Presence Meeting Presence - The Eternal Flame

There is a way of meeting another that has nothing to do with words, awareness, or even wakefulness.

It happens beneath all of that — in the quiet field where soul recognizes soul.

When I sit with someone who is dying, I do not feel that I am with them so much as within something with them. A shared atmosphere. A single, porous listening. We are both opened — not psychologically, but cosmically — as though the boundaries that usually define “me” and “you” have gently dissolved.

And yet, if I am honest, this meeting is not unique to death.

In truth, we are meeting one another in this field all the time — in every conversation, every shared silence, every glance that lingers just a moment too long. Presence is always available. Communion is always occurring. What changes near death is not the field itself, but the thinning of the veils.

So many barriers usually stand between us: language, history, fear, self-protection, the relentless activity of the mind. Roles. Stories. The need to be understood or defended. These layers dull our perception, making what is most intimate seem distant or rare.

As life loosens its grip, those barriers fall away. There is no longer the energy to maintain them. And suddenly, we find ourselves meeting where we have always been meeting — only now without interference.

After days of such silence, when the moment of death arrives and the body releases its final breath, something moves through me that is unmistakable. A grief — but not the grief we usually name. It is clean. Wordless. Untangled from story. It does not accuse or ache or demand meaning.

It arrives like a tide.

And then, just as quietly, it reveals itself as love — vast, intimate, unspeakably tender. Love without object. Love without direction. Love remembering itself through the hollowed space of the heart.

This is what happens when presence meets presence.

It does not matter whether the other is conscious by medical definition. It does not matter if their eyes are closed, if their body is still, if language has long since departed. Something deeper than cognition is awake. Something older than memory is listening. And it knows it is not alone.

I learned this long ago while guiding meditation. People would sometimes fall asleep — and I would smile inwardly. Sleep, when it comes in safety, is not absence. It is surrender. And though the mind forgets, the essence remains. The body remembers. The field remembers. Something essential is received and carried forward, even if no words survive.

Presence always leaves a trace.

Because of this, those who keep vigil must tend themselves with reverence. Not as recovery, but as ritual. Not as self-care in the modern sense, but as sacred containment.

Warm water. Candlelight. Prayer whispered into the unseen. Simple gestures that call the soul back into the body. These acts seal what has passed through us, allowing grief to complete its arc into love, allowing love to rest rather than overflow without ground.

To sit in this field is to become a doorway.

To tend oneself afterward is to close the door gently — with gratitude.

Both are holy acts.

Both are required.

And perhaps, as we learn to notice this meeting even here — in ordinary moments, amid all the noise and defenses — the world itself may begin to soften, remembering what it has never truly forgotten

Nigel Lott

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other Doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

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