A segment from a conversation between Mirabai and Lynn Murphy for SAND’s ‘Dying and Living’ Event (2020).
This gathering was centered around the theme of Dying and Living. Our world is going through challenges, upheaval, and confusion. Some see this moment as an evolutionary threshold. Death feels closer. False beliefs, obsolete structures, and ideas of separateness are falling away. This crisis has forced us to perceive life on a planetary scale. Perhaps we have entered a bardo-like collective state in which everything is shown to us more clearly as it is, which brings up tremendous pain and grief that we are called to meet.
The four poets Mirabai reads are:
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative non-fiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos for 20 years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialog. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. Her youngest daughter, Jenny, was killed in a car accident in 2001 at the age of fourteen. On that same day, Mirabai’s first book, a translation of Dark Night of the Soul, was released. She considers this experience, and the connection between profound loss and longing for God, the ground of her own spiritual life. Her latest book, WILD MERCY: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, was named one of the “Best Books of 2019” by Spirituality & Practice. Mirabai is on the 2020 Watkins List of the “100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People of the World.” She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico
