I have walked the fields and watched as spirits have slipped from their earthly shapes and emancipated themselves from our physical world. I have come across the cold dead bodies of goats ripped apart by dogs, the stale chicken in the coop, and felt incredible heaviness and pain as a young sheep drifted from this domain in my arms, each out breath a little softer, eyes that seemed to leave before the heartbeat stopped. I’ve raised puppies that lived entire lifetimes by my side before being handed to me as ashes in wooden boxes.
Electronic signals have arrived in my pocket, relaying the terrible news of accidents, mishaps and unexpected events. I have sat, bedside, helpless, as one of the most important people in my life began the journey home. I have spent time in darkness understanding what this transition could mean for them, for me. I chop wood and carry water alongside the low hum of death, knowing that we will meet face to face in the end.
In a natural world whose foundation is built on transformations, we have cultivated a society that is seemingly shielded from seeing this potential in our own existence. We spend much of our lives trying to summon to ourselves the lotions and potions that will evade the inevitability of death, and this fear is capitalized upon and resold to us with interest.
Our obsession with material objects and our insatiable consumption of this world are just a couple of symptoms revealing our inability to connect with our eternal selves. We know that energy is an ongoing phenomenon, that it cannot be created or destroyed, and yet we cling to the physical and material nature of reality, fearing what is left of us without it.
In most of the ancient teachings and religious doctrines, we see that life is viewed as a sort of stepping stone within a long line of happenings and creations. The most freeing practice we have to utilize in this dimension is letting go of our fear of the unknown. Our mind, sculptor of our world, relies on patterns to manifest the things we experience.
We can become imprisoned by thoughts and beliefs, the shackles of which tie us down to realities we have generated from fears we have of the uncharted, of the next path, of past mistakes and future misgivings. Drawing our mind’s eye into these doubts waters the gardens of misfortune in our lives. It takes our focus away from the abundant potential of gratitude in this realm.
Our constant focus on death acts as a fast forward button through our experience while, potentially worse, total avoidance of these thoughts plants the fear deep within the subconscious where it can bloom in the darkness of our unawareness. These suppressed fears present themselves in difficult to understand chronic conditions or actions that impair our lives and seem easier to blame on external influences and others than the evasive nature of our own minds.
Playing these images and ideas over and over in our mind’s eye builds the spiritual bridges that attract events with a similar vibration. Our obsession with pain begets pain and our fixation on this inconvenience or that troubling pattern paves the way for more of the same. The more we can turn our gaze towards the beauty, abundance and possibility in this life, the gratitude that shines even in the dark, the more capable we become at generating stability within our journey.
In nature, the hummingbird does not focus its energy solely on the avoidance of death and instead spends a lifetime in the present moment, exacting a beautiful existence filled with drama, procreation, and flowers. The hummingbird eventually departs this world at the hands of death and the body becomes the very flowers it danced and fought atop while alive. To think that the hummingbird’s body is recycled into symbiotic beauty on Earth serves as a kind of visual suggestion of what may happen to our own identities when we die.
Naturally, all aspects of our existence being fractals of the same source energy, our souls must undergo a similar transformation, just as dramatic and thrilling. If our physical existence is the mirror to our soul, we can only anticipate something incredible to occur when we cross from this realm into the next. What is it that death truly reveals to us as the hummingbird’s body is distributed among and integrated into the living system that, for a time, sustained its beautiful life? The consciousness that was just a tiny bird has suddenly become so much more.
There isn’t a single thing in the natural world that truly has an end. The ways that energy shape-shifts can lead us into the false assumption that things can be eliminated or lost, but the cyclic nature of our world reveals to us that this could never be the case. As we enter this new era of habitat loss and mass extinction, it is our obsessive focus on these very issues that makes them concrete, and steeping in our own feelings of hopelessness that leads us into inaction.
The age of the internet has made it very easy to dwell in the negativity pools of this thought pattern or that. It has made it increasingly easy to judge others and feel validated in that judgment, as if knowing and fixating on the fact that there is wrong in the world is a sort of activism.
We may never see the return of the Black Rhino in our lifetime, or total racial and social equality in our laws and enforcers, but it is important to remember that the positive possibilities for this Earth are just as potent and powerful as the negative. The small, localized actions made to nurture abundance are far more impactful than a slanderous article shared over 4 million times online. Acknowledging the horrors of this existence is essential in bringing about justice, awareness is a necessary action, but to dwell within the problem without giving any momentum towards the solution is being complicit in the crimes themselves.
To declare things too far gone is to ignore the massive momentum that could arise from a concentrated effort to change our practices and relationships on Earth. To say the environment is lost to capitalism, and we have irreparably distorted the world, is to distemper the desire in individuals to continue creating innovations that will change how we interact with the planet’s resources. Using death as our teacher, we know that things are only truly lost when we have decided that there is some sort of finish line.
Even if the world were on the brink of ruin, as many feel it is today, we still have an incredible force of abundance within our natural systems to harness that could dramatically change the face of this planet. To heal the relationships we have with one another in our social constructs and personal exchanges would begin to instill practices and restructure systems that could begin this process. Creating an equitable future for all would naturally dismantle the destructive means we utilize to extract and monopolize resources. The lack of oppression always leads to a lack of the oppressed.
While death may not be the end of things, it is an essential transition, nonetheless, that certainly changes the influence the departed have in this dimension. The great philosophers, activists, artists, musicians and even murderers, criminals, and dictators that no longer walk among us still exert upon us a certain persuasive force. Their legacies grow and blossom among the living and continue to influence and shape our world as their stories turn to legend.
Even in the life of a lesser known human, the lived experiences of their ancestors, the handed down behavioral patterns in their relationships; these vital dynamics continue to create within their families certain inclinations within the hearts and minds of their progeny. All the more reason to do right by the Earth, its people, your family, and your talents while breathing air in hopes that what carries on in the physical from your soul beyond the grave adds value and hope for your loved ones and future generations. Death changes your relationship with life on Earth, it does not free you from it.
My own journey with death has had an unpredictable and branching growth since the first time I was introduced to it. I have tested out religions and philosophies, worn the cross and the buddha, read from the shamans, journeyed on psychedelics, and even found myself isolated deep enough into my own darkness and regret that I was ready to see for myself what happens when the pulse stops.
I’ve come to accept, for whatever reason, that death is not the end, for any of us. Death is a powerful and natural transition. It should be our hope to meet it, whenever it visits our lives, with a compassionate, open heart.
In truth, at the end of all things, it won’t be the accomplishments, the money made, or accolades won. It won’t be the arguments, the lines drawn in the sand, or the hurt feelings that linger. It will be the small moments held in hues of light you can’t quite remember but can feel. It will be the sound of trees and birds and the gentle stirring of your loved one trying not to wake you in the morning. It will be the smell of the cast iron on the stovetop and the joyful laughter of someone who left the world long ago. When twilight comes to this life it will be only sunrise in your mind.
The End