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The Ripening
Many years ago my beloved teacher, the extraordinarily gifted healer Rosalyn Bruyere, told us a story about what happened when she went to learn from the Hopi Indians. They told her if she wanted to heal she must learn to kill. They instructed her to kill a deer and skin it. She followed their instruction. These four decades later I never forgot that story. Loved ones die, our children struggle and suffer, we ourselves know we will have to leave behind all we’ve grown to love. And all the suffering and loss, all the sickness, starvation, struggle, pain, fear, and loneliness — all the misery is also punctuated with tender moments of closeness, with magic, the miraculous softness of moss growing by a stream, the kind eyes of a stranger, the taste of pure water, — and the hope we carry in our hearts no matter how close or far away we are from love — the bright blazing fire, or dim flicker of hope to love and be loved. So now, some four decades later as I look back and imagine the innocent eyes of that deer as the hunter approached, I realize that the embrace of death is the way we learn to embrace life — that this enfolding of the totality is the way we ourselves become full and whole. This is the ripening.
— Denise Yanez
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