#4 Liberated: The Beauty of Return
What happens when we let go?
What was scattered, gathers. What was gathered, blows apart. – Heraclitus (fr. 40)¹
A few months before Anne died, we stood in her kitchen. It was late October, one of those evenings when the light had already decided to leave, retreating through the window in long, half-hearted lines. I closed her laptop, problem solved, and hung up my “tech support” hat for the night. I just needed to tend to a few more things in her space before wrapping up. Upstairs, the muffled sounds of my children drifted downward: bath water started, voices soft, the small rituals of bedtime in motion.
Anne, my mother-in-law, joined our home three years earlier, transforming us from a family of four into a vibrant five. In short order, we learned how to move around and with each other—sometimes closely knit, sometimes slipping quietly into our own routines, all of us shaped by the welcomed contours of shared living.
“How are you doing?” I asked, half-distracted, changing the garbage bin, and already mentally scrolling through which bedtime stories or meditations might settle the kids (and myself).
“Fine,” she said, her usual even tone. “Fine” was her default response. And I often accepted that, trusting she would say otherwise if that were not the case. “Tired” or “Fine” were reliable signals.
Yet something in her voice gave me pause. I turned slowly toward her, my hand still on the counter at the opposite end of where she leaned. Our eyes met.
“Anne, how are you really doing?” I asked again, softly, insistently.
She glanced away, inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, then exhaled slowly. The kitchen seemed to expand and shrink with her breath. Our eyes reconnected.
“Liberated,” she said.
Time suspended. The room changed, yet nothing happened. The background noise of the house — the running water upstairs, the distant voices of my children — faded. A quiet clarity filled the space between us, as if the air itself had thinned. I stood still, not wanting to disturb whatever just opened between us.
The refrigerator hummed. The clock ticked its tock over my left shoulder. Beyond the window, the low evening light slipped deeper into silence. “Liberated” converted the space between us, invisibly hovering in the quietness, undeniable in its force. For those few extraordinary moments, we shared something beautifully ineffable yet elegantly clarified.
Eventually, reluctantly, I broke the spell. “What does that mean?” I asked, my voice swallowed by the space.
She declined to elaborate. Her voice gentle, a bit staggered by her underlying condition yet determined: “I just… feel… liberated.”
I nodded, sensing that pressing further would diminish this, this something important. We stayed in that moment together, the word hanging between us like a delicate thread connecting two realities — mine, increasingly bound by daily concerns: laundry, bedtimes, bills, careers, the dog, things to do — and hers, having already begun retiring from external attachments and associations, she loosened from more.
Four months later, after she died, I understood the depth of generosity she shared with me that evening in the kitchen: the clarity that comes from releasing everything we think we are. The freedom encountered through forms of acceptance.
She knew. And probably for quite some time.
Her final weeks unfolded as close to her plans as one could wish.
Anne lived seven years with a rare neurological disorder that slowly eroded her body but left her mind intact. The cruelty of her disease lay in this awareness—the mind remained sharp while the body rebelled. After several years of navigating her debilitating condition, the physical falling apart had taken its toll. She struggled to speak, swallow, and general mobility constrained to stiff shuffling. The window of her defined quality of life was shuttering.
In early January, she chose to stop eating and drinking: a final act of clarity, an act of freedom. She started her final decision on Wednesday night. By Saturday, she transitioned from palliative to hospice care. One of the nurses informed us people who stop eating and drinking usually pass within one to two weeks. Anne died eight days later, following her own timeline just as she had throughout much her life. She released with love and peace in her own bed at her own home in her own way.
Hospice offered guidance, a light gravity on the periphery, while we attended through the days and nights. My spouse slept beside Anne those first few evenings, both of us moving between vigilance and exhaustion learning how love changes shape in the shadow of departure. The hospice nurse checked in, never in a hurry, helping us trust that nothing urgent needed fixing. As the death doula visited, her presence gentle and practical, invited us all to notice what mattered most, and to let the rest fall away. Their calm steadied us, but it was Anne’s steadiness — her quiet grace in the face of everything — that set the rhythm during those seemingly endless days.
Even as her body weakened, her spirit held the room together. Together, our hands, our voices, our tears, our smiles, our being held each other through each uncertain hour. In the hush of that care — ours, theirs, hers — a different kind of presence peeked through, one you feel most keenly when the world narrows to a single bedside and the hours drift between memory and what’s next.
During those final days, we bore witness to the quiet unraveling of bodily form and to the deepening presence that revealed itself behind it. As the Zen Hospice and Buddhist teacher Frank Ostaseski observes in The Five Invitations, dying is a process, a gradual shedding of the elements: earth, water, fire, air.² These elements represent more than metaphors or representations of things. They offer a lived vocabulary for the experience of witnessing a person disappear from physical form while growing somehow brighter in the immaterial.
It is said that when we die, body and mind unravel together in a shared, interdependent process of cocreation and destruction. Form and release. Refolding and unfolding. The four elements — earth, water, fire, and air — aren’t limited to the body’s structure. They shape our emotions, our thoughts, even our creativity. Earth holds firmness and tenderness, steadiness and give. Water carries cohesion and flow, flexibility and constancy. Fire swings between warmth and intensity. Air moves between stillness and motion. These forces rise and recede together, the way breath follows heartbeat, the way living and letting go always stay in conversation.
This framework spans cultures and millennia — from ancient Greece to Rome to the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar, from Indigenous Americans to Indian Ayurvedic thought to Chinese philosophies and the tribes across Africa — humans have recognized these elements as the foundation of existence. These traditions understood what modern medicine often misses: the elements represent more than physical components. They embody emotional states, mental processes, and creative, subtle energies that flow through us. When medical explanations of death feel sterile and foreign, these elemental patterns offer a resonant language for the experience of witnessing someone’s transition.
First, Anne’s body lost solidity—her legs weakened, her foundation caving. This is earth dissolving. Her previously grounded presence, always gentle yet persistent, softened into the bed beneath her. Her hands, once firm enough to work her sewing magic, prune her plants, and manage a sprawling Human Resources team, now rested lightly on the sheets, barely making an impression. The hardness of bone and muscle yielded to gravity.
Water followed. Her circulation slowed. Her ability to swallow waned. Her speech became infrequent, then sparse. Like a glacier calving into the sea, parts of her that once held shape and function quietly slipped away. The coherence and fluidity that had characterized her—her ability to connect thoughts, to flow from one topic to another—gradually stilled. And yet, she radiated warmth whenever her daughter, the grandkids, or I entered the room. Her eyes followed us, a quiet current of attention barely flowing beneath the surface.
Then came the fire—the metabolic flickering. Her temperature fluctuated. Her energy, once enough to sit upright and smile, turned inward. That inner heat, previously a source of love and tenacity, gathered at her core like dying embers on a cold night.
Scientists explain that we contain atoms forged in stellar explosions billions of years ago: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, all created in the heart of dying stars. Big bang. Converted potential. Consciousness repurposed. The dynamic cycle of cocreation and destruction. Poets reach for similar explanations through different language: we are fallen or dimmed light, cosmic fire cooled into temporary form. Science and art arrive at the same realization through different paths: we’re brief arrangements of borrowed elements, a momentary congregation of stardust that eventually rejoins the universe that shaped us. Life and death cocreate form and release, unfolding and refolding.
We are temporary arrangements of ancient elements.
Anne’s fire element began its return journey, the cooling beginning at her extremities, moving slowly inward, as if her life force were condensing to its essential nature.
Eventually, fire gave way to air. Breathing became shallow, then erratic. Long pauses filled the room between breaths. There was no distress, no struggle for oxygen, just space gradually replacing rhythm. We found ourselves unconsciously matching our breath to hers, then holding it during those extended pauses, as if collectively participating in the gradual loosening of her from life.
And then came stillness.
In that sacred space between her final breath and what followed, I experienced the awesome power of being with someone becoming nonbeing. Someone un-becoming. Someone refolding into themselves. Someone returning. Someone I loved and knew loved me and our family with all her might. Her might, powerfully yielding to returning. Words can’t capture the essence of this transition — this symphonic movement within stillness back toward origin that embodies the cyclical nature of existence itself. Beauty manifesting and unmanifesting.
Our elements dissolve. Our essence reimagined.
The ancient wisdom traditions describe this process with elegant simplicity — earth yields to water, water transforms to fire, fire dissolves into air, air expands into space, and space opens to pure consciousness.³ What remains is more than absence. It’s a subtle presence that permeates the room, something undeniable yet unmeasurable, recognized not by instruments but by something within us that knows it immediately. Consciousness transformed well beyond our linguistic grasp.
The doings of nature leave “footprints” behind. Like the wet ground after the rain stops. Or at the beach where your foot imprints in wet sand. When we die, our body is the vestige of our previous doings that linger after nature stops its dissociative process.⁴
Dying doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a gradual withdrawal from life and form. It’s a dissolution of our ego. When we speak of the four elements dissolving, we’re not merely describing physical breakdown but pointing toward something ineffable yet observable—those animating qualities so conspicuously absent in the body afterward. Science can measure the physical disintegration with precision, but the inner dissolution happening simultaneously remains subtle and still. Our instruments capture data but not the mystery.
The Tao Te Ching offers this wisdom:
The returning is the movement of the Tao.
The weak is the utilization of the Tao.
The myriad things of the world are born of being;
Being is born of nonbeing.⁵
We can interpret this passage as a gesture to the rhythm of return — the movement of all things back to source.⁶ “The weak” does not mean feeble, but soft, yielding, adaptable. This flexible pliancy characterizes what propels life forward. In a sense, it’s the aspects of the four elements of existence. Living things bend and adjust. The stiff and unyielding, like dried branches, break under pressure.
This applies equally to our minds. An awareness in tune with Nature bends like a young sapling in strong winds — responsive, curious, alive to possibility.⁷ But a mind that grips its certainties like talismans, that reflexively barricades itself against unfamiliar ideas? That mind has already completed a kind of death. The body walks, talks, scrolls through endless feeds, but some essential animating force has weakened – or, perhaps, nearly departed.
We’ve created a peculiar modern condition where many of us move as if half-asleep, drifting through days like unconscious, living corpses. The zombie apocalypse isn’t coming, it’s here. It’s here in our rigid thinking, our mindless scrolling, our poverty of attention, our reflexive rejections, our desperate clinging to what we imagine is permanent when nothing is.
This disease of distraction narrows our mental airways and disrupts our breathing, stifling the vitality that could expand our lifescape. Avoidance collapses our lungs, leaving us breathless, while awareness lights the breaths we still hold and release. We scroll past horizons that might have widened us. We can feel, paradoxically, more absent than those who have already died yet faced impermanence with open awareness.
The Tibetan yogi Milarepa reminded his students that the corpse we fear “is living with us here and now,” present in every breath and heartbeat.⁸ Death is not an event waiting somewhere in the distance, it moves with us. It rides the morning commute, sits across from us at lunch, lingers through the evening meal, and tucks in beside us at night.
Life carries death as its companion. Rather than diminish life’s light, this companionship deepens and expands it. When we recognize that death is both certain and uncertain — absolutely coming, never knowable in its when or how — we stop postponing the reckoning. We stop playing peek-a-boo with the universe, covering our eyes as though what we refuse to see cannot find us. We can walk with paradox: death is always near, and therefore so is life.
Anne lived with this awareness. While disease narrowed her healthspan, her openness widened her horizon and expanded her lifescape. Each breath carried more weight, each step more fragility, each moment more radiance. Where our culture suffers a dis-ease of avoidance, she turned toward what we fear most, carrying dying alongside living. In that companionship she revealed the strength to release, the grace to return, and the love that somehow grew firmer as her form dissolved. Generosity is abundant.
Gradually, Anne’s body, once soft, pliant, resilient yet responsive to change became hard and stiff; the flower of death blooming inside her. While her mind remained clear and open until nearly the end, her body cooled and stiffened. She played, in every way, her part of the cycle of return. Being becoming nonbeing.
In her final days, resistance ceased. Her awareness thinned like morning fog as we felt her presence swell, then recede. She seemed to dissolve into the space she once occupied, like steam from a kettle dissipating into air, no longer visible, but still somehow there.
As a species, when we trace our origins back, we eventually realize we existed first as nothing but pure potential. Our being (or existence) emerges from nonbeing (or nonexistence). This realization counteracts our worldly—physical and mental—attachments. When we truly grasp this, our clinging makes no sense at all. Anne embodied this understanding and shared that insight with me in her kitchen that evening months before, and even more fully in her final days; holding nothing, resisting nothing, simply being the beauty of return.
There were no universally understood metaphysical claims in our shared household, no dogmatic assertions about what happens after death. We don’t know. Claims on such certainty degrade the intrinsic Mystery of things. But there was something felt in our heartbeats. An intuition. A soft, resonant experience that transcended our usual categories of thought.
Even the skeptical among us — those who don’t hold a belief in subtle consciousness or something beyond the physical — perceive something radiant about the quality of existence. And when we open ourselves up to the presence of our inner radiance and understand that same of those around us we can tap deeper into the incomprehensible mysteries of existence.
These subtle aspects of being become more available as death closes in. There’s a perceptible shift in the texture of presence. Not necessarily supernatural, but undeniably real — a clarity or luminosity that emerges as physical form recedes. Our vocabulary falters when trying to capture these “this” moments. We reach for words like “presence” or “essence,” then recognize their inadequacy and fall silent. Perhaps that’s the this: acknowledging that direct experience transcends our explanatory frameworks. What we witness and experience matters more than (and with) our ability to categorize and measure.
What becomes undeniable when sitting with the dying is that impermanence forms the bedrock of existence. Life constantly comes together and falls apart. At death, sure, but also always. We generally agree that life flows in constant flux, yet cling to the illusion that we ourselves are solid entities moving through a changing world. “Everything is changing except me,” we tell ourselves. While true at some level, we entangle meanings. We are not the roles we play: accountant, teacher, lawyer, landscaper, parent, writer. We are, like everything else, simultaneously here and disappearing. And we’ll find, as Ostaseski writes, “The more permeable we become, the more we realize that we are just bundles of ever-changing conditions.”⁹
When we relax our grasp and flow with flux, we open to the wider plane of awareness. Sometimes in our openness, we brush the ineffable. Sometimes we sense the sacred.
Anne’s dying illuminated this: the collapsing of identity, the dissolving of form, and yet, somehow, the amplification of love.
True longevity is not breath prolonged but meaning that endures. Memory that lives on in others. Influence that persists beyond physical presence. An imprint’s soft, fading persistence. A shared resonance. The Tao Te Ching reminds us, “Those who do not lose their base endure. Those who die but do not perish have longevity.”¹⁰
In the months following her death, I found myself less wedded to being somebody. My personality or identity sometimes felt like a balloon I had become breathless constantly trying to inflate. As I reevaluated and internalized the fragility and meaning of my own life, I softened. I yielded a bit more. I felt more porous, more transparent, more permeable to experience. A feeling of aliveness. Anne’s imprint enduring.
The Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi captured this fluidity of self with striking simplicity: “What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.”¹¹ This image stays with me: a static doorway in perpetual motion, a threshold continually crossed. When we relax our grip on who we think we are, we expand. The borders thin. At first, this openness feels exposing, even dangerous, but given time, it transforms into a peculiar freedom swinging through thresholds. Permeations uncovered.
I recall encountering this wisdom at a Buddhist temple in London in 2006. I was twenty something years old, midway through my undergraduate studies—naïve, likely a bit arrogant, and ravenous for knowledge. My exploratory intellectual path began years earlier when Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces landed in my hands during a high school library peruse, detonating my provincial worldview. Though raised in a Christian household, Campbell exploded open doors to ancient Eastern and Indigenous philosophies that my parochial education and upbringing barely acknowledged. While the concept of life cycles wasn’t new to me, London offered direct, embodied engagement with ways beyond my existing, provincial worldview, and I absorbed them eagerly.
During my first encounter with a Buddhist service, I noticed a wooden block—the han—hanging near the entrance. It captured my curiosity and wonder. Afterward, during otoki — the communal meal where practitioners and visitors share food and conversation — I asked a monk about it. As he patiently showed me how to hold and use my chopsticks properly, he explained the han‘s purpose: to call practitioners to meditation. After our meal, he guided me back to the entrance and showed me the characters carved into its surface:
Great is the matter of birth and death
Time swiftly passes by
Wake up, each one
Don’t squander your life
While the words serve as a powerful reminder, what affected me most was what the monk showed me next: where the mallet had struck the block over decades. The wood gradually began to hollow. The characters were beginning to fade. The block itself, its wearing away, its physical transformation, conveyed something more resonant than the inscription it bore. The teaching became tangible: nothing solid stays solid. We wear away. The explicit enfolding back into implicit.
This struck me with unexpected and enduring force. Despite my philosophical tendencies and religious upbringing, impermanence sort of remained separate and abstract, an intellectual concept rather than a lived truth. But that han somehow made it real: a physical object gradually disappearing through intentional use, its very purpose accelerating its transformation. The block absorbed its dissolution and embodied its message through its changing form.
These glimpses of our transient nature often arrive unexpectedly, sometimes as we attend to the mundane, more resonant in moments of disruption or loss. Insights await everywhere, available in this breath, this heartbeat, this kitchen conversation. Not reserved for some distant enlightenment or final release. Now is that moment you’ve been telling yourself you’ve been waiting for. You’re already standing at the corner that the thing is “just around.” Pick your path and start walking. Don’t wait.
Anne didn’t perish. She transformed fully into the mystery. She released. And in that release, she left behind something we can only call beautiful. Not clean, not easy, yet radiant in its clarity and mystery. She inhabited her part of the return.
Heraclitus’ words resurface here: “What was scattered, gathers. What was gathered, blows apart.”¹² In the river of life where Anne set her feet, she’s now gone — a mere imprint, those waters giving way to this, now this.¹³ Each moment gathers and dissolves, no two the same, and yet each a return.
One of the insights from this journey reveals how our shared impermanence draws us closer. When we recognize — then abide with — the fragile, temporary nature of our lives, artificial barriers dissolve. Compassion flows not from sentiment, but from knowing we belong — together — within a greater field of being. Empathy courses naturally from understanding that we all move to the same cosmic rhythm of emergence and return. Relationships flourish within our unified sense of Being.
Our separateness is illusory; our connectedness closer to reality. We arise within a unified field of existence — Consciousness — endlessly refracting itself through each life and death, each gathering and return.
Consciousness is all there is.
We do not live as isolated selves. We are both the ocean and the wave, the background and the foreground of every story we tell ourselves stretched across existence. Matter and consciousness move as two faces of the same underlying reality, like water shifting forms: sometimes vapor, sometimes ice, sometimes flowing clear in the stream.¹⁴ Experience, in all its ordinary and extraordinary textures, arises from this depth.
Awareness is at the bottom of everything.
We belong to each other and to everything and to nothing, bound together by the very impermanence and mystery we so often ignore or fear. When we accept this, a peculiar freedom grows: presence widens, release becomes realized, and this moment accepts the past and stands as the only reality we possess. We realize we are mystery. It lives through us. This was Anne’s abiding act of generosity. It was her liberation. My reminder.
What remains moves beyond the stories we share about her, and ourselves. It’s the space she shapes in living and dying; a space that teaches how to exist with more softness, more permeability, more presence. A space where we might unveil our own purpose, realize our own liberation, and wake up. Death reminds us. Memento mori.¹⁵
Looking back, I see how Anne’s kitchen revelation ignited my second han. Like the strike of wood on wood, a sound that wears into silence as its echoes hollow out what I thought I knew. A flash of consciousness uncovered through a single word. The sound lingered, just as the wood of that London han had worn thin with years of striking — both reminders that impermanence leaves its mark, carving silence and meaning at once. Imprints in the folds of memory.
Anne’s generosity sculpted and lived through a single word uncovered a sense of truth I feel beyond intellectualizing. Like Campbell’s books that once shattered my parochial worldview, her “liberated” sparked a return of my attention to something enduring in me that was there all along, a kind of abiding you can forget even as you live within it.
She offered me my second han, a wearing down into something more open, steady, and awake. Like that monk in London who repositioned the chopsticks of impermanence in my hand, she revealed how to hold what slips away while still keeping close the pieces that matter. And together these encounters — separated by decades — press me through thresholds, doors swinging open and close.
Anne knows. She is released. She is returned. She is liberated.
And in witnessing her liberation, I glimpse the possibility of my own.
So, what happens when we let go?
NOTES
¹ Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 27, fragment 40.
² Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully (New York: Flatiron Books, 2017), 32.
³ Ostaseski beautifully captures the essence through his work on death and dying. See Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations, 34.
⁴ Bernardo Kastrup, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell (Washington, DC: Iff Books, 2024), 142.
⁵ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Derek Lin (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2006), Chapter 40. According to Derek Lin, “Being” in ancient Chinese characters also translates as “existence”; “nonbeing” as “nonexistence.” In this sense, the material world comes from existence which derives from nonexistence. Our tangible reality seems, ultimately, to come from nowhere. We just need to return to it. Perhaps your lifelook can help you inch a bit closer to this paradoxical inner radiance.
⁶ Derek Lin, commentary on Tao Te Ching (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2006), 80.
⁷ Derek Lin, commentary on Tao Te Ching (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2006), 123.
⁸ Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 10th anniversary edition, revised and updated (London: Rider, 2002), 15.
⁹ Frank Ostaseski, The Five Invitations, 38.
¹⁰ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Derek Lin, Chapter 33.
¹¹ Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), 29.
¹² Heraclitus, Fragments, 27, fragment 40.
¹³ Heraclitus, Fragments, 27, fragment 41.
¹⁴ For accessible and rich perspectives on consciousness as the ground of being, see Tony Nader, Consciousness is All There Is (2021); Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), especially chapters on matter and consciousness; Peter Russell, From Science to God (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006); Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware (Oxford: Sahaja Publications, 2017); Adyashanti, The End of Your World (Boulder: Sounds True, 2008). For kindred perspectives, see the Buddhist (especially Zen and Dzogchen), Taoist (Tao Te Ching), Indigenous, and Vedantic (Advaita) traditions, as well as the works from mystics, artists, and poets across millennia—Rumi, Meister Eckhart, Tagore, Whitman, and the list goes on.
¹⁵ Memento mori—Latin for “remember you will die”—serves as a reminder for Stoic philosophers, artists, and thinkers across centuries to live with presence and purpose, knowing life’s brevity brings each moment into sharper relief. For a deeper look, see Ryan Holiday’s reflection at dailystoic.com/memento-mori. I’ll also explore the depths and power of this mindset in my second book.