Living with dying, and loving it all.
“There is death, something you do not know. What you don’t know you are afraid of – at least you think you are afraid of something you do not know. But is that so? How can you be frightened of something you do not know? You are frightened of losing something you already know – that is the real cause of fear. Not the unknown but something which you have stored up – of losing that you are afraid. You are afraid of losing the known, not of the unknown.”
~ J Krishnamurti
In daily aware living, one never knows. Life and the living of it, unfolds and flowers in ways that no personal plan, agenda or preference can foretell. There’s a constant learning – a curious exploring – as one seemingly goes along. It’s like you stumble across an old, stone walled well, tie a rope to a bucket, thow it down into the water, pull it out and taste the unknown water, first with a sip, and maybe then with a longer, thirst satisyfing draft. Or, on a few occasions, you toss the bucket’s insipid content away and move on! No goodness there! 😉
‘Water’ is an ancient symbol for Truth, and this morning I was delightfully invited to taste it a little by the above quote from K and the photo here that my ND Cafe friend Colombe Perras posted elsewhere on FB. So let’s drop the bucket here to explore that water now, and find out what happens! 🙂
The pioneer French novelist Michel de Montaigne, ( Born 1533-died 1592) a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote in his famous ‘Essays’ (which he was the first to ‘invent’) that he lived in a waring time between Catholics and Protestants. He spoke of the dangers of leaving his walled estate, of saying “Au revoir” and hugging his family before leaving them to perform his mayoral duties, and he observed that “death was always at my elbow’. Indeed, it’s always at our personal and collective elbows; we rarely notice it but perhaps these days it’s more in our heads and may be touching our hearts. 😉
Indeed, there’s no finite life without death, no beginning without its ending. In fact, all that lives and grows, dies. And there’s an eternal beauty in that. Otherwise, deathless, uninterrupted growth would be like cancer that breeds, competes and repeats its own chaos and demise. The supposed ‘person‘ with its body/mind would live on and on, but there would be no new growth, no real change – indeed, no vitality in life.
The good news is that – after all’s said and done and one has, per Shakespeare, “strutted and fretted our hour upon the stage“- what one is – awareness – having no beginning and no end, remains, or more precisely, is. So, short or long, living well and truly in and as awareness while we live is perhaps what life is – or can be – all about.
In aware living there’s a constant discovering and uncovering of ‘what is‘ – a loving, infinitely peaceful watching and finite experiencing of the apparentlaches and pains, thrills and pleasures that pass in the unsurpassed awareness of one’s whole being. There’s great gratitude in not knowing but just being, and absolutely no fear in dying and living.
Love, and be well. 🙂
