"Excellent!"Meshack Yahani Eliah

This week, from miles away, I joined via Facebook Live in the funeral service for Meshack Yahani Eliah—a man I’d only met a handful of times. I cried along with his family and friends, mourning as I joined in prayerful songs sung in a language I do not speak or understand.

I met Meshack perhaps five times over about fifteen years of visits to Chaa Creek in Belize. It’s fair to say we didn’t know each other well. He was a nature guide there, and if I was lucky, I might have joined him on a birdwatching walk a dozen times at most.

So why was I called to sit for almost two hours and watch his service from so far away? It’s not as though I didn’t have a hundred other things waiting on my to-do list. Yet I had to be there—to be part of this mourning.

For those of us who grieve, funeral services for others often stir our own sorrow to the surface. While some may avoid these services for that very reason, in a way, that can feel like grace. The tears that have been quietly collecting over time—the ones from small heartbreaks that didn’t seem to warrant a full breakdown—finally find their way out. There’s a welcome release in that, I must admit. But still, that’s not what called me to this service.

Was it because Chaa Creek is the site of our Sacred Journey of Grief Retreat, February 8–15, 2026, and I needed to understand what the people there were feeling in their loss? Perhaps that was part of it. But no—it wasn’t only that.

I was touched by this man. Even before I knew how much he touched others, I was already gently and profoundly impacted. The love that Meshack had for the land--for nature, for the birds, plants, and people of Belize was palpable. His smile, bright white teeth against his dark skin, and eyes squinting the bigger he smiled, lit up the rainforest. The patience in his pace, the gentleness in his step, and the joy he found simply in helping guests spot a bird, felt like prayers in motion. As was spoken in his service, he was indeed a man “whose spirit moved like the rivers and birds he loved.” He was quoted as saying, “Wealth is not measured by what you have and what you keep but by what you share and give away genuinely with your heart.”

That generosity was felt in every moment I was blessed to share with him—simply walking through the rainforest, listening, learning, and feeling the essence of nature’s beauty. Each time I saw the bird he pointed out, he would speak the word that became his signature—the word that summed up his worldview—“Excellent.” I was so deeply move by the simplicity with which he lived and loved, and by his optimistic, grounded view of life. Excellent.

How is it that we are so impacted by others—some whom we hardly know, or even meet only once? Is it because we are all connected in the great web of life? Because we are bound together by the spark of the divine, a part of our unique yet universal spiritual DNA.

I recently began reading Laura Lynne Jackson’s new book, Guided: The Secret Path to an Illuminated Life, and though I’m only a few pages in, she beautifully highlights this truth. She writes that “every small positive action we take, every tiny bit of kindness we put out into the world, has a ripple effect.”

Her words reminded me of something my own mom once wrote. She died when I was only twelve, but she, too, was a spiritual seeker at heart. In her journal, I found these words: “Doing little things for the love of God makes them truly great.”

Jackson reminds us that our journeys through life are intertwined in ways we cannot see or fully comprehend. “Enormous shifts in our lives do not occur in concise moments,” she writes. “They occur in a series of small, rippling decisions.”

And maybe that’s why Meshack’s spirit continues to echo in my heart and in the hearts of all who knew him—even those of us who only crossed his path a handful of times. His quiet kindness, his reverence for the earth, his easy laughter—all of it created ripples that continue to move outward, touching us still.

At his service, it was said that Meshack’s spirit had a way of lingering. I experienced that firsthand, and I trust his spirit will linger at Chaa Creek eternally.

As we walk together through the hallowed rainforest of Belize during our Sacred Journey With Grief retreat, we extend an invitation--to pause and truly see. To observe and appreciate the beauty that surrounds us—the trees, the sounds, the stillness, the pulse of life in all things. Let us honor our grief, our heartache, and the love that gave birth to them.

May we open ourselves to beauty and to healing. May we trust in the great interconnection of all life—the gentle truth that love continues to flow and expand beyond time and form. And may we remember that we, too, leave a lingering spirit through the love, kindness, and presence we offer to the world.

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