Let the Last Thing Be Song
So we stumbled through our loving, difficult readings and tiny speeches; then the button was pushed, and as the coffin advanced solemnly into the furnace, dysfunctional squawks came like a shower of arrows out of the sound system. The tape kept trying to play and its clicks and grindings were amplified very efficiently into the overhead speakers. T
... See moreJohn Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
Rob Tourtelot added
Death illuminates the fact that this very moment is all we really have in this life.
Lawrence Yeo • Death: The Roommate of Life - More To That
Ajinkya Wadhwa and added
A beautiful poem by Mary Oliver. The last line is 🔥
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the... See more
talk about it.” We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all.
Caitlin Doughty • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
It is good to make a meditative and daily practice of untangling the Life/Death/Life nature over and over again. The fisherman sings a little one-line song over and over to aid the untangling. It is a song to help awareness, to help untangle the Skeleton Woman nature. We do not know what he is singing. We can only guess. When we are untangling this
... See moreDr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés • Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:
You can’t tell when strange things with meaning... See more
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again.
Maria Popova • Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective
“People die a thousand times to get to who they are.”
—Zach Bryan
Steven Schlafman and added