A recent walk in the woods affirmed something for me.
We are co-existing with things that are living and dying all around us...all the time.
What does that tell us?
Among other things, this seems to indicate that living AND dying are actually quite compatible with each other...as opposed to being mutually exclusive and something to be resisted.
Such understanding changes our relationship with this reality. It moves us from a posture of resistance to a binary characteristic of it (that we so often presume) and toward the implications of something that we actually can (need to) cooperate with.
Living and dying is often positioned in the context of parameters, like bookends, as if the essence of living or of life itself is ever actually truncated. A more holistic point of view would likely demonstrate that living of all kinds is perpetual and that dying is just part of it. What changes is more its form than anything else. Somehow, we’ve accumulated something close to a conclusion that the sustenance of life is predicated on the resistance to death. And yet, nothing could be further from the reality that we observe all around us — that the two are mutually inclusive and that they cooperate with each other, even in harmony. The loss of one form is really just a transference to another form, and the sooner that we can both recognize and become comfortable with the sheer nature of this reality (and I do mean nature), the more capable we become of perpetuating something good about what it means to really live, even as we die.
Everywhere we look, we can see that nothing lives forever…and, if it did, there would be some real problems in the general ecosystem, in overall existence. It’s also true that we can recognize, without even trying too hard, how something lives on even after some part of it dies. We can see this, for example, in our natural ecosystems, like in a forest. We can see this in terms of family. We might often observe (if not comment on) how a son is like a father or a daughter like a mother. Any study of history shows that so much of what lives on does so across generations. Things live on. Death doesn't prevent life — in fact, it might actually perpetuate it.
We can even see this in the context of ideas — they come and they go and often return again. As it has been said, there is really nothing new under the sun. Most certainly, there is at least rediscovery, even to the point where the rediscovery often looks more like something brand new.
It is so apparent that there is...finish here.
