What is this depth in me that runs to writing? Beneath those waters a lunatic is dancing, racing to explain the summation of everything-everything to everyone-everyone. But why am I so often in such a hurry to explain? Here must be where I’ve always been headed—To a morning tea ceremony that enjoys itself without needing to run to the next task of the day.

Yesterday, I spent 18 hours in a shuttle bus from Manali to Ladakh—18 bumping hours through the most spectacularly beautiful landscapes, across unforgiving and dangerous roads that were such thrilling reminders about the ever-precarious state of our human bodies hanging in a delicate balance.

Having lost two friends unexpectedly in the last six weeks, I’ve been thinking about this delicate balance — so I’ve been thinking about death. My human heart doesn’t understand.

I lived half of last year happily with Mario as my housemate. He was such a heart-first, humble example of letting joy take life’s wheel. I was sitting in a café in Manali overlooking a Himalayan-fed river when a friend wrote me to tell me that Mario had drowned in a river. And I didn’t understand, how the waiter still brought me my meal, how I still ate it, how the world didn’t stop spinning, or the river stop flowing?

It didn’t make any sense how the most beloved man in a community of lovers would leave us so young.

The outpourings of sharings, tributes, and memories of Mario on social media has been overwhelmingly beautiful. He really had a way of becoming significant in the lives he touched. So that’s what I asked Mario to leave with us who knew him here on Earth — that shining ability to truly lift the corners of each smile we meet along the way.

The morning after I heard the news, I prepared a cup of cacao, a frequent tradition when we lived together. And in my monk-sized room, I danced to a playlist of Mario inspired songs, songs he either used to play or we used to listen to at the house.

I felt centered in a Mario-joy afterwards. It was like he was saying, “I didn’t come to earth to break anyone’s heart. I had to leave soon to give you a gift that the deepest part of you somehow understands.”

Then I reach for this journal, and wrote to help me process what I was feeling about all this. When I finished I placed my journal back on the nightstand, it knocked over the empty mug and it shattered on my floor. It was a brand new cup and that had been my first time using it. I held the broken pieces and found in that instant all the explanation my words were insufficient at expressing. “Thank you,” I held a vivid image of a smiling Mario in my mind, grateful for the chance to know him and a broken cup.

Here’s what I wrote pre-breakage, after my Cacao ecstatic dance:

Where else could we wander?

Who else could we be?

When some other brother leaves this earth, everything evaporates but the transient sacredness of each earth breath.

Then we touch that mystery, “Was he here to guide us home?” He was ready in ways we aren’t. All the folly of thinking of his unfinished future is some of the silliness he came to wipe for my mind—more of the wishful-future-thinking he came to earth the birth away.

We think we’re lucky because we imagine we have more time. We believe a thousand years is longer than a single second. But when our time comes it will be the same now as his.

Spirits dare each other to enter space and feel the forgotten pangs of time.

“I’ll meet you,” they say, “when the time is right. I’ll pretend you are you and you can pretend I am me. Or I’ll be you and you be me. I’ll have my make-believe life and you’ll have yours. And we’ll pretend there’s more important things to do than a freely given smile. But when you see this glimmer I’ll hide in the back of my eyes, may the subtlest thing there is touch something ever so gently in your heart and drop by drop may the mystery unravel. May the balls of yarn we’ve been tangling fall down the mountainside of uncompromising sincerity.”

And when one of us returns, may the other keep the vigil. May he harness that everything within and wipe away anything smudging that smile. Life‘s a miracle, not a chore. Every moment is a chance to throw off more shackles and sing. Forget that there was anything to understand and tell the ones who leave us here, “I’ll see you again on the other side of eternity.”

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