“There is nothing left to say
but we are That.
And that is what we sing about.”
– Stephen Levine
Over his long career as a Buddhist meditation teacher focused on the art of conscious living and dying, Stephen Levine (1937-2016) sat with countless people through their dying processes. Just as the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi wrote of our individual lives as raindrops falling toward joyful reunion with the ocean, in his poem “Millennium Blessing,” Levine gently suggests that a homecoming of larger belonging calls us. Regarding the larger, loving belonging we sense beyond our individualized existence, he writes, “And that is what we sing about.”
Millennium Blessing
There is a grace approaching
that we shun as much as death,
it is the completion of our birth.
It does not come in time,
but in timelessness
when the mind sinks into the heart
and we remember.
It is an insistent grace that draws us
to the edge and beckons us to surrender
safe territory and enter our enormity.
We know we must pass
beyond knowing
and fear the shedding.
But we are pulled upward
none-the-less
through forgotten ghosts
and unexpected angels,
luminous.
And there is nothing left to say
but we are That.
And that is what we sing about.
From: Breaking the Drought: Visions of Grace by Stephen Levine
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