For Thom's Three Word Wednesday where this week he chose the words:
Lump; Nervous; Puzzled.
I am fast approaching end of life, I think. I am doing pretty much as I planned many years ago. I believe you can wreck a whole lifetime legacy of good living by dying poorly and so my task has become first to understand what it means to me that I die well, and second what I am to do to maintain my readiness and what little grace as I may possess.
I am not completely sure of that much about it all. Also, I do not think every day of it. One thing is very clear. It has been clear for decades now. Death is not my enemy. I should not fight and resist as if I could successfully defeat death. So my question is, how do I befriend death?
Understand, this is not the same as trying to die.
Transition
This lump of gristle
used to be my nervous heart
which puzzled me then
but now lies so still
and gray in my wide open
chest and I wispy
and ghost like float up
looking back and back and down
from ten miles away...
from further than that.
June 24, 2015 2:16 PM
Death is inevitable and only the pressure of the materialist reductionist scientific age has made it an enemy.
ReplyDeleteIt is irrational, given the order and system of everything in this world, to believe that death is an end for, if it were, then all else is pointless. And everything happen with point and purpose.
However, even if it were all we can do is live the best we can and let death carry us where it will.
I see you are certainly passionate in your belief in such matters. I believe your analysis is partly correct - that plagues in Europe (which happened prior to the scientific age) which literally destroyed civilization caused Christendom to take an antagonistic stance to death or at least to disease. That happened before the scientific age and informed much of its focus - to vanquish death. Also, one of the key pieces to Christian philosophy is that Jesus defeats death and as such has been a part of Christendom since the first century AD.
Deletep.s. great poem.
ReplyDeleteI know some living folk with gristle for a heart.
ReplyDeleteMe too.
DeleteBeen a while since I have seen a comment from you. Thank you.
Deletelove your poem
ReplyDelete:) I am happy to see you here, my friend.
DeleteI agree with Christopher, all I see is an ending, and it behooves us in that regard to leave our little patch a bit better off than it was before. "A lifetime of good living" sorta says it all, for Christopher, and for me.
ReplyDeleteI think dying well is important, if not for us but for who comes after and tends to us,. And we dont always have the option, after all...
Good poem, btw...
Hmmm. This poem was a poem of mood and my intro in keeping with it. It is not a poem of religion or philosophy.
DeleteI stand foursquare with my mother in that regard - that we don't really know. Further there is no question in a just and fair universe that reincarnation and karrma is the best guess that humans have ever offered to each other. There is not enough time in a single life to balance things.
I also stand with my mother (she was an award winning minister in her second life on the planet and a teacher in her first) in her sentiment that this was the last time around here on this plane if it is possible to arrange such things. Oh do I ever agree with that. Perhaps that is the ending you sense in the poem.