Consider the lilies, how they grow:
they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Last week I shared some crazy big picture stuff—you know, the meaning of life, etc. This week I want to write about the personal. They are, of course, intimately connected.
Life, Etc.™ is the accumulation of personal experience, every kind of personal, not just human. From a rainstorm to a marriage to a dream, to thirst, pain, and suffering. To sacred moments of love, joy, and sorrow. To desire. To fear. To waves on the ocean and trees in a forest, to every living breathing thing and every little thing that doesn’t need to breath. To being born and to dying.
Death is what I’m thinking about as I sort through decades of living, decades of accumulation. Who needs hundreds of catalogs representing multiple interests? Who needs photographs of everything you ever made? Who need to save things that are broken and write on them: no good?
I’m not judging. My house is filled with stuff I’m saving for the apocalypse. The actual apocalypse will be what my descendants have to deal with when I die, if I don’t clear out my junk before that happens. I’m one of those people who save string too short to be saved.
I’m noticing how brutal and unfeeling I need to be to toss, throw away, chuck, get rid of someone’s life… but the truth is that they don’t need it anymore. We all have our own piles of weird stuff. We don’t need more piles.
All our THINGS are like fantasy anchors that we hope are holding us in place. What an illusion. We are caught in a fast-moving stream and nothing stops its flow.
My big picture pronouncements are more of the same. Most ideas about God and religion, and a lot of other opinions, same, same. An attempt to find a handhold, an anchor, a resting place in the stream. As natural as this is for our kind, the most fun we ever have is when we give ourselves over to the stream, to the flow, without fear or resistance. That’s when we experience the blessing of the present. That’s when we be like lilies of the field.
As I throw out a person’s life, I wonder if I am throwing out too much. Reading things our parents wrote can remind us of who they were and how they affected us. It can be helpful.
It only helps if we take old-style judgement and blame off the table. The 'I’m this way because you did this to me; it’s YOUR fault.' That way of thinking ignores the great chain of being. It ignores the great flow. (I’m not saying don’t feel the feels.)
Six Feet Under
Speaking of death, I just started rewatching Six Feet Under, a TV show about a family that runs a funeral parlor. The jokes about dying and dead bodies begin right away and keep going. I loved it in the past. It’s strange how there are shows that are very old (it ran from 2001 to 2005), but new enough that you don’t have to think of them as period pieces. They already were using cell phones, and their clothes look like our clothes. It’s easy to see it as depicting the recent now. One with landlines and phone booths.
I still like it. I’ll watch a few more episodes. It must have been cutting edge when it was new. It has overt gay and straight sex, interracial couples, magic realism, and lots of solid family and personal craziness and interaction. And love. And change. It’s on Netflix. It feels like an appropriate show for me to watch while I’m dealing with the detritus of death.
Sorting through the remnants of a life teaches me the lesson of impermanence. I pay lip service to it but don’t always understand in my bones. Doing this helps. I hope.