Image of the Week: Love Is the Funeral Pyre

© Durga Yael Bernhard

Years ago I worked in a therapist's office in Woodstock, NY.  My employer was passionate in his views of spiritual transformation.  He believed in the transcendental nature of love – love as a crucible and a cauldron of cathartic change.  He loved a particular poem by the 14th century Persian lyrical poet Hafiz, titled "Love Is the Funeral Pyre," which gives voice to this idea – and commissioned me to create this illustration for his own personal use.

It's easy to think death was easier in centuries past, simply because it was so much more commonplace.  People were not sheltered from death as we are now.  Not a birth took place that did not threaten the life of the mother; nor was a child presumed to survive its first year until it did.  Yet the words of Hafiz speak of loss as profound and shattering as what we feel today at the death of a loved one:   

Love is
The funeral pyre
Where I have laid my living body.

All the false notions of myself
That once caused fear, pain,
Have turned to ash
As I neared God.

What has risen
From the tangled web of thought and sinew
Now shines with jubilation
Through the eyes of angels
And screams from the guts of
Infinite existence
Itself.

Love is the funeral pyre
Where the heart must lay
Its body.

 

Love certainly kindles the fire that destroys our illusions, our false beliefs, our identities and attachments.  All of that is sacrificed on the altar of love.  But love also reveals that which is imperishable, and does not burn away – the eternal nature of the connection between souls, symbolized here by the woman who, like a rock, survives the flames.  

Three days ago my beloved dog Yaldah succumbed to death, and took a piece of my heart to her grave.  Her body is buried outside my bedroom window, under the low boughs of a spruce tree.  She was like my fourth child – my constant companion for 13 years – my angel in golden fur.  She taught me to appreciate little things in life, and burned away my previous ideas of happiness and love.  The flames of grief have left me wandering a landscape of ash, searching for signs of my precious pet in the eyes of angels and the guts of infinite existence. The void she leaves behind is indescribable.  At the same time, my love for my sweet girl, my little lioness, my funny puppy – is deathless.  

The greater the love, the more sorrow it kindles when time burns away the body.  Dogs accept the ravages of time without projecting into the future or dwelling on the past; they simply respond in the moment, knowing it will only be a matter of time before they'll return to their source.  I marveled at Yaldah's equanimity in the face of her deteriorating body. What a pure, sweet soul.

I shall miss her forever.