Die and become the sky

Quietness by Rumi trans. by Coleman Barks from The Essential Rumi (HarperSanFrancisco)
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick clouds.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence. The speechless full moon
comes out now.


When I first read this poem by Rumi, the final in the trilogy of poems about silence that I selected for this week, the invitation? command? to die unsettled me.  Although I know  the death he's talking about isn't literal, the word still was a stumbling block for me.   I couldn't stop thinking about it in terms of the traditional definition:  death is the cessation of life.

So I did what I always do when a word snags my attention, I consulted the dictionary.  And while I didn't find anything to shift my understanding of the word in terms of the way it's defined, which is pretty straightforward, the word origin intrigued me. 

The etymology for the word in English can be traced back to its old Norse root.  That then led me to read about the Viking understanding of death.  Evidently the old Norse understanding of death is that at the moment a person takes his or her last breath, it's not  the end of existence but as release or evaporation into the larger source of life.  I like that word evaporation.  The basic elements of the thing are all still there, they just take on a new form, a new way of being. 

Reading Rumi again with this understanding of the word die, I see it as not a command to end my life, but to begin it in a new way.  A command not so much to sever my ties with this world, but to strengthen them with the entire universe.  An invitation not to decay in the earth but to become the sky . . .