Living with Truth
On contemplating death and the archetype of Scorpio
Dear reader,
I began this year with a meditation course that introduced me to the practice of reciting the five remembrances every morning and every evening. While I am still working toward more consistency with this practice, I am already transformed by having these truths greet me from the wall on my left when I sit at my desk. Here they are for you:
I felt an immediate shift with this new practice. The night of the first day that I read these statements aloud, I was in my bed facing my husband who had already fallen asleep. I was jealous because I knew my mind was going to do what it does most nights: walk me through every worry that did not manage to get my attention all day, every horrible possibility that could cause me deep pain as soon as right now—how do I know for sure that our baby is still breathing? and on and on. When I was newly postpartum, I got into the habit of listening to podcasts while I fell asleep to keep me from the nightly torture of anxiety. (My favorite go-to for this was Barbara Brown Taylor’s interview with Krista Tippett for the podcast On Being—always so soothing.)Last month, I started a course at Spirit Rock called A Year To Live that is inspired by Stephen Levine’s book by the same name. One of my classmates mentioned five transformative words that he learned from our teacher Vinny Ferraro: right now, it’s like this. The moment passed as the words remained in a nest of my questions. Is that phrase about acceptance—a way of tricking myself into being cool with whatever—or distance or truth?
On this night, I interrupted this pattern by repeating the five remembrances to myself. I cried quietly as I imagined my husband dying and my children getting sick. I let myself grieve, and then something shifted. There was no horror story for me to spin. Because I had already met those truths and let myself feel them, I freed myself from the burden of anticipation. Yes, it can happen. Yes, it will be so painful. Yes, there are people who survive this pain.
Of course, it did not eliminate my anxiety altogether. (Now, instead of stressing about the future, I ruminate over the regrets of my past.) Still, I am grateful that I found a way to interrupt the vivid and fearful visualizations of death that kept me from sleep. It allows me to relax into these hard truths, letting the hard truths hold me. Again, my whole being sighs and says, Thank you for telling me the truth.
Many of you are my dear friends and know that I have a Pisces Sun. What many of you may not know is that I have Scorpio Rising, and I lovelovelove the Scorpio archetype. In You Were Born For This, Chani Nicholas summarizes Scorpio’s style with these two words: “intense, penetrating.” Pair that with Pisces as “intuitive, creative,” and if you know me personally or follow me on IG, then you’re probably already like “Okay! Damn!” because yes, it is very much a summary of me.
Quickly moving past talk of Scorpio’s “sexual magnetism" (hahhahaa), Scorpio is associated with truth-telling, emotional strength, and transformation as well as self-sabotage. According to Chani, Scorpio is willing to suffer to prove a point.
Where Scorpio lives within me strengthens me and brings to mind how much I listen to my own suffering. In some ways, I see myself as devoted to my suffering by being devoted to the end of my (& our) needless suffering. It is this overwhelming condition that steers me toward spirituality, discovering different ways of knowing myself, and being more present in the practice of living. It is the Scorpio in me that completed a death doula training while pregnant in 2021, that turns to the tarot almost daily and has the five remembrances taped to a wall in her home.
In The Inner Sky, Steven Forrest summarizes the essence of Scorpio with a brief visualization that begins with you lying in a sleeping back in the early morning:
With that scorpion in your belly, only the awesome intensity of the present moment remains. Everything else—all pretense, all vanity, all ambition—is ripped away. Only essentials remain. And mind, naked and alert, focused sharp as a cut gem, stands ready to live or die.
That attitude, that state is consciousness, is Scorpio.
Only essentials remain.
Very Scorpio of me to say: That’s what I call some goddamn perspective.
To return to the root
is peace.
Peace: to accept what must be,
to know what endures.
In that knowledge is wisdom.
— Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching
Forrest writes about how Scorpio achieves a certain level of self-knowledge by thinking about death:
Morbidity is not the point…The strategy is to fully accept into consciousness the reality of one’s own inescapable death. To let death serve as a counselor. To feel the fear, to let it stir up emotions, and then to ask death the critical question: “Given that my time here is limited, what should I do next? What is really important to me? Which of my commitments and behavior patterns are based on the insane assumption that I am physically immortal?”
This is what I am reaching for when I aim to contemplate death as a daily practice: a living practice that help me stand and act on what is essential, what I decide or realize really matters.
So far, it has revealed to me a few matters that used to dictate so many of my daily actions:
grades & academic degrees
career goals & money
pleasing other people, especially my employers
physical appearance.
I can see more clearly now how I abandoned myself for everything above. I also look around and see more clearly how a culture of self-abandonment makes it easier abandon others.
Now, I live around this question a lot: What really matters?
“Shining the light of death on my life” helps me return to this question often and find some answers (Frank Ostaseski).
James Baldwin describes death as “the only fact we have.”
I’m beginning to think of the third remembrance in particular as a First Truth: an initiation into a practice that teaches us how to relate to what is true, how to welcome truth into our actions. I don’t think we can have an intimate relationship with the First Truth of death without letting the fact of death inform our daily lives and help us truly live as beings in community.
But here’s where I take a turn:
I also find myself pleading let me live because some of us have had to swing a blade and climb out of the rubble to keep our own lives & lineages.
Even as I begin to see my own life as truly sacred, I am still be living under a system that willingly forsakes my health and my life.
Many of us come from people who not only know death as a fact but also as a weapon.
Every now and then I come across the notion that “Not all things are meant to last” and when it echoes in my mind I start to hear, “Not all people are meant to last.” Yes, horrible, but I hear it because I see it and live it as Black Dominican mother living in a city on Medicaid and food stamps. That is what my husband sees every single day as an EMT in Newark, NJ. It is the declaration at the heart of every settler-state (yes, Israel, and also the U.S.). It is the justification for labeling a whole people as a “problem” and attempting to eliminate them. This is how we end up in a place where white & wealthy people are granted the legitimacy to be seen as ill, deserving of treatment, deserving of protections and a certain quality of life.
What does it mean to seek death’s wisdom while living a reality in which some of us suffer and die disproportionately?
And, at this point in my reflection, all I have to say is: I don’t know.
I don’t know what to do with that except finally write it down and share it because I have yet to come across a Buddhist teacher, grief expert, or death doula willing to tell this truth.
So I leave you with another question:
When you contemplate death for a moment,
when you strip your life all the way down,
what remains? What endures?
In solidarity,
Yomalis
