Living AND Dying

It's Really Not Either / Or

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 emergence and decline and then re-emergence and decline; this repeating pattern continues throughout time. And, there is really nothing meaningless about it when you consider it from the perspective that life itself is being perpetuated and that the process by which it does so is actually through various forms of death. What is alive about something lives on…perpetually. And, I'm increasingly convinced that this is not driven primarily by human initiative because we can observe this dynamic occurring in the study of many things — independent of anything human at all. 

So, if this dynamic is there, in those contexts, why would it not be operating in the human context as well? And would this not indicate that there is something transcendent — underneath, behind, above, and all around — that is creating this dynamic, this very nature of things. 

People throughout time have called this many things. I am most comfortable with calling this God, the Source of energy that generates this dynamic. Who is to say what the essence or nature of God really is? Certainly humans at least have tried, and I think that many times they’ve gotten portions of it right. Most certainly, they’ve gotten portions of it wrong, too. But to me, the divinity element of all of this nature of life dynamic that we can so widely observe throughout both time and space points to something that I think could be described as God. 

Within that context, perhaps our greatest opportunity (acknowledging as well that, at times, it is our greatest challenge) is to become more fully cognizant and engaged within this dynamic. So, in this case of ourselves, it is a question of how we become more fully human as we participate in this macro-ecosystem of existence.  How can we contribute to the even visceral nature of what is good about it?  How can we work against forces that don’t (or can’t) acknowledge this dynamic and think that forms of personal power are the only means of surviving? 

While it is in nature, it seems hard to identify power as a primary dynamic, especially in the human terms of power.  In places occupied by mountains or forests or lakes and streams, things like a tree are participating in the ecosystem of their environment, receiving and giving what each does by nature, as every other form of life works towards a harmony around it.  Each element cooperates (at least participates) other elements in the surrounding environment.

So many power dynamics are fraught with elements of control and manipulation — promotion of self-interest, as opposed to universal interest. It is easy to see how awry those forms of power can become if we just look around at the use of our own energy, not to mention our consumption orientations. Note, for example, how often one person or a group’s sense of viability-in-perpetuity is based on the backs of someone or something else — such a terrible misread of the true nature of reality. It is, at the very least, unfortunate and too often much worse — it is destructive. By using power in this way, we often work against the very ideals of what living means, including the perpetuation of life in harmony with itself.

One of the more significant ways we see this is the frequency with which we often try to perpetuate life through the denial of death. We don’t want to die; we just want to live.  But, we don't even recognize that the very ability to perpetuate life is through the process of dying (“unless a seed falls into the ground…”). It is as if we don’t believe (that we have no faith), that there is anything involved (or beyond) our definition of living...even as it contradicts the patterns of nearly everything that we see around us.

We seem to have become the last ones now to recognize that it is in the process of dying, that we actually perpetuate the essence of life.

Perhaps that’s one result of not spending enough time in the woods.