Changing into death

From Deborah Bird Rose's Shimmer, which was written while she was dying of cancer:

[Lev] Shestov was prescient in his understanding that we of the West deeply need to understand that the brilliance and beauty of life lies precisely in its uncertainty and vitality. We are not promised immunity from vicissitudes, but, far more powerfully, we have the opportunity to see the world in its abundance. This proposition is challenging, perhaps especially when the issue is death; within mainstream western philosophy it invites a kind of glorious madness. And so, stepping away from the straightjacket of the unchanging eternal, we may be lucky enough to fall into love with all that is of this earth, all its transience, its fragile beauty, its unpredictabilities and uncertainties, and its countless joys and sorrows.

A great many attempts to offer a loving account of death struggle under the weight of this long history during which death has been understood as the enemy. To step away from giving death more (or less) than it is due means embracing more fully the logic of both-­ and, thereby including death in the patterns and pulses of life on Earth. Death only exists because of life, and so to keep faith with life is to keep faith with the relationships between death and life.

The "becoming Crone" thing is in part about accepting death as a teacher and guide. The book emphasises the importance of saying YES to life, living with exuberance, living life to the full, while also saying YES to death, the inevitable end that cedes space for the next generation, just as the previous generation ceded space for ours.

It seems to me that we struggle to say yes fully to either. We are too afraid to live fully and too egotistical to accept that we too must die. And the terror of dying, the lengths we go to to avoid it, for us and our loved ones, that is perhaps part of our cultural illness.

And I wonder if that is in part because we feel that life and therefore death are meaningless? Perhaps if we lived life as part of the ecosystem and in death fed back into it, both would have a meaning and we could be freed from the search for meaning in power, religion, consumer goods, prestige, and so on.

Freya Mathews writes in The Ecological Self:

Meaningfulness is to be found in our spiritual capacity to keep the ecocosm on course, by teaching our hearts to practise affirmation, and by awakening our faculty of active, outreaching, world-directed love. Though a tendency to ‘tread lightly’ on the earth, and to take practical steps to safeguard the particular manifestations of Nature, will flow inevitably from such an attitude, the crucial contribution will be the attitude itself, a contribution of the heart and spirit.