Death....death....DeatH

An intention of mine for this month is to spend much time thinking about and working with my fear of Death.  It is interesting because once I brought this intention in to the world, I began to notice Death everywhere around me.  Waking early to gifts of rat parts from my cat.  The Death of my grandmother's husband.  The dying of the leaves.  Books and films having much more to do with Death than I realized when I began them.


I do plan to take in much art and writing as it pertains to Death.  I have begun reading a book titled How To Fall and have other books about Death and dying, waiting to be read.

I am not sure why Death has always scared me so.  As with my other fears, I am trying to work with my fear of Death, rather than overcoming it.  I see the acceptance of Death has the ultimate plunge into and acceptance of the mystery that is life.  In my way of thinking, mystery is the only tangible thing worth of our worship.  Death is the greatest threshold that we ever cross because before we cross over, we have no idea what is on the other side and once we get to the other side, there is the possibility that we will know everything or that the knowing within us will cease.

Therefore, I am making a secret pact with Death, that will bind me to her, as if I had a choice in the matter.  The choice is to accept this final marriage or to run from it.  Either way it will happen, so I will begin to embrace all the facets of life that lead me closer towards Death.  I will celebrate each heartbreak, gray hair and aching joint and when my time comes, as it no doubt will, I will reach my hand out toward Death rather than pulling away.

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.” 

----"On Death" The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

                                      Halloween 2013

When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield
When your life looks back—
As it will, at itself, at you—what will it say?
Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.
Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.
Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.
Your life will carry you as it did always,
With ten fingers and both palms,
With horizontal ribs and upright spine,
With its filling and emptying heart,
That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.
You gave it. What else could do?
Immersed in air or in water.
Immersed in hunger or anger.
Curious even when bored.
Longing even when running away.
"What will happen next?"—
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.
No back of the world existed,
No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.
This, your life had said, its only pronoun.
Here, your life had said, its only house.
Let, your life had said, its only order.
And did you have a choice in this? You did—
Sleeping and waking,
the horses around you, the mountains around you,
The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.
Those of your own kind around you—
A few times, you stood on your head.
A few times, you chose not to be frightened.
A few times, you held another beyond any measure.
A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.
Mortal, your life will say,
As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.
Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.

Old Woman Nature by Gary Snyder

Old Woman Nature
naturally has a bag of bones
   tucked away somewhere.
   a whole room full of bones!
A scattering of hair and cartilage
   bits in the woods.
A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it.
   a shellmound
      a bone flake in a streambank.
A purring cat, crunching
   the mouse head first,
      eating on down toward the tail—
The sweet old woman
   calmly gathering firewood in the
      moon …

Don’t be shocked,
She’s heating you some soup.

The Goshawk by John Haines

 I will not walk on that road again,
it is like a story one hesitates to begin.

I found myself alone,
the fur close around my face, my feet
soft and quiet in the frost.

Then, with a cold, rushing sound,
came a shadow like the death-angel
with buffeting wings,
his talons gripping my shoulder,
the bright beak tearing and sinking...

Then, then I was falling, swept
into the deepening red sack of a voice:

"Little rabbit, you are bleeding again;
with his old fire-born passion
the Goshawk feeds on your timid heart."

The antelope are strange people ... they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

—Pretty Shield,
Medicine Woman of the Crows
transcribed and edited by
Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing   

his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it  
and I have gone burning  
to meet him, the jacklight  
fills my eyes with blue fire;  
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack
in the back of his pickup,
I wipe the death scum
from my mouth, sit up laughing  
and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,
when he sharpens his knife
and thinks to have me, like that,
I come toward him,
a lean gray witch
through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house
drinking coffee till dawn
and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,
crawling back into my shadowy body.
All day, asleep in clean grasses,
I dream of the one who could really wound me.  
Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.  
Not even with his goodness.

If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.

Louise Erdrich

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

 Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

A Coal Fire In Winter

Something old and tyrannical burning there.

(Not like a wood fire which is only

The end of a summer, or a life)

But Something of darkness: heat

From the time before there was fire.

And I have come here

To warm that blackness into forms of light,

To set free a captive prince

From the sunken kingdom of father coal.

A warming company of the cold-blooded-

There carbon serpents of bituminous gardens,

These inflammable tunnels of dead song from the black pit,
This sparkling end of the great beasts, these blazing

Stone flowers diamond fire incandescent fruit.

And out of all that death, now, 

At midnight, my love and I are riding

Down the old high roads of inexhaustible light.

-Thomas McGrath

A not so gentle reminder....

to myself and anyone else who needs it.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

The last lines especially!

Descend into the Loving Arms of the Night

Tender are the hunters

Tender is the night

-Jackson Browne

I have been having some wonderfully inspiring conversations over the last few days and a conversation I had last night got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects, that of descent and darkness.  The darkness is something that I have had a fear of for my whole life.  I always felt hunted in the darkness.

In my way of thinking, fears are not something to be conquered.  The language shouldn't be so aggressive.  Fears exist to illustrate something we cannot see in ourselves, which is why I believe the darkness is such a common fear and fitting symbol.  It takes a lot of bravery to look into the dark places within ourselves but these are often the most rewarding places to look.

I have worked to make an ally of the darkness and feel like I have made some progress.  In the western way of thinking, we are taught to strive for ascension.  To look outside the warm animal bodies we possess to some place in the sky where everything will be safe.  We were never meant to be safe and it is important to learn to accept this.  The only way to feel safe is to give yourself over to the wildness that is life.  If you need to feel comforted, take off your shoes, find a patch of nice unpaved ground and wiggle your toes around a bit.  Find both the physical (feet touching soil) and soulful connection to the truly bigger story that is life on Earth.  Descend into the depths and don't be afraid to look.  What you find, just may save your life.


You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The descent beckons
              as the ascent beckoned.                 
                               Memory is a kind      
of accomplishment,                          
              a sort of renewal
                               even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
              inhabited by hordes
                               heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
              since their movements
                               are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned).

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
              formerly
                               unsuspected. A
world lost,
              a world unsuspected,
                               beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness     .

With evening, love wakens
              though its shadows
                               which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
              grow sleepy now and drop away
                               from desire     .

Love without shadows stirs now
              beginning to awaken
                               as night
advances.

The descent 
              made up of despairs
                               and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening:
                               which is a reversal
of despair.
              For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
              what we have lost in the anticipation—
                               a descent follows,
endless and indestructible     .

William Carlos Williams 

Holy Secrets

Below are two poems.  They are written by a father and son.  The first poem is by Kim Stafford, the son.  The second is by William Stafford, the father.

The Secret

After long delay, ignorant of what you guarded

when it came volcanic to your mind, there to be

hoarded smoldering until you found a way to tell it,

your secret is out—your joy too tender to entrust

to anyone, your pain too dangerous to reveal

until you do. And there it is, a birth, with blood,

to celebrate.

But then the bowl in the heart,

where such things first appear, has something

new to hide, some fingerling creature silver

in the dark, with jagged fins and tender wings

that must be held, locked up, suppressed, fed

crumbs as you fend off the world. Little one,

must you leave me now?

Thus we breathe our holy secrets one by one.

 

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by--
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"--
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."

Two By John Haines

                                    










 illustration by Jack Unruh


The Ghost Hunter

Far back, in the time of ice
and empty bellies, I and three others
came over the tundra at evening,
driving before us a frightened deer.

We lighted small fires on the hillsides;
and heaped up boulders
at the gates of the valley.

We called to each other over tossing
antlers, beat legbones together,
and shook out bundles of hoofs...

There was a soft thunder in the moss
as the firelit meadow of bodies
broke past to the corral of the dead.

Now the long blade of the autumn wind
sweeps the willows and bearberries,
yellow and red in the evening light.

I hear nothing but the dinosaur tread
of winter, huge wingbeats in the stone.

I have come to this trampled ground,
to stand all night in the wind
with a hollow bone in my hand.

Legend

I.

I understand the story of Gilgamesh,
of Enkidu, who called the wind by name,
who drank at the pool of silence,
kneeling in the sunburnt shallows
with all four-footed creatures.


I know the name of that exile,
the form that it takes within us:
the parting and breaking of things,
the distance and anguish.


I know too, in its utter strangeness,
that whoever asks of the sun its rising,
of the night its moonstruck depths,
stirs the envy of God in his lofty cabin.


And when Enkidu awoke, called
from his changed, companionless sleep
—singly, in glittering pairs,
the beasts vanished from the spring.


II.

The forest bond is broken,
and the tongued leaves no longer
speak for the dumb soul lost
in the wilderness of his own flesh.


All that had life for him:
the moon with her wandering children,
the storm-horse and the shepherd-bird,
become as salt to his outspread hand.


Let him go forth, to try the roads,
become that wasted pilgrim, familiar
with dust, dry chirps and whispers;
to die many times—die as a man dies,
seeing death in the life of things.


And then descend, deep into rootland
—not as temple-gardener, planting
with laurel the graves of gods and heroes,
but as one grieving and lost …


To ask of the dead, of their fallen
web-faces, the spider’s truth,
the rove-beetle’s code of conduct.


By such knowledge is he cured,
and lives to face the sun at evening,
marked by the redness of clay,
the whiteness of ash on his body.


III.

By stealth, by the mastery of names,
and one resounding axe-blow
rung on the cedar-post at dawn,
the great, stomping bull of the forest
was slain. Rain only speaks
there now on the pelted leaves.
Overheard through the downpour,
in the stillness of my own
late-learned solace, I understand
through what repeated error
we were driven from Paradise.
The nailed gate and the fiery angel
are true.
Could we ask them,
speaking their wind-language
of cries, of indecipherable song,
it may be that the swallows
who thread the water at evening
could tell us; or that the sparrows
who flock after rain, would write
in the coarse yellow meal
we have strewn at the threshold,
why God gave death to men,
keeping life for himself.


For the strong man driven to question,
and for him who, equally strong,
believes without asking,
sleep follows like a lasting shadow.
  

2012 An Incomplete Reading List

One of the 15 or so New Years Resolutions that I have made for myself is to read more books!  I got a bit lazy about it in 2012 and watched more movies than I should have.  That said, here is an incomplete list of what I read in 2012.  I most likely forgot some of the books I read and I also am not adding books that I didn't finish.  I have been crawling through some pretty heady stuff at a snail's pace, so not everything I have been reading has been completed.

The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Mockingjay-all by Suzanne Collings (I needed to start the year with some fluff!)

A Branch From The Lightning Tree by Martin Shaw

Blue Pastures by Mary Oliver

The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun by Martin Prechtel

Gilgamesh by Herbert Mason

Ecstacy by Robert A. Johnson

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O'Brien

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar by Martin Precthel

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk

Thin Places by Ann Armbrecht

The Raven Steals the Light by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst

Ten Poems to Change Your Life-by Roger Housden

Ten Poems to Change your Life Again and Again-Roger Housden

Poems from Prison/ Belly Songs by Etheridge Knight

The Faithful Gardner by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Gift of Story by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Ten Poems to Say Goodbye by Roger Housden

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Crow and Weasel/ Lessons from Wolverine by Barry Lopez and Tom Pohrt

By The River Pedra I Sat Down and Wept by Paulo Coehlo

In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo

From The Forest by Sarah Maitland 

Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

Old Woman Nature
naturally has a bag of bones
tucked away somewhere.
a whole room full of bones!
A scattering of hair and cartilage
bits in the woods.
A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it.
a shellmound
a bone flake in a streambank
A purring cat, crunching
the mouse head first,
eating on down toward the tail -
The sweet old woman
calmly gathering firewood in the
moon…
Don’t be shocked,
She’s heating you some soup.

By Gary Snyder

A(r)MOR(e)

Greed and Aggression by Sharon Olds

Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats,
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into it's nature, the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the the throat of the held goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger and the
making of new tigers, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of an animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouth's running into sleep.



"I look. I look so hard it becomes an embarrassment-
and then I see eyes. Lion eyes. Two amber beads with
a brown matrix. Circles of contentment until I stand;
the lion's eyes change, and I am flushed with fear.

"Quiet," Samuel whispers. "We will watch for a while."

As my eyes become acquainted with lion, I begin to distinguish
fur from grass. I realize there are two lions, a male and
a female lying together under the stingy shade of a thorn tree.
I can hear them breathe. The male is breathing hard and fast,
his black mane in rhythm with the breeze. He puts his right
paw on the female's shoulder. Ears twitch. We are no more
than ten feet away. He yawns. His yellow canines are as long
as my index finger. His jowls look like well-worn leather. He
stands. The grasses brush his belly. Veins protrude from his
leg muscles. This lion is lean and strong. No wonder that in
Maasai mind ever aspect of a lion is imbued with magic.

Acting oblivious to us, he moves to the other side of the tree.
From the protection of the Land Rover, we spot a fresh kill. It
is a wildebeest whose black flesh has been peeled back from a red
scaffolding of bones. The lion sits on his haunches and feeds.
He separates the wildebeest's legs with his paws and slowly sinks
his teeth into the groin. He pulls and tears large strips of meat.
With his head tilted, his carnassials shear more muscle and viscera
from the body cavity. His rasping tongue licks the blood from
the bones. Ribs snap. His claws clamp down on the wildebeest as
though escape was still possible.

The carcass is like a cave that the lion enters. He growls, and the
female joins him. He nibbles her ear and then licks her face and
neck. I am startled by his bloodstained muzzle. Side by side, two
lions devour their prey."

-From "An Unspoken Hunger" by Terry Tempest Williams