Daisy and I go for a walk in the woods every morning and today we visited Carla. It's coming up on 2 years since she passed, and I visit her grave pretty regularly. Today, I was sitting and looking around at a tiny sugar maple seedling that took root on her grave, and the most obvious thing struck me...
I suddenly became acutely aware of everything (I mean e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g) growing, living, declining, dying and rotting.
I was surrounded by countless tiny seedlings just starting out in life, and also by 12' tall saplings stretching towards the sun, and by older beech trees casting shade, and by really old ash trees slowly dying from the emerald ash borer, and by downed trees from the last storm or timber harvest, and by logs rotting at my feet... all at the same time. I used my walking stick to poke at the rotting log, realizing that it, too, was teaming with life.
Yeah, I know, this is not news. We are all taught this cycle of decomposition. But this was different. It wasn't an intellectual understanding.
For a moment, I was completely part of the circle game of life... death and decay being as beautiful and normal as birth and life. I felt connected and good and normal and without fear or strife. There was nothing to change or fix or improve or worry about.
How did we let modernity take us so far away from what is normal and true and inevitable and beautiful?
We are told the story that science and technology have improved our lives, but the more we "improve" the more separated we become, and the farther we get from an embodied knowing of ourselves as perfect and interconnected beings on a planet circling a star we call Sun.
RIP Carla!