We Can Only Be Called Home: On the Spirit of Suicidality

I’ve spent a long lifetime in intimate conversation with the Spirit of Suicidality. That Spirit—often shamed or silenced—has become a companion, a teacher, a witness. CW: grief, death, longing to die, tender themes.

In a world ablaze with suffering, despair feels appropriate. Necessary. How does it make sense to hope? To keep fighting for joy and justice? How can I want to stay alive, when bombs are falling, tyrannies rising, and the climate is tilting ever-further into chaos?

Despair is familiar. I am old, and I have spent many nights with the Spirit of Suicidality, over a long lifetime. I’ve come to trust it. I’ve learned that my longing for death can be welcomed and listened to. It is not always—or only—a longing to leave. It is also a longing to become soil, to go to ground, to rest and reset at the quantum level. To dissolve into something larger, quieter, truer. Listening to my longing—rather than numbing or pathologizing it—often yields unexpected fruit.

What follows is a piece I wrote from that listening. It is part of a larger work in which I explore the physics and math of going to zero, so I hope it makes sense as a stand-alone piece. I felt called to offer this perspective after reading Kai Cheng Thom’s brilliant piece last week on “Hanging on to Hope Amid the Horrors.” I share it here as one possible thread that may or may not belong in the weave of a collective conversation.

We Can Only Be Called Home

We’ve been taught to fear death. To hold tightly to form, to aliveness, to separateness. We are told that going to Zero means erasure, failure, defeat. That despair is dangerous. That dying is failing. That to rot is a terrible fate. That a longing to die is emergency, pathology, betrayal.

I think differently. In a society that pathologizes the longing for death, I sit often with the Spirit of Suicidality. And I have learned to find much peace—and joy—in its good company.

Who does not dream of ending? Doesn’t everyone, sometimes, long to release the I, dissolve into the All, be still, and rest? To come to Nothing…. Oh yes! To release all contraction. To open to the peace and love of complete satisfaction, where all time ends.

Death is not the fear. Death is the longing. Death is the dream.

What if this longing for Nothingness is not just yours or mine, but a structural fidelity, woven into every act of becoming and belonging? If death ceases to be threat, the noisy fears go quiet. The scales fall from our eyes.

We can never be forced down. We can only be called home.

And if we come back to life, again—it will be because of our unstoppable longing to be delighted, and to be delighted in.

The Spirit of Suicidality whispers: there is blessed silence after every story ends. Death is not the opposite of life—it is the soil of becoming. I spring from it. I will return to it.

Going to Zero is only the end of being as we are—a threshold, not an erasure. The place where the axis of the real meets the axis of the imaginary. The world becomes permeable.

And this, I think, is why the Spirit of Suicidality needs our reverence, our offerings, our prayers, and our practices. This is not pathology. It is sacred force.

We live in a world that works to extinguish delight—at all scales. The withering of wonder in a child’s eyes. The hollowing of ecosystems. The flattening of imagination. These are signs of a deep, unmet longing for Nothingness that has gone unconscious.

When the longing for death—for silence, release, unmaking—cannot be consciously held and regularly satisfied, it acts out through the world. If we do not hold Nothingness with reverence, our longing for non-being finds destructive routes: war, ecocide, extinction, collapse.

This is what happens when Nothingness is denied its place in the cycle. The apocalypse we are living and dying in is the shadow of a sacred longing that has no home.

When we don’t learn to sing our death songs, our nervous systems rattle toward endings in panicked agony. Whole cultures reach for death without the grace of preparation, without ecstatic and devotional practice, without the deep remembrance of Zero as both our origin, and our longed-for end.

But if we sit with the Spirit of Suicidality as an ally—as a presence that knows how to return us to sacred rest—the story can change.

I don’t want to lose you. And maybe we don’t have to die. We can go to Zero often, in other ways. With somatic devotion, grief rituals, rites of passage, plant medicines, pleasure practices. Contemporary research into ego-dissolution through psychedelics confirms what ancient and Indigenous cultures have always known: experiences of vastness, awe, and identity-transcendence support wellbeing. They foster humility, interconnectedness, reverence. They soften every fear.

Despair. Orgasm. Grief. Wonder. Surrender. Death. These are the gates of Zero. We can go there—alone and together. We can spiral into silence and stillness, and savour the satisfaction, before we rise again.

Longing ends at Zero. Ahhh… peace.

And then,

we curve into new dreams.

 

If something in this resonates, I welcome your reflections. Comments are moderated and will not appear right away—I’m moving at the pace of trust, and listening with care.