In tears I want to be the gardener
of the soil you inhabit and enrich,
*friend in dharma, much too early.
As my tuneless pain feeds
the rain, conches and organs,
to the disheartened poppies
I will give your heart as nourishment.
At the end of a retreat I sat at Gaia House, a man came in to give the dāna talk: head shaved, fingerless gloves, a thick Spanish accent. Little did I know that, not long after, we would train together—first as a CDLs, then as teachers—and that our shared homeland would become a special bond.
When I received an email explaining that Ramiro was in hospital, likely in his last hours, I went up to my studio and sat on my meditation spot. Between sobs, looking at my altar, a famous line from Miguel Hernández came to me, adapted: *"compañero del dharma (del alma), tan temprano." Not all deaths are equally tragic—my grandma had died just three weeks earlier, at 97—and an untimely death is particularly sad for someone so heartfully dedicated to the well-being of others.
I want to dig the earth with my own teeth,
I want to take the earth apart
in warm, dry bites.
I want to mine the earth until I find you,
and kiss your noble skull,
unshackle you and bring you back.
Soft-spoken and radically sincere, Ramiro embodied the Buddhist value of non-harming. Through his voice transpired the commitment to never ever hurt, sometimes anxious, naïve even. You could sense this was no mere politeness or pretend kindness—he deeply cared—for he did not hold back from disrupting the narrative in the room when he wasn't on board. "I want to be truthful," he said when introducing himself at the first module of our teacher training. Truthfulness is what we read in the health updates Ramiro posted during the last few months of his life, a period that unfolded far too quickly to seem fair—if life ever is. I cannot help but wonder what he would’ve written if he’d had more time and less pain; if he’d had longer to ponder, metabolise and share his learnings. Ramiro’s quest for truth, for growth, for dharma, oozed out as a respectful yet serious inquisitiveness that felt ennobling.
His unflinching honesty could also bring about some awkward feelings. Like that time, teaching online together, when I tested the bell over Zoom. ‘Yes, I can hear it well’, he said, then added: ‘sólo que no me gusta para nada el sonido de tu campana’ (‘it’s just that I really dislike the sound of your bell’). For those who didn’t know Ramiro, it might be hard to believe how clear it was that no spite whatsoever inhabited his words, because mostly, people just don’t say this. The kind of honesty that shocks you in the moment and makes you chuckle in hindsight. Ramiro didn’t perform.
You'll return to my garden and my fig tree:
all around the high trellises of flowers
will flutter your beekeeper's soul
of heavenly waxes and labours.
You'll return to the murmur of the ploughshare
of delighted farmers.
I remember small and random things. A long walk in nature after lunch, during one of our training modules. I remember his presence and his mannerisms more than what we talked about. I remember the noticeable shift whenever others weren’t around and we could switch to Spanish, his speech less paused, less measured, more easily excited—freer. And the shared bewilderment of not knowing how to express certain Buddhist teachings in our own tongues. I wonder if this is why he was getting interested in reading Spanish mystics like San Juan de la Cruz, as if looking for a native spiritual prosody. Living in between languages that stand at similar heights is a strange experience, always trying to recover what you have never lost—an experience I can now share with one less friend.
His passing still feels unreal. I believe last time I saw him in the flesh was in the spring last year, briefly, over a meal in the teachers’ flat at Gaia House, with Jenny and Julia. Yet my mind is placing that meeting in the future, as if it could rather than did happen. Even more strangely, I can’t seem to remember whether we managed to get a coffee just the two of us, that day or the day after, as we hoped to. Perhaps I don’t really want to know. Perhaps we can leave it undetermined. Since we never said goodbye, we can still always do.
Your heart, now withered velvet,
calls my eager lover's voice
on to a field of foaming almonds.
To the feathered souls of roses
in the blooming almond tree I summon you.
For we've got so much to talk about,
my friend, my friend in dharma.
Bernat Font
I thank River Wolton and Martine Batchelor for improving the piece with her suggestions. The verses are taken from Miguel Hernández’s Elegía.