#experiencing death

[thethcministry]

[moooonsafari]

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love..

Rainer Maria Rilke

[objects-food-rooms]

Letters, letters

I could write I could write but I'm not even sure how to begin with you, you, you, what could I even say to you?  He: honestly, have never felt this black.  thoughts of death just creep in. the images of corpses stuck to my being.  too much pain.  can't understand why people create so much suffering for each other, maddening for me to think about.  hard to articulate these experiences to anyone back here, it's just so different out there in the bush that all explanations break down.  when i try and tell folks what happened, this big feeling of isolation grows inside me.  never have i felt so fundamentally changed in my soul...and in such a short time!  crazy.   small glimpses of light come tho, when rock climbing or playing the banjo.  cures wait in strange places.  will be slow healing but will eventually heal.  this i am sure of. sorry to be so low, feel guilty about it but hell, it was hard out there.  this is a time of mourning for me. i will remember what love is. 

And here is some of what I wrote back: I am of the pragmatic mindset that people are all inherently predisposed to doing certain things. Some people build yachts, heal others, garden, write incredible literature, create sculptures.....and some rape, pathologically lie, kill. Do you see what I'm saying? Some people are just more likely to do awful things than others, and a great deal of whether or not these predisposed inclinations are drawn out of them has to do with nurture, time, place, state of mind, and the events that happen in their own lives. If you think of human beings like this-- in sort of, I guess, biological survivalist terms-- it removes the morality quandary. I never fail to be horrified by what people are capable of, but I have long since stopped wondering how people can harm each other. Because when it comes down to it, we are still animals, and the success of our civilizations will always be humbled by our own undoings....  But mostly, I am just so, so, sorry. I want to travel across country now, instead of 13 days from now, and hold you.

[confinedbydoubt-blog]

Death.

I've been meaning to say something about death for a while, and I've just been sitting on my own musing about it for the past hour, so I thought I'd share. I know; I'm too nice. If there is a single thing that we as humans can be certain of, it's death. We're all going to die at some point, which begs the question as to why people are fearful of death, when there's no need to be; especially with how natural death actually is. I suppose the fear could come from the fact that we can't really define death. We have no idea what it is actually like, and we'll never be able to either, which can play on human instinct of fearing the unknown.

Another part of death which can be understandably feared is what happens after death, or what not happens as the case may be. Personally, I find it very hard to believe that there is any kind of afterlife; be that "Heaven" or "Hell". The whole idea seems far too estranged to have any element of truth to it, but maybe that's simply because I'm a logicist and a pessimist. I just think that when you die; that's it. There's no angels, no Devil, nothing. Imagine sleeping dreamlessly eternally; that's my depiction of death. Which, in my eyes anyway, doesn't sound too bad.

There'd be no more pain, no more anguish; just peace. How does that not sound appealing? You'd be completely at ease, for eternity. The only thing is, you're not conscious to feel it. Which has a certain dark irony about it; complete peace has finally found it's way to you, and yet you would have no way of experiencing it. Another element of death that fascinates me is how the world would change without me in it, if at all. I assume the latter would be far more likely. In an example, if I were to drop dead right this second, I would love to be able to see how everyone around me would react. My friends, my girlfriend, my family; even anyone who hates me, it would be completely entrancing. But again, I'd have no way of seeing any impact my death would make.

I suppose the long and short of this is that I'm completely enamoured with the concept of death.