A Purple Passage

One of the things I discovered in my research about the color purple is that a paragraph containing "ornate and flowery language" is called a "purple passage."  Metaphorically speaking, that's a good way to describe how 2012 has been for me.  Also, this year has been a major rite of passage, resulting in discovery of what a new friend of mine calls the "heart treasure," that one still point of purpose that, once discovered, turns everything else in one's life to serve it.

During the time of planning my brother's memorial, I happened to see an ad in a magazine for the Celebrant Foundation & Institute, which trains people to become professional Life-Cycle Celebrants - people who create and perform ceremonies with and for people.  I immediately knew this was for me, and I entered that funny process of coming to decide something that you've actually already decided.

At the time, I had just started working toward building my new business as a personal historian, and I questioned the wisdom of aborting that in midstream and starting another new thing.  But the rightness was so apparent to me that I took the leap of faith and signed up for the training (which I'm now in the middle of). 

The thing is, I knew I had found my true calling, and so many things that had happened in recent months all worked together to form one big twinkling, neon arrow pointing to celebrancy.  It started with writing about wedding officiants and realizing the importance of celebrations of milestones.  But the biggest thing was leading my brother's memorial.  It felt totally right to me, and many people who attended, most of whom I didn't know, gave me very positive feedback; a couple of them even leaned in and whispered, "I want you to do my funeral."  I know it may sound strange, but I am so intensely grateful to my brother for this gift.

I have always felt drawn toward ritual and ceremony.  I've even considered going to seminary; and now, in the Celebrant Institute, I've found my tribe, my place.  I'm amazed at how this vocation will draw on all my passions and talents.  I'm so used to having multiple jobs, but for the first time in my life I see the various side paths all merging into one.  And since focus on the client's personal story as a "hero's journey" is one of the hallmarks that makes a Life-Cycle Celebrant different from other kinds of officiants, the personal history business is also simply being absorbed into this profession. 

All the bells in my heart are ringing in one accord.  Hallelujah.

An Extra-Spectral Year

This year has been something else.  I suspected it would be when I realized purple was going to be its color.  I've never been fond of this color; you might even say I'm porphyrophobic.   I've always associated purple with discomfort, with intensity, and also with death.  When I finished making my collage for the year and contemplated the finished product, I just knew it was going to be a fiercely disturbing year, and that there would be death in it.

Then, at the beginning of February, my younger brother Scott unexpectedly died.  And that was just the beginning.  There have been deaths and brushes with death on many different levels this year.  I could do about ten more posts on each of those experiences, but I'll spare you all that.

Really, the death theme started at the end of 2011, and that's partly how purple came to be my color for 2012.  I had been writing the weekly blog for a client's website.  Her product, called Life at Hand, is a system for recording and organizing personal information and vital documents, so a lot of what I was researching to blog about had to do with estate planning and other end-of-life stuff.  In the process of that research, I became more and more aware of (and disturbed by) how deeply in denial we are as a culture about all things death-related.  I began to feel an urgent sense to do something about that, but I knew not what.  All I knew is that death was going to be a focus for me for a while.

When Scott died, I took on the task of planning and leading his memorial.  At the time, I had been happily planning the Valentine's tea party I mentioned in my last post, inspired about the opportunity to create a celebration of my woman friends.  Now that enthusiasm went into creating a different kind of celebration altogether, a celebration of Scott's life.

But I had never done anything remotely like planning a memorial before, so I went into major research mode, and what I quickly discovered is that there is very little freely available on the Internet that is useful for such a task .  The poems and readings I found were mostly cheesy and/or bland, and I was horrified that several sites wanted to charge for the most basic resources.  For instance, one site I landed on wanted $30 for a funeral program template Word document.  After many, many hours of research I did finally find some good stuff, and managed to put it all together, but my sense that how death is approached in our culture needs to have the lid blown off it was amped up several levels.

It wasn't just because of the research, either.  It was because of Scott.

I had never had much of an opinion or feeling either way about the idea of connecting with people beyond the grave.  When people recount experiences of having felt the presence of a dead loved one, I've never really believed or disbelieved it.  But with Scott's death, that changed forever.

One day, shortly after his death, I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop, talking about him.  Some amazing things had been happening among those he was connected to; a sense of community had formed over many miles among us.  His two ex-wives were connecting with each other, for instance.  And for me, who had been alienated from Scott for several years because his addictions and demons had made him an unsafe person for me to let into my life, I felt all of the walls I'd erected with him come down, and I simply loved him once again.  As I discussed all this with my friend in the cafe, I said, "I have no regrets; I'm at peace with all of this and I can tangibly feel that he is at peace too.  I just wish I could give him one good hug."  And as I said that, all of a sudden everything just lit up and became more alive, vibrant with warm good life; and his spirit, his essence - HE - was there hugging me, and it was infinitely more satisfying than any physical hug.

Eckhart Tolle says that when someone dies it's like a soap bubble bursting; the outer form of the bubble is gone, and what was inside that bubble is released.  That's as good an analogy as any I've heard to describe how this could be.

Can I prove that it was really Scott's essence there with me?  No, of course not.  But I know it on a level that trumps the puny "knowledge" of the rational mind.  Conveniently, there's a fitting metaphor here involving my color for the year: 

There is no such thing as the "wavelength of purple light" on the visible color spectrum; purple only exists as a combination, and is therefore referred to as "extra-spectral."  It wasn't even acknowledged on Newton's color wheel. However, as it says on Wikipedia, "The spectrum is often divided up into named colors, though any division is somewhat arbitrary: the spectrum is continuous."

Just as the color spectrum is continuous regardless of the divisions we impose upon it, so is the spectrum of life and death.  And whether you classify and divide the spectrum, whether you name the color or not and include it as part of a system you recognize, you know it when you see it, and that's all that matters.