In old Japan there once lived a poor man and his wife. They had no children and so they gave all the love they had to their dog, ‘Shiro,’ which means ‘white’ because he was white from nose to tail. They fed him the best of scraps and played with him in the evening after dinner.
One day Shiro was digging beneath a tree at the bottom of the garden, barking like mad. The old man went to see and to his amazement found that Shiro had dug up a great treasure of gold coins. His envious neighbour had meanwhile observed everything. Next day he asked the old man if he might borrow the dog. He set Shiro loose in his own garden to see where he might dig. He was rough and insistent, pressing Shiro to find something for him and so the dog began to dig anxiously wherever he might.
The neighbour got angrier and angrier as Shiro turned up nothing but rocks. Eventually he swung a blow at him with a shovel, killing the poor dog. He threw Shiro in the hole he’d so faithfully dug and buried him under the stones.
The old man and his wife were devastated when they heard what had happened. They arrived at their neighbour’s door weeping, and begged him most politely if they might have the tree beneath which Shiro was buried to remember him by. The horrible neighbor could scarcely disagree and so the old man cut down the tree and took it home. He lovingly carved a bowl from it and gave it to his wife who used it that evening to pound rice. To her amazement the rice began to multiply as she pounded it and some invisible hand began to make the most delicious cakes right before her eyes.
Of course the horrible neighbour got to hear about this and stole the bowl which would also not work for him and so he broke it up and burned it on the fire. Once again the old man and his wife knocked on the door crying and asked very politely for the ashes of the fire to continue remembering Shiro.
Some months later when winter had come and snow lay on the ground, the kind old man and his wife decided to scatter Shiro’s ashes in the garden they had all loved together and as they did so the bare trees suddenly burst into blossom; pear, plum and cherry all flowered into life with every sprinkle.
The local nobleman heard of the miraculous ashes and called the old man and his wife to see if they might help with the recent death of his favorite tree. They went along and sure enough a single sprinkle bought the tree to life. The noblemen was overjoyed and gave them a big bag of gold.
Meantime the wicked neighbour heard all about this and gathered the remaining ashes from the fireplace, resolving that he too would learn to sprinkle ashes. He swaggered off to the nobleman’s house to get some gold for himself, though the ashes just blew in everyone’s eyes and he got thrown into a dungeon for his trouble.
On the face of it this story is a simple parable about good being rewarded and evil getting its just desserts but it seems to have a deeper running theme to do with the relationship between life and death, between heartfelt grief and ecstatic celebration.
We tend to have the attitude towards grief and loss that ‘this too shall pass’. We forget that grief is about love and value and is therefor connected to the sacred which, once remembered, then pours itself into experience as divine generosity or the grace of god. Grief therefor has a synthetic effect, it catalyses the re-integration of consciousness at a new level of development. Grief is not only necessary to love but meaning and abundance are restored on account of it. Remembering Shiro animates the bowl, transforming it into a cornucopia of nourishing plenty. Likewise the cherished ashes quicken dead wood, imbuing the trees with spirit ex nihilo.
If our pain is the breaking shell that encloses our understanding [Gibran] then we must experience many such events in life. Growth is never incremental. It rather proceeds by fits and starts, by paradigm shifts which involve disorienting loss in a way that reliably unfolding days do not, the end of a relationship, random events which end a stage of life, dark thresholds which tease apart as much as configure anew.
This wrench from attachment loosens internal cohesion as well as outer ties. It produces a state akin to dissociation, but since grief’s origin is Eros and relatedness it doesn’t stop there. Something autonomous responds from the Unseen, transfiguring Death such that it is also the birth of the new, a doorway to the as yet Unimagined.
In Egyptian mythology we find this emphasized in the story of Osiris’ death at the hands of his horrible neighbour and brother, Set who chops him up into bits. The pieces are gathered up by dog headed god of grief and death Anubis who reassembles all the pieces before ushering Osiris into the next world for subsequent adventures. Such reintegration is not achieved by heroic action but by allowing oneself to be acted upon by the feelings, rituals and obligations engendered by relatedness. The old man and his wife do not act against the horrible neighbour, that would be to become like him. Rather they allow themselves to mourn Shiro to the full, their love ultimately evoking something miraculous and transformational.
