Update January 9, 2025

I wrote the following after months of not only facing death and riding some kind of tortuous roller coast, but also watching firsthand the actual death process.

Death is not pretty, any way you look at it. Death can come from: blunt force trauma, stab wounds, a surgery gone wrong, gun-shot wounds, even a tortured mangled body left to hang or rot. (that part I only know from watching TV!) OR it could be the slow death of aging, over time losing abilities in body and mind until you finally let go, let go of it all. OR it could come by the way of disease, more quickly devouring the body in one way or another, turning it into a skeleton of sorts with no more functioning parts.

All these ways will end as some kind of fertilizer, in the earth, in the water, in the air, a foundation for new growth.

The death life cycle mirrors the seasons. There is the fullness of summer, harvest of fall with leaves falling to begin their decay throughout the winter. Then it seems, that energy is reborn in a different format in the strength of spring- coming up from the earth bundles of flowers and green plants and baby trees.

In western culture death and aging is feared and put off as far into the future as can be managed. Thus, all kinds of products to try and stop that process are sold. It becomes then, another way to make money. Other cultures honor the aged.

My mother, the artist, was fascinated with death. So many of her paintings were of dead things. A gutted rabbit hanging on a hook. My bedroom had a large blueish painting of a dead squirrel in the moonlight. She also painted the insides of animals so you didn’t just see the skin. You saw bones, organs, arteries. Somehow she knew that death was a part of life and to respect it.

In my Taoist qigong studies I have noticed that the first thing to learn is to become aware of your body, actually learn to feel your skin, your muscles, tendons, sore areas, and stuck areas. Then one can notice the fluid flows: interstitial, lymph, and blood also noticing where these flows might be restricted. Next is realizing there is an overlay of chi – or life force energy, almost like a matrix energizing your body. There are layers beyond that: progressively more and more subtle. Emotions, thoughts, psychic knowing, karmic or inherited cycles of energy patterns, and beyond that is the pure light of creativity that fills every cell.

What is meant by “go with the flow”? To go with the boundless energy of God’s Spirit. In the divine order of things His Spirit is way above and beyond influences from the material and psychic planes.

What if, just what if, death was embraced, loved even. In a spiritual sense death to ego (attachments, fears, anger, worries) is a deliverance and a freedom. In the biblical scriptures Paul, in I Corinthians 15, talks about dying daily to human motives, which in reality are perhaps more akin to animal instincts. Letting go of these instincts, dying to them, through acknowledgement and receiving the love and grace of the Father of lights makes room within to feel and know the leading of the Spirit of God.

The material world seems to constantly promote the illusion that it is of utmost importance and there are no other realms or realities. The goals promoted are to have a lot money, to be a strong individual by lording it over others or by proving to others that one individual is somehow superior than another. The state of believing in separateness from divinity is what causes the race for fame and fortune. When in reality all are connected- God is in all and through all, we are eternally one.

It makes sense to consider death as a way forward when you consider Jesus Christ. Who thought equality with God not a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a bond servant. Then on the cross itself, his death was shortened, certainly after his last words were uttered: “Into Thy hands I commit my spirit.”

I want to utter those words every day in my own heart of hearts. To become one with the Father, one with the light of heaven, one with the way of heaven. Surely compassion and grace would then flow from every cell, filling up every room, every household, every town and city.

As Michael was nearing his transition to spirit he would exclaim, “I am so free!” He was talking about freedom to love, not to be listening over and over to the self-inflicted insecurities. Just a knowing that in essence none of us are separate. Together we are stronger. If you hurt your brother, you are hurting yourself.