![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thoughts on Death
Aug. 16th, 2008 09:50 am[x-posted]
Death is so often conceptualized as an external force or being, someone or something that "comes for us." Death is an angel. Death is a cloaked man or skeleton with a scythe. Death is a beautiful goddess. Death is a cute goth chick with an ankh t-shirt.
But today I'm thinking of death as a seed, a tiny dark nugget placed into the body with the soul, nestling in the depths of our incarnate being until the body breaks somehow, freeing it to blossom.
We enter this life bound to exquisite, vulnerable, limited bodies. We enter this life without conscious memory of being immortal beings, fragments of divinity. We live life with no assurance that it's not the only game in town, with the stakes unutterably high because there are no second chances.
Then something happens: accident, disease, aging. . . and we break. Our bodies and brains crack and shatter like the shells they are. And in the midst of pain -- or so quickly that we don't have time to register what's happening -- death emerges from our depths: our escape hatch back into the transcendent reality of our immortal lives.
We leave behind the Game, the Work, the grand Adventure.
We escape back where we belong: home.
Death is so often conceptualized as an external force or being, someone or something that "comes for us." Death is an angel. Death is a cloaked man or skeleton with a scythe. Death is a beautiful goddess. Death is a cute goth chick with an ankh t-shirt.
But today I'm thinking of death as a seed, a tiny dark nugget placed into the body with the soul, nestling in the depths of our incarnate being until the body breaks somehow, freeing it to blossom.
We enter this life bound to exquisite, vulnerable, limited bodies. We enter this life without conscious memory of being immortal beings, fragments of divinity. We live life with no assurance that it's not the only game in town, with the stakes unutterably high because there are no second chances.
Then something happens: accident, disease, aging. . . and we break. Our bodies and brains crack and shatter like the shells they are. And in the midst of pain -- or so quickly that we don't have time to register what's happening -- death emerges from our depths: our escape hatch back into the transcendent reality of our immortal lives.
We leave behind the Game, the Work, the grand Adventure.
We escape back where we belong: home.
