Walking Each Other Home: A Book Review

Written by Rev. Andre van Zijl

Zimbabwean born Andre van Zijl is a co-founder of All Paths Divinity School and an award-winning artist with work in over 30 museums worldwide. He is a co-founder of Awareness Now Projects, producing, promoting and nurturing Sacred Community through the arts. He is also founder and director of Van Zijl Art and Design Studios. Areas of expertise include: sacred arts, mysticism, Vedanta, eastern philosophy, social activism, nonprofit management.

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Book Review

Not quite a swan song, but definitely an ode to the art of living lovingly with grace into the inevitable encounter with death as the soul prepares for leaving the body. A direct message to be less attached to form and more attached to spirit.

This important book on death, living, and dying well is a sublime message of hope and an enduring affirmation that there is no separation. It reminds us that we are the eternally living soul which has never known birth or death, those belonging only to perishable form.

Here is an excerpt: Last Leaf On The Tree from pg. 126:

Tonight we are going to a Seva Foundation concert to honor Ram Dass, at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. I give Ram Dass time to rest and to visit with Joan Baez, who will sing at the concert. After their chat, before leaving for the sound check, Joan says goodbye to us, “It was like a visit with the sun,” she tells us. She is beaming.

At the concert she dedicates Tom Waits’s song Last Leaf to Ram Dass:

I’m the last leaf on the tree,
Autumn took the rest, but they won’t take me…
I’m here through eternity
If you want to know how long
If they cut down this tree,
I’ll show up in a song.

It reminds me of ethnobiologist Terence McKenna saying, “I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I am behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.

Ram Dass & Mirabai Bush. Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying
(Boulder: Sounds True, 2018) p.126.