Card of the Day: XIII Death

It’s easy to love-and-light this card as “change” or “transformation.” But here, the artist leaves no doubt about the reality of death. No getting around it. It’s real and stark and unmistakable. When a living being dies, that animating life force departs and there is no mistaking that there is now a dead body in front of you. Something has changed and cannot be changed back. It is impermanence, “the reality before our eyes,” as a 13th-century Zen master put it.

I attended a white affinity group at a Zen center in NYC last year. The teacher, who was facilitating the group, was talking about how it feels when we as white people are called in, or called out, or challenged. “It feels like you’re dying. Because you are. Let yourself die.” Now, I want to put a very fine point on this: the extreme discomfort that white people—that I—feel in these situations is in no way comparable to the actual danger and constant stress that Black people experience on a day-to-day basis, and have been experiencing for centuries. Full stop. And: when your whole identity is built around “I’m right, I’m good, I know, I’m in control,” getting feedback that we caused harm through thoughts and actions that we don’t recognize as racist, or rooted in white supremacy, can feel like a little death (or a big one; I usually feel activated for days after such incidents)—and not the good kind.

The Venn diagram of my sense of self and my white supremacist conditioning is pretty much a circle. That’s why these challenges feel so hard. It’s not cognitive or abstract when it happens. My body responds: you are in danger. This is why white people act defensive, crazy, or become life-threateningly dangerous to Black people.

For me, this is a time of learning how to die, over and over again. And then to come more fully alive. To metabolize that falling apart of my sense of self—as good, as right, as knowing, as in control—so that I can see who ELSE I am, and to keep going. My work is to long for this work. To have faith that my humanity and my liberation depend on it.