arrange stones as circles and you will find me in the center of the circle.

You will find me in the waves upon the sand on the beach.

I am emergence of birds.

I am in caves where you can hear your own echo.

I am in intuitions and premonitions and synchronicities. Serendipity.

I am in your heart.

And I am in your heart and in sadness, and in fear, and in anger.

I am in the passenger seat of your car.

I am in the garden.

And like to be tended to.

If you grow fruit and vegetables. You will taste me.

If you mend a fence. You will know me.

If you split wood. You will sense me.

If you stack stones upon each other. You will connect with me.

Yes.

I am the block of wood,

yet uncarved.

I am in the space between…

words.

What they say “reading between the lines”.

I am in the space between zero’s and one’s.

Between life and death.

Between aboveground and underground.

Between this and that.

I am in the edge.

Look for the edge.

You will find me in the edge.

You will find me in the infinitely small.

You will find me in cycles of which are instantaneous.

Yes.

You will find me in living waters in your own eyes.

You can hear me in your own heartbeat. Especially the third beat.

You can hear me in the note of D.

While looking at the color orange.

Find solace that I am around. That I love you.

Find solace that we are around. And we love you.

Love you.

Love.

Take a handful of soil.

Lift it into the air.

And let it sift through your hands.

Take a cube of ice.

Watch it till it melts.

In your hand.

Speak on behalf of those who do not have a voice.

The tree people.
The animal people.

The river people.

The wind people.

You can honor me by honoring nature.

The sacredness of nature.

The sacredness of life.

Honor me by protecting.

Honor me by protecting nature.

Honor me by speaking your truth.
Honor me by inoculating yourself against mind-control.

Honor me by being in integrity.

Honor me with humility and compassion for other things.

Including non-humans.

Honor me by taking part in the finer things in life.

By writing and reading poetry.
By making music.

By having spaciousness.

Honor me by going for a walk.

Every day.

Out in nature.

Honor me by looking into your loved ones eyes.

Honor me by letting go of your fists and opening your hands.

Honor me by bringing forth the creations that are inside of you.
Do not let the creations inside of you die in the grave.

Honor me by listening.

Honor through silence.

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Meditation

Hustling haste. Onward to the next. Gerbil wheel of a modern human civilized life. To think we made technology to make life easier and yet it was become more diluted and stressful as a result. Ding. Buzz. Ching. Chime. Beep.

A constant alarm taking attention. The most valuable currency is our attention.

So what’s stealing it?

Sometimes the external world distracts, other times it’s our own thoughts. But the quality of focus to our inner and outer worlds dictates the quality of life.

Meditation as silence.

As dance in forest.

As walk in desert.

As eye gazing.

As vocalizing singular tones.

As dipping into a gentle stream.

As with barefoot on dirt.

As observing the heartbeat

yours and others.

Observing the migratory birds.

Imagining the perspective of the moon looking down.

And a beetle looking up.

The winds of time.

Past and future.

Presented now.

And now.

And now…

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Love Without Attachment

Now as for the “Love” word….

I Love many things. I Love my family, my friends, my life. I Love food and clean water. I Love my musical instruments. I love dance and art and poetry. I Love Nature and animals and trees and mushrooms and rain and moss and soil. Quite frankly, I Love everything. Now does this dilute the potency of the word “Love”?

Please read an article I wrote about Love here: https://josephrastovich.com/2018/06/true-love-and-the-many-different-forms-of-love/

I think the key is to Love without attachment. For many people the word Love has many attachments. 
Whatever happens between us — whether we stay friends, live in different countries, or even drop out of communication — I will always Love you.
A Love without opposite.
A Love without a reason.
A Love with a capital “L”.
A Love without attachment and expectations.
The same Love I have for the song of birds and colors of a sunset. 

Love is undefinable. But let me try…
Love is an appreciation and adoration for the beauty, magic and nourishment of something. I Love therefore I care. Love is humble. Love is free. Love is warmth. Love is gentleness. Love is levity. Love is awe. Love is comfort. Love is acceptance. Love is with an open hand. Love is turning towards. Love is listening. Love is compassion. Love is resonance, attunement and connection. 

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The Spirituality Of Digging Roots

Walking down an animal path from which there are no signs or parking, I unexpectedly find myself in a field of diverse wildflowers. I know which one to look for … the pungent Sagittarian colored one. There were many to choose from, but when you are going to take life it is important to have discretion.

The first discretion is to make sure whatever you are taking is in abundance; which it certainly was here.

The second discretion is to never take the strongest, healthiest individual.

But the main thing is to spiritually ask for which plant to take. To be organically guided to the plant of which you are about to create relationship with.

Walking further and further, I finally see the one. It is glowing in the sunlight and was in abundance.

I knelt down to gently touch this plant … “is it ok if I take you?”

I feel that it is.

And with tentative tears, with my trowel I begin to carefully remove the top layer of grass and moss to replace when I am done. Then I dig through the precious fertile soil to volcanic rock. This beautiful plant is tenacious with it’s fleshy roots growing between the rocks and expanding these spaces over the course of decades.

Like an archaeologist carefully peeling back layers of time never seen with human eyes I slowly move the ancient rocks as I forage for roots.

As soon as I remove one rock, there is another. I use my fingers to trace the direction of roots and feel I am touching the muscles, veins and sinew of the Earth. As I go deeper, I pull the stones out of the cool soil as if delivering a baby from a womb. I can only place rocks gently after such an experience.

Finally I have retrieved all the medicinal aromatic roots with dirt embedded in fragrant sap on my hands. I smell just like the plant of which I was searching. Now before me is a hole just large enough for me with rocks stacked around the edges. I can sit in this cool nest of rock and dirt where there was once another being.

As I dig roots I am taken back to an embodied memory of what our ancestors did daily. I connect to the wisdom of plant medicine and nourishment derived from nature. My mind quiets and I am present with my environment as the crow teases me upward. Naturally I chew on the bitter root as I dig with its alkaloid medicine evident upon my tongue. My conscious perception begins to change. My movement slows down. My peripheral vision expands and colors brighten. The animals stare me in the eye. I see things for how they truly are. Things I don’t usually see. I became different after digging and eating the roots of our ancestors. The altered state of consciousness was heightened beyond placebo such that it made me wonder if I had poisoned myself; this was not a plant known to have any psychoactive properties. I quickly realized that when you put your hands in the Earth, you become attuned to the subtleties around and within. All elements of Nature will change your awareness if you allow it. The wind, rain, snow, lichen, moss, soil, rivers, smoke, trees, animals, insects, fungi and of course plants. We owe our life to these people.

Before I leave my rock nest, I tell the plant of which I dug and the Earth of which I dug from:

“soon, I too will return to the soil”.

Words cannot describe my connection with Nature.

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When Evil Turns to Sacrilege

I woke up this morning to the continued sound of ecological destruction during a time of year when Nature is softest with infinite potential and hope. It pains me to see the steel tines of “progress” desecrate the ancient lands which have given life to countless generations of coyote, rabbits, ravens, snakes, lizards, quail, chuckars, yellow balsam root, sage, rabbitbrush. What was once curvaceous wild hills upon a dark sky is now terraced into submission and polluted with streetlights.

If you are going to pillage the Earth,

subdue it

control it

break it down

With iron tines of adapted war machines,

called backhoes, bulldozers and rock crushers

Then at least have the courtesy to do it at the high noon of summer

or the dead of winter.

Ravaging in the rain in early spring,

when birds sing their song of hope

where plants brighten with lushness

how flowers show their vulnerability

while soil opens with fertile receptivity,

Pain turns to torturous despair

as the ancestral lands give stillbirth

and the blood of terra erodes,

devoid of life.

The sacrilege of doing something more perverse than what is already evil.

The equivalent of killing somebody, but killing a pregnant woman.

Where evil turns to sacrilege.

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“Overture” Film Review

 

A longer film by Dan Sachar, “Overture” is another melancholic story reminding us of profound archetypes.
Filmed in a post-apocalyptic world, a lone man tries to piece together a broken memory while doting over a delicate young tree in an otherwise inhospitable world. A mysterious woman who seems to have uncanny wisdom and compassion forces him to look at the past and accept what happened to humanity. The desertification of the city slowly expands into the remaining life of nature.
In the end he returns to source and the woman is what I assume as Nature herself.

Overture / אוברטורה from Dan Sachar on Vimeo.

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“When It Will Be Silent” Short Film Review

 

A short film by Dan Sachar covering powerful archetypes which will bring tears to all but the coldest eyes.

Poetry could be described as art focusing on that which is not said. Or in other words “reading between the lines”.

This video perfectly fits that definition.

Filmed in sepia almost to the point of black and white. A dead landscape showing what is oil or blood dripping down a heart symbol drawn on a wall. Puddling near a dead bird with feathers being blown by the wind. A broken bridge. A man in a truck wearing a gas mask. Drudgingly digs a hole in the dust. He pulls out the body of a woman draped in white from the back of the truck wearing a wedding ring. Of skin blistered with chemical burns. The mask wearing man carries her down the valley of the broken bridge and into the hole he dug. He lays next to her and takes off his mask, looks at the corpse of the young woman and dies next to her from what we assume is a toxic air. The video ends with oil or blood dripping down a heart drawn on a limestone wall. Soberly melancholic as it brings up the ancient archetype of love, loss and grief with and an unspoken undertone of environmentalism. 

When it Will Be Silent (כשיהיה דומם) from Dan Sachar on Vimeo.