The Buddha said that the greatest of all footprints is that of the elephant, and the greatest meditation is that on death.
      - Dhammapada, Buddhist Holy Book

We may worry about death but what hurts the soul most is to live without tasting the water of its own essence.
- Rumi

The processes of life co-exist with the processes of death. Good health, and life itself, are temporary.  Part of treating life with reverence is recognizing that the ultimate reality is death.  The mystery of death -- a fitting conclusion to the mystery of life.  When we pretend that death doesn't exist, that there is a technological fix, that death is something that happens just to others, or that will happen to us at some date in the very distant future, we are free to put off living, put off courage, for tomorrow.  But living a full life, pursuing our dreams, pursuing our potential, pursuing the goodness that is in each of us is preparing for, recognizing, the inevitableness of death.   
We are born out of nature, out of some mystery.  The chances of any one of us being here is so slight as to be infinitesimal. 

  

Death is an advisor looking over our shoulder showing us how to live.
     - Carlos Castenada

  I was lying in bed one day, thinking about my death, wondering if I'd be conscious enough to talk to my children, what I'd want to leave to them; famous last words, as it were.

            The key word is trust. Trust everything that happens in life, even those experiences that cause pain, will serve to better you in the end. It's easy to lose the inner vision, the greater truths, in the face of tragedy. There really is no such thing as suffering simply for the sake of suffering. Along with developing a basic trust in the rhyme and reason of life itself, I advise you to trust your intuition. It is a far better guide in the long run than your intellect

    Next on my list is to learn what love is. It is complete and utter surrender. That's a big word, surrender. It doesn't mean letting people walk all over you, take advantage of you. It's when we surrender control, let go of our egos, that all the love in the world is there waiting for us. Love is not a game, it's a state of being.
- Henry Miller, Reflections, edited by Twinka Thiebaud

Only in silence the word,
     only in dark the light,
          only in dying life.
-   Ursula Le Guin, with thanks to Friends of Silence

 

The distinctive vein of Whitman's poetry comes, I imagine, out of meditation on the following brief sentence recorded in his earliest journal:

"I know that my body will decay."

No fixed identity can relax in the face of this knowledge. Once it has entered our consciousness, that part of us which takes identity seriously will begin to search for a way of being which could include the fact of death and decay.

-   Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

I like to remember the distinguished Swedish ocea­nographer, Otto Pettersson, who died a few years ago at the age of ninety-three, in full possession of his keen mental powers. His son, also world-famous in oceanog­raphy, has related in a recent book how intensely his father enjoyed every new experience, every new discov­ery concerning the world about him.

     "He was an incurable romantic," the son wrote, intensely in love with life and with the mysteries of the cosmos." When he realized he had not much longer to enjoy the earthly scene, Otto Pettersson said to his son:  “What will sustain me in my last moments is an infinite curiosity as to what is to follow."
      - Rachel Carson, A Sense of Wonder

I'm enjoying life more fully now than I ever have . . . I don't for a moment regret being seventy-two years old. It's part of life, just like getting born was; just like being a jackass as an adolescent was. (Laughs.) And I'm continually, repeatedly, discovering or having experiences sitting in the yard and listening to spring come into the land, watching purple martins, knowing that they've been all the way down to the southern tip of South America, have come back, found the same house — same hole in the same house (laughs) — that they were raised in.

This great capacity of life to renew itself, I think perhaps I'm more sensitive to that than ever before. I'm more sensitive to the fact that when Robert Browning had Rabbi Ben Ezra say, "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made" — this is absolutely profound.
—John Henry Faulk, from an interview by Phillip L. Berman in the book The Search For Meaning. Several years after he conducted the many many interviews that make up his book I met him. I can’t remember where. Not on a backcountry trail. I think I’d remember that.
He said to me, “I’ve heard of you. You’re that guy who lives like Thoreau.” I thought, first, that’s not true. But even so, I wonder who would say that. I asked him. He couldn’t remember or didn’t want to say.
I asked him about John Henry Faulk. I told him it was one of the many passages in the book that I thought about from time to time. He told me that Faulk passed away not long after the book was published.

To know death is to know the wind,
That whispers through the trees,
And death is just anther friend,
Blowin' in the breeze.
- From a poem by Tommy, a convict on death row, quoted in the book “We're All Doing Time“ by Bo Lozoff, foreword by the Dalai Lama.

 

Among the Maoris every human being is regarded as a compound of four elements - a divine eternal principle, known as the toiora; an ego, which disappears at death; a ghost-shadow, or psyche, which survives death; and finally a body. Among the Ogala Indians the divine element is called the sican, and this is regarded as identical with the ton, or divine essence of the world. Other elements of the self are the nagi, or personality, and niya, or vital soul. After death the sican is united with the divine Ground of all things, the nagi survives in the ghost world of psychic phenomena and the niya disappears into the material universe.
     - Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

 Another quote, this time from Sleeping Island by PG Downes -- a teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts who spent his summers (in the 1930s) roaming around Canada's north in a canoe -- an incredible book about freedom wandering backcountry lakes of the old North that Heron Dance had the honor of republishing years ago, but that is once again out of print and available only used:

They climbed into the canoe.  Lop-i-zun took the stern, then before him John, then Zah-bah-deese in the bow.  I leaned down to each and made that sharp, embarrassed, brief handshake used in the North.

Like true Northern men, they never looked back....The same old feeling rushed over me.  It was always the same:  "See you somewhere, next year maybe...see some time...at Pelican, Brochet, Athabasca, Cree Lake, the Slave, the Grease, the Fond du Lac...lakes, lakes, rivers, rivers...the Barrens."

It was the feeling I had experienced so many years before; the sun was shining then, too.  Far away the buzzing of a plane came nearer.  It was time to leave.  Solomon, my Cree friend and companion, stood with me, shading his eyes to see the plane and he said more to himself than to me:  "You will come back...maybe not nex' year, maybe not year nex'.  But you will come back, and then we make long trip.  Then sometime we make a trip again.  We stronger.  We tough, and then, we make the long trip an' never come back."

 I know that gentle handshake among the tough Indians of the bush. The averted eyes. The shy smile. They seem to say, “I shake your hand, my friend, but you are not you, and I am not me. We are people passing through this place. We are insignificant.”

     We make lots of trips, but then we make the long trip and never come back.

There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave. But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
- Cervantes 

Doug Peacock, grizzly bear man, eco-warrior, ex-Vietnam Green Beret and author of several books including his recent Was It Worth It?. He was also the character on which Ed Abbey based Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! These excerpts are from a Heron Dance Interview or interviews. I’m not sure which. I interviewed Doug several times over a decade during which he became a close friend.

I sometimes call the book the Arapaho Book of the Dead.  Or Walking It Off.  It is a book about death, but a happy book about death.  Except I have been sort of down the last five weeks, so I haven't made too many inroads.  And it is also about my friendship with Ed Abbey.  But that's just the tie.  When I went over to Nepal I lost a couple of quarts of blood and I didn't think I was ever going to get out of there.  At 18,000 feet, way, way back in.  I had a chronic cough all of the way through Siberia for four or five months.  I ripped a hole in my esophagus.  I thought I was bleeding from esophageal verities but I wasn't.  But you gush out blood.  Everything that does that, you die rather miserably in six or eight months.  Besides, I had lost a couple of quarts of blood, and I was still leaking.  I knew that if I did that twice -- I had to climb over that 19,000 foot pass . . .

We were exploring new country -- these wild valleys north of Dallegeri -- nobody lives in them.  They go all the way to China.  They are full of Blue Sheep and Snow Leopards and maybe Marco Polo sheep and certainly wolfs.  Maybe bear, maybe Yetis.  Had I not died, I'd still be looking for them there.  What I wanted to do, you could do.  To get from one valley to the next, it takes a little bit of technical scrambling.  But it’s not like climbing Everest. 

I've been courting death in one way or another for decades.  That's not a big deal.  I'm certainly not afraid to die.  But Ed Abbey -- he was really ready to go.  I was with him all of the time in the last five days of his life.  I buried him, illegally I might add, with great satisfaction.  Buried Ed Abbey illegally in a wonderfully wild place.  He really impressed me, the way he went out.  He was ready to go.  In my own situation, even though I have been rubbing shoulders with death for twenty or thirty years, that's not the same thing.  Not being afraid to die, or even being prepared to die is not the same as really being ready to go. 

I had to make a friend of death over there (in Vietnam), like Ed did. 

But even this book is a meditation on being ready to die.  To be prepared for death, you've got to live well.  This book is a lot of trips and travels and walks in really wild country.  That's the only thing that really gives you perspective on everything.  Is to get out. 

I had a big fight with my friend Ed just before he died about a gun.  The essence of the argument was over the right to an end -- suicide.  Anyway, because of children and things like that, I decided to make a rather harsh decision.  I decided to make a gun disappear.  At that time, I think I thought that the edge above the abyss of death was very sharp, a sharp line and it was possible to regret having stepped over it on the way down, while on the way down.  That's what I thought.

But I tell you, after my little trip into the Himalayas, I'm not so sure.  Within that line there seems a lot of space.  There seems to be a lot of space between what we call death and coming out the other end.  And even going down to die, there is a lot of stuff going on.  I don't think I can judge it anymore.  There are lives in between.  If you wanted to look at the whole thing as a metaphor, you can see your whole life that way. 

The value of the lesson that I received was the gift of a good dying.  That is the lesson I feel I received.  You can't die well without having lived well.  People who hang onto life to the last minute, with any kind of technical fix, are people who haven't lived enough.  The tubes in every oriface.  I am not sure if letting go is the right word anymore.  To die well you really have had to loved life, lived it to its fullest.  We live in a culture where death is an unexpected surprise.  That is unimaginable.  Its crazy.  The only thing that is certain about life, is death. 

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning bush
I am the swift, uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave
and weep.

I am not there. I do not sleep.
- Mary Elizabeth Frye

 To fully accept our wildness we must embody it, we must take up residence in biological order, to become whole we must live as part of larger system of  plant and animal communities governed by reciprocity.  The acid test is this: to see yourself as food.  To acknowledge that each of us at the table will eventually be part of the meal is not being `realistic.'  It is allowing the sacred to enter and accepting the sacramental aspect of our shaky temporary personal being.
-   The Practice of the Wild By Gary Snyder.

I couldn't think of a better way to die than being out there.  I like the thought of animals eating me.  I have eaten them.    That is so much more satisfying than ending up in a box in the ground--or getting cremated. 
-   Robert Perkins, author of Into The Great Solitude and a film about the same Barren Lands Canoe trip. He made a great film of the same trip, same name. Heron Dance Interview.

 

When I die, I want to be thinking that I lived the good life.  I want the thought going through my mind--I've had a wonderful time.  I did what I needed to do, what I wanted to do.  Not feeling that “Gee, I realize that I should have done such and such."

      It’s my search for a home.  Skiing all over the place, researching ancient native peoples -- it’s all an effort to get connected.  On my hardest climbs, when people are getting killed around you right and left, it was a searching to come home.  To feel at home.  Whether it is on the face of a cliff in the winter by yourself, or at home in history.  I want to feel as if I am a part of this earth, that the way I live fits with the history of the earth.
-   Don Gardner, mountaineer extraordinaire, arctic explorer. Heron Dance Interview.

One in full quest of the spirit
knows that the goal of life is death.

One great thing about growing old
is that nothing
is going to lead to anything.
Everything is of the moment.
-   Reflections On The Art Of Living, A Joseph Campbell Companion.  Selected and Edited by Diane K. Osbon

Recently I have been feeling that I have used eight of my nine lives up.  Maybe I am pushing it too far.  I guess I have got a guardian angel.  People have often commented on how many near death experiences I have had.  I couple of times I have been pulled out of the water unconscious on kayaking trips.  I have been aware for quite some time that my number is long overdue, with the risks I have taken.

I have been working on the assumption that I wouldn't have lived to the age I am now.  I expected to have been dead by now, in my planning.  I have never thought that I would live to an age where age was an issue.  To travel, to be living this on the edge lifestyle that I have accepted as normal and natural.
- Kiko Anderson, trekker, kayaker, treehouse man. Heron Dance interview. I just looked Kiko up. He’s still alive! He has a Facebook page!

I've seen people that are sixty, seventy years old who wonder what they have done with their life.  On the other hand, what does it really matter?  The most important thing is that you are happy with who you are.  And where you are going. . . Are you going to live to be eighty years old and say: "I wish I had done this, I wish I had done that?"  Or are you going to say when you come to die that: "Yeah, I feel like I really lived my life.  I'm happy I did the things I did." 
      - Kellie Rhodes, Outward Bound Instructor, Heron Dance interview.

Jeff Casebolt, former Outward Bound Instructor. Heron Dance interview. Jeff kayaked from Alaska down the Inside Passage, and then cycled to the tip of South America.

In the winter we planned a climb up Mt. Rainier.  Willi (Unsoeld - Jeff's close friend, teacher, and fellow climber) and a woman who was 21, Janie Diepenbrock, died in an avalanche.  There were twenty of us on the climb.  We were camped close to the top, had made a summit bid and had gotten weathered off.  This huge storm of came in and dumped large quantities of snow.  In a twenty-four-hour period we had gotten three feet of snow.  Some of the tents were starting to rip.  We were running low on fuel.  We decided to retreat and were dropping down a gully -- a huge gully called Cadaver Gap.  Whenever you get a lot of wind and a lot of snow in a short amount of time, the avalanche conditions can become extreme.  That's what we had.  Cadaver Gap is an avalanche chute.  So Willy at the top--we were broken up into rope teams of three and four.  Willy said we will go down in five-minute intervals.  So he and his rope team headed down first.  He was the first on the rope.  Janie was second and there were two other people behind him.  Apparently the slope fractured and he fell about five hundred feet.  My rope team was third.  When I got down to the fracture line, I really didn't know what had happened.  At that time I really didn't know much about avalanches. The fractured line was about four feet--a huge avalanche. 

They were swept about five hundred feet.  Meanwhile there was a blizzard, gusts up to sixty miles an hour, according to the park service.  I heard cries for help and I got down close enough to see the debris.  Janie was unconscious and they were working on her, doing CPR.  Willie hadn't been uncovered yet.  Both had been buried completely.  The third guy was buried almost completely but he had shoved his hand up through.  Just part of his hand was showing.  The fourth guy was buried up to his waist.  He managed to work his way loose.  When you get buried in an avalanche, it sets-up like concrete.  So while its moving, its fluid and you can move around.  When it stops, you are just frozen.  A lot of people report being disorientated--you can be upside down and not know which way is up.  I have spent a lot of time studying avalanches since then.  The fourth guy helped out the third guy.  They followed the rope to Janie.  By then, the second rope team showed up and unburied Janie and started working on her.  Then my rope team showed up and we followed the rope to him.  Me and another guy unburied him and started working on him, started CPR.  We were never able to revive him--the biggest mentor of my life.

We decided there was nothing we could do with their bodies--the weather was so extreme.  So we marked the site and got ourselves to Camp Muir.  The Park Service, when the storm abated two days later, sent up Jim Whittaker and a rescue team to escort us down.  Myself and another member of our party went up with the Park Service to find the bodies.  We were unable to find them because a bunch of subsequent avalanches had come down and obliterated the site.  Eventually the Park Service went in with a hundred people and probes and big guns and blasted down everything and found them.

So, that event was very much instrumental in me deciding to do the bike trip.  I had been thinking about doing it.  I remember having read in National Geographic before my trip to Europe about this couple who had ridden from Alaska to Argentina. That had captured me.  While riding in Europe I thought that that was something I would really like to do.  I would love to go on a really extended adventure and do more of this.  So I had been toying with the idea, and what it would require, both economically and internally.  What kind of commitment and what kind of risks would be involved.  And whether or not that was something I would really like to do with my life.  Whether or not I had the commitment to do that.  I had been thinking about that during the year, and Willie's death really was the catalyst.  I just became clear that I wanted to do something with my life.

After Willy's death, I felt vulnerable.  I was twenty when that happened.  I could see that it would be easy to fulfill the American dream, go to school, have a family and mow the lawn.  But I knew that I could get snuffed out at any time.  I came to the decision that I wanted to do something with my life. 

Willy talked about mortality--how did he say it--having your face rubbed in the reality of mortality.  I have a real clear image of that.  I had to decide for myself that I was willing to die doing this trip.  To be okay with that.  To have that kind of resolution--having the drive.  Something incredibly powerful about coming up against that barrier and choosing to do it.  In some ways that was probably the biggest accomplishment--deciding to follow through.  Then the nuts and bolts were easy.  Willy was buried on March 4, 1979.  I continued with school for another six months, but my mind was really on the bike trip.

Willy once said:  "Its better to die young of a life fully lived than to live to an old age without ever taking risks."  I have to agree with that.  At the same time I feel like I don't need to put myself in situations where there is so much risk that I could easily die.  There are things that I need to do with my life.  There are enough projects that I want to do internally for myself and with other people.  There are awarenesses that I have and things to teach people.  I feel a responsibility to contribute to the betterment of the human condition.  I have awarenesses that a lot of people don't.  I can help people and touch people in ways that are important.  I hope that I don't go the way of Willy and have to pay that price.

Robert L. Reid, Mountaineer. Heron Dance interview.

Most climbers don't like to think of death as a part of climbing.  All the climbing I ever did, I was thinking of the potential results of a misstep.  Fear of death became more and more a part of the climbing experience for me.  It’s a hell of a sport.  People die.  Not many people die playing football or boxing.  Mountaineering isn't a sport.  People go out and pit themselves against the natural forces, and they love do it.  It’s not a confrontation with your opposite, it is a confrontation with yourself.  It demeans it to call it a sport.  It’s living.  It’s life.  It is a way we relate to ourselves and the rest of the universe.  But you die.  That's why it is life.  You don't die in baseball or football, because its small potatoes. 

U Thant (former Secretary General Of The United Nations): “A man must care to know during his lifetime how he wants to be remembered in death. This will mold his entire life, actions, thinking, objectives and behavior, and make him a man of righteousness and peace, a man to remember.” U Thant applied the Socrates' principle: "The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be."

Sleepe afer toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
     - Edmund Spenser, from Faerie Queene

When he was old, I tried to introduce him to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness; I thought it would ease any anxiety he might have about the imminence of death.

      "Ultimately," I began, "you never were."
      "Maybe not," he said peering over the rim of his glasses, "but I made a hell of a splash where I should have been.”
    - From Of Lineage and Love by Stephen T. Butterfield.

Death Again

Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

[Jim Harrison, from SONGS OF UNREASON, Copper Canyon Press, 2011]