I didn't realize I was posting this on 9/11, but it seems prescient that I did so. The horror of that day will always remain with me, as well as the heroic efforts of people to save lives and comfort each other, that sense of togetherness, of shared grief and shared love for the victims.
Yes, that's it. They are a continuum - I'll bet my last dollar on that. So many studies showing how once one drops a fear of death and sees it as a process, not a finality - one flourishes in that acceptance. But the trick is in the doing this, not just knowing it. I look around at the faces on the street, every day like some guy caught in Prufrock's poem and I see how most people's lives are just a constant buzz, a looking away from death. Our society is run on our ill beliefs about death.
Some powerful thoughts herein ... so much of our lives, we live with our heads in the sand ignoring the role of suffering and death in life. We don't want to hear any deers scream. But it is, as you point out, right there infront of us all the time, this terrible fact of dying - even breathing we kill through our living, 100,000s of lives, happy microbes. I once wrote a piece, a kind of Ginsbergian chant about how everyone should have to dig a grave, your piece reminded me of that. Living is but one form of dying.
Thanks, David. It is weird how life and death are so interconnected. And yet this brilliant flash of color , this deep gasp of air, this ecstasy of just being, this bubble of existence between the before we can't remember and the after we can't imagine is so exquisite and seems so full of meaning and is so precious. Even for those tiny microorganisms, I image.
Powerful piece. Deer are such beautiful creatures, and they are wired to run from danger. Growing up, I witnessed a rattlesnake being captured with a garden rake and then killed.
Thanks Russell. I love watching the wildlife behind our home, lots of deer, elk too, and wild turkeys, coyotes, quail, the occasional fox and mountain lion. And rattlesnakes. The beauty and brutality all wrapped in one. Yet I feel so blessed to live here.
I didn't realize I was posting this on 9/11, but it seems prescient that I did so. The horror of that day will always remain with me, as well as the heroic efforts of people to save lives and comfort each other, that sense of togetherness, of shared grief and shared love for the victims.
Yes, that's it. They are a continuum - I'll bet my last dollar on that. So many studies showing how once one drops a fear of death and sees it as a process, not a finality - one flourishes in that acceptance. But the trick is in the doing this, not just knowing it. I look around at the faces on the street, every day like some guy caught in Prufrock's poem and I see how most people's lives are just a constant buzz, a looking away from death. Our society is run on our ill beliefs about death.
Some powerful thoughts herein ... so much of our lives, we live with our heads in the sand ignoring the role of suffering and death in life. We don't want to hear any deers scream. But it is, as you point out, right there infront of us all the time, this terrible fact of dying - even breathing we kill through our living, 100,000s of lives, happy microbes. I once wrote a piece, a kind of Ginsbergian chant about how everyone should have to dig a grave, your piece reminded me of that. Living is but one form of dying.
Thanks, David. It is weird how life and death are so interconnected. And yet this brilliant flash of color , this deep gasp of air, this ecstasy of just being, this bubble of existence between the before we can't remember and the after we can't imagine is so exquisite and seems so full of meaning and is so precious. Even for those tiny microorganisms, I image.
Good piece - a beautiful and horrifying world all wrapped up in one... yup
Indeed! Thanks for coming here, Patrick and leaving your message. Nice to know what I write is resonating with people
Powerful piece. Deer are such beautiful creatures, and they are wired to run from danger. Growing up, I witnessed a rattlesnake being captured with a garden rake and then killed.
Thanks Russell. I love watching the wildlife behind our home, lots of deer, elk too, and wild turkeys, coyotes, quail, the occasional fox and mountain lion. And rattlesnakes. The beauty and brutality all wrapped in one. Yet I feel so blessed to live here.
Thank you Russell for the restack.