here he comes with that death stuff again

Here I speak of death again. For those who do not wish to hear it, Flee! Flee!

An attitude exists in our culture that one is not to acknowledge death or if one does, to "rage, rage against the dying of the light!" [And of course, in one's own mind, it never happens to oneself (there's truth in that). One is always the one offering condolences to the bereaved and saying over the open coffin: "S/he looks good, doesn't s/he?"]

Death is no enemy. Nor is it a dying of light. Death is an entryway to where we already are.

Contrary to what you might think with my postings on this Geezer blog, I do not sit around mooning about death. Au contraire! I was called to read Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" (yes, I receive callings and I answer them) yesterday morning in preparing for my Saturday Wu Chi Ku class and opened it to this passage:

"We must accept our existence as far as ever it is possible; everything, even the unheard of, must be possible there. That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest , most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us. The fact that human beings have been cowardly in this sense has done endless harm to life; the experiences that are called 'apparitions,' the whole of the so-called 'spirit world,' death, all these things that are so closely related to us, have been so crowded out of life by our daily warding them off, that the senses by which we might apprehend them are stunted."

In focusing on the phenomenon we call death, I am unstunting my senses. In this focusing, I am finding that rather than calling me away from life into some morbid crusty chamber of the soul where I sit with cast down eyes awaiting your removal of my bodily remains, I leap into life with greater joy.

How to explain this other than to say that death is part of who I am and is thus already transcended. Can I not feel a teensy bit of joy at knowing this, deeply knowing this?