A brief note about death

From www.layoutsparks.com

     These January days, riding out into the country, I observe the bare trees along the sides of the roads. Black trunks send out blacker branches into the grey sky. They appear to be quite dead, ready for the fireplace.  And yet, in few weeks they will be drawing sap up into the tips of their buds as they prepare to burst back into life. Their death is but a moment in a longer cycle of life, of resurrection.

As I grow into the later chapters of life, I find that the “death dimension” takes on a larger role. This is far from a question of nostalgia or moroseness. I am simply paying more attention to how the factor of death reshapes, colours and provides significant perspectives on what I experience here and now and what I feel when I try to make sense of my life at this point.

     I begin to loosen my grip on the projects and achievements of my personal life and attend more to another dimension that provides a deeper flavour and richness.

As my life becomes more ephemeral and as I take stock of the fact that the colony of cells that constitute my body begins to show signs of becoming more fragile and frayed, life also turns to a dimension that I can only call more “eternal” in the sense of being freed from the need to show a pay-off. Death helps me see that the illusions of the ego are just that, that the “great leveler” is a gift to put everything in perspective and that the call is increasingly to give thanks and to let go so that life in all its splendour can flourish in its own way, a way that goes infinitely beyond my ego.