Good morning!
I’ve always been a mystery buff, an amateur detective if you like, skills which have been gainfully employed on behalf of health for the last 30 odd years. The forensics of things are fascinating to me both in people and in the world around me. Likely I was that aggravating child always asking why and piping up when what I saw or experienced didn’t match the explanation. Recently, I was walking in an old graveyard near my house. Many of the stones are carrying the names that I recognize from the roads and mountains nearby. It is strangely soothing to walk there, to see the worn stone, the death dates and the soft overgrowth that surrounds the stone as it is both enduring and breaking down slowly. Such an interesting metaphor, the stone, for our own life. What will endure? What will disintegrate when our animation in this body is no longer?
Persistently over the last few weeks, I keep having the idea of doing a forensic examination on my own life, specifically on the things in my life that have died. I know this might sound morbid or terrifying, but truth is, it has begun to feel like it is a necessity. Knowing how and why something has died, knowing when to bury it, giving it its due, its honor and respect for having shown up in my life and then burying, burning, casting away, launching. Any of those actions could be called for.
To tend to death and dying is just as much a function of health as tending to growth. Even more I could say that tending to what is dying, decaying, returning to darkness is equally health-giving as tending to that which is growing, expanding, spreading and flowering. This is not my opinion. It is not my bias. It is a fact. One only has to observe the natural world to see this fact. A plant that is pruned, cut back, will actually grow more quickly and healthfully. The natural elements will have their say, promoting growth and death equally and without favor. This is a law. Not a rule, not a principle. No, a law. The dictionary does not want to distinguish between laws and rules, most often making them sound almost identical. But I think a distinction might be useful in service of my examination.
A law is something observable. Observable through one of our senses including our intuition, or our perception of space. A law is something that will operate with or without human intervention. It emanates from the primal forces of the universe no matter how you define those forces. A rule on the other hand is something precisely human-made. This is not to say that it isn’t made for a reason. There are many reasons a rule might be called into being. But it is a construct made by design or invention rather than just observation. It may or may not reflect the natural world accurately, or even reflect natural law.
For me, the ground, the point I begin and return to, is the natural world. Using my native powers (inherent power a.k.a. power-with vs. power-over) of observation, I attempt to live in harmony with my world. This, in fact, is the heart of the medicine I practice. You could call it the medicine of harmony, the medicine of relationship. In my case, it is the harmony of my relationship with my own body that is the ground for all the laws I discover and the rules I choose to obey. Sometimes I choose not to obey the rules because according to the natural law that I can observe they are not appropriate. This is the relationship I have with my own body and the one that brings me health.
There is no rule that can govern death. There is, however, a law. The law says death will come to you. You don’t know how. You don’t know when. You don’t know why. This is the law of mystery; the fact of death and the relentless lawless mystery that surrounds it. Walking among the stones that continue to stand, I feel content as time slows, the air around me buzzing with life. I smile in the soft gaze of those who came before.