Is death bad?

Well, dying sure is.

The picture on the front page is a tuft of rabbit hair that I saw while volunteering. It was so soft. Incredibly soft. Nothing human made can ever be as soft as that. The rabbit might just have shed a bit, I suppose. Though my bleak mind imagined the buzzard swooping down. Good for the buzzard, I guess.

A few days later, I found this.

I thought it was a body of a mole... But I couldn't quite make it out. I found a stick and prodded it over.

Not very helpful. But on the far right, can you see what looks like a jaw-bone? I figured this must be the kind of thing raptors hawk up. I wonder if that's the etymology of that phrase... Anyway, it was BIG. I think it was too big. Just found some pictures and they all show smaller things of a more pellet shape.

Maybe it is a dead weasel that had partially decayed.

It didn't smell much as far as I recall. And it had gone the next time I passed that way.

So. Death.

We're all powered by the sun, ultimately, though made of earth and then we go back to the earth. Yet we think we are powered by thought and made of ideas and should live forever. Walking, thinking sacks of protein, fuel for the soil, the fungi, the plants, the animals - for life. We are transient flashes of awareness in a changing world, graced with the consciousness of its beauty and our mortality.

I am afraid of dying. The pain, loneliness, indignity, confusion, concern about my cats and so on. But I am not afraid of being dead. There's nothing to it. I mean that. There's NOTHING to it. There is NOTHING to be afraid of and I am not afraid of nothing. I don't want to live five, ten, twenty extra years being in pain or lonely or having no money or having no privacy. But I don't yearn for extra years if I am healthy. I can except my life-span, whatever it is, and when I am dead I will not be missing out, or leaving stuff unfinished, or have regrets because I will be DEAD. I will be nothing. Dead is just fine. What's not fine is living and regretting, living and missing out, living and yearning.

The Buddha was right: cut out the goddam YEARNING.

But what the Buddha can't tell me, or hasn't told me, is what I should be doing NOW.

I yearn not for x or y but for anything to yearn for! I guess, if I cut out the yearning then I wouldn't need to worry about what I yearn for. On the other hand, maybe no-yearning is the same as being dead. Being nothing.

Not sure how this works out.