Someone I did not know well died recently. Not so recently, but last February. It wasn't until May that I found out. A gregarious, hard-working fellow with a family whose grip on life seemed secure. His life found its final punctuation point in the unyielding steel of a crushed automobile.
There is a moment when one hears news of a tragic nature that time slows as the mind attempts to assimilate the finality of death. Although our world seems at times inured to death, the loss of even one person can be widely felt. For myself, such sad news eventually provokes musings on the fragile and temporary nature of life: the realization that the only legacy that can be left is a fond memory, and that the whole of life of which we can be assured is the moment in which we are now present.
Before everyday living lulls me out of my contemplation, my thoughts shift to the nature of death -- that which we each experience everyday and that which we experience when the loyal flesh and bone that ferries us about this planet can go no step further.
There are as many visions of the afterlife as there are souls to dream of it. And that is as it should be. My own beliefs tend toward the Otherworld of the Celts and their forbears. Existing neither here nor there, perhaps in the twilight western ocean or perhaps in the space in which we now live but cannot yet comprehend while we live mortally. Ambiguous but joyful, a place of extraordinary colour, no compensatory heaven and no punishing hell.
But my thoughts cannot linger too long on a world to which I have not earned admission. The Otherworld is no place for those without invitation.
To our own lives we die and are born again each day as we moil away the time which fate has allotted us. The passing away of certain ways of life or modes of thinking and feeling can be felt as a death. As writer Eden Gray notes "death is a protest against stagnation -- it is by death that changes for the better come to pass and old ideas give way. Creation necessitates its opposite -- destruction."
Looking now at my sleeping children I can feel the task before them -- to grow into this life, to gather and hold its experiences with integrity; to look outward and accept the reality of the world they see. And my task? To recognize the illusion and limitations of that world and find my path inward to the universal, the mysterium tremendum that is beyond. States Gray "the change from the personal to the universal view is so radical that mystics often compare it to death."
Time is ours only while we are here. At 6:26 a.m. PST, the summer solstice will again witness the victory of the Holly King over the Oak King and our bright year will begin to wane. Here again is death in life. Don't wait until midlife to have your crises, one never knows when midlife is. Farewell to those of our tribe taken so soon. Best wishes for your Journey.