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5:38am July 10, 2014
[Click through the link to see the blog of the original artist.] My father never got to have grandchildren.  When I was a child, though, everyone thought my brother was my father, and that my father was my grandfather.  My brother was 14 years older than me, I looked young for my age, and my father had a grey beard since before I was born.  Now he’ll never have grandchildren when he’s alive, and I wonder if he regrets that.  I know how powerful the urge is to see your genes go on.  I have it myself, despite having decided not to have children.  I still want to know what it would be like to have biological children, who they would be, who they would turn into.  It’s probably a moot point.  I haven’t had a period since I was twenty-eight, and I’ve been told I wouldn’t survive pregnancy.  But I still wonder.  And I wonder how he feels. In the hospital, every time a baby was born, they’d play Brahm’s Lullaby over the loudspeakers.  My father, in there for terminal cancer, said every time, “They’re sending in another one to replace me when I’m gone.” I have a view of the world where it’s not just your own genes that count, everything is connected.  My father must, too, to some degree, or he wouldn’t have been saying things like that. Somewhere, there’s a single piece of redwood sorrel, pushing its way through the earth.  Unfolding its leaves, it feels sunlight for the first time.  It’s a feeling that non-photosynthetic creatures can only imagine.  Yet I’m certain sometimes that I’ve climbed trees, and pressed myself into the branches, and felt the sunlight pour nourishment into my hair.  They say autistic people have no empathy, but when’s the last time you saw a neurotypical person with that much involuntary empathy for a plant? The redwood sorrel comes from the redwood soil, and the redwood soil is sacred to me.  The soil is the place where you can most readily see the processes of death, decay, and rebirth taking place over and over again on a daily basis.  When I think of my father dying, I think of the redwood soil, and I wonder what plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria he will turn into — and what they will turn into.   Because there’s our literal descendants, the ones that come from spreading our genes through sex and reproduction.  But in death, we have a chance to have an entirely different kind of descendants.  They feed off of our bodies, our ashes, our composted remains, and whatever else is left of us.  We are conditioned to view this process as ugly.  There are good evolutionary reasons for our disgust at the sight or smell of a decaying body.  I am not immune to that disgust. But it’s also profoundly beautiful.  And beautifully profound.  No matter what happens to any of us, once we die we will have more descendants than we know what to do with.  And those descendants won’t be limited to our species, or even to the animal kingdom.  It will be everything that feeds on us — and everything that feeds on them — and that is how life continues, and that is another way of having descendants. I want to be a redwood tree when I grow up.  I want to be put in one of those Swedish compost machines and then buried under the Mother Tree.  Barring that, I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the Mother Tree and in the surrounding forest.  I want to become part of the forest that has given me everything important in my life. Some people believe that once you are dead, your body isn’t you anymore.  I have mixed feelings about that.  I’ve seen recently-dead spirits, and had other people see exactly what I saw, often enough that I know there’s something of us that goes on beyond our death, although I believe that this is a short-term state, that ultimately, if everything goes right, it gets reabsorbed into Love, in the same way that our bodies get reabsorbed into the ecosystem.  But I also believe that our bodies are made of all these parts that have tried to stay alive for so long.  We are not just a mind, and not just a brain, and not just intelligence (and our brain is not the only intelligent part of our body).  We are cells that want to go on living, that go on cooperating with each other, that are important, that most humans in Western society pooh-pooh because they don’t want to see how much of themselves is collections of cells working together in amazing and wonderful ways, ways that show that the cells themselves have a drive to life as extreme as any our brain can concoct. And when we die, and those cells begin to break down, they are what get eaten up by all the plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals that break down our remains.  We can do things to slow down this process, but not by much, and it wouldn’t be good to slow it down too far anyway.  We don’t belong taken out of the cycle of life and death.  We exist there for a reason. And somewhere, right now, a single redwood sorrel plant, surrounded by all of its redwood sorrel friends, is reaching up to the light, feeling what only a plant can feel.  For the very first time. And somewhere, right near it, a human being is picking another redwood sorrel plant and eating it.  And as sie eats that plant, the plant becomes part of hir.   Nearby, another redwood sorrel plant dies of old age, turning brown, wilting back into the soil it was born from, becoming food for all kinds of microbes and plants and other creatures. As long as we are tangled up in this cycle, we are never dead.  We go on to feed someone else, who feeds someone else, who feeds someone else.  And those are our descendants just as surely as any genetic grandchildren are.  And however much we may turn up our noses at the stench of decay, the fact of decay is one of the most beautiful and elegant solutions life has ever come up with.  Without it, we would have no life. And the whole thing is run by Love.  And Love is in the soil, the soil is where I can see this aspect of Love operating the most, and that is why redwood soil is so sacred to me. Every time I think of my father’s death, I think of what he will become.  He will be absorbed into the highest Love there is.  He will be absorbed into the plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria that consume his body.  And these are not contradictions.  These are not the ‘higher’ and 'lower’ aspects of death.  They are one and the same thing, and they are beautiful.

[Click through the link to see the blog of the original artist.]

My father never got to have grandchildren.  When I was a child, though, everyone thought my brother was my father, and that my father was my grandfather.  My brother was 14 years older than me, I looked young for my age, and my father had a grey beard since before I was born.  Now he’ll never have grandchildren when he’s alive, and I wonder if he regrets that.  I know how powerful the urge is to see your genes go on.  I have it myself, despite having decided not to have children.  I still want to know what it would be like to have biological children, who they would be, who they would turn into.  It’s probably a moot point.  I haven’t had a period since I was twenty-eight, and I’ve been told I wouldn’t survive pregnancy.  But I still wonder.  And I wonder how he feels.

In the hospital, every time a baby was born, they’d play Brahm’s Lullaby over the loudspeakers.  My father, in there for terminal cancer, said every time, “They’re sending in another one to replace me when I’m gone.”

I have a view of the world where it’s not just your own genes that count, everything is connected.  My father must, too, to some degree, or he wouldn’t have been saying things like that.

Somewhere, there’s a single piece of redwood sorrel, pushing its way through the earth.  Unfolding its leaves, it feels sunlight for the first time.  It’s a feeling that non-photosynthetic creatures can only imagine.  Yet I’m certain sometimes that I’ve climbed trees, and pressed myself into the branches, and felt the sunlight pour nourishment into my hair.  They say autistic people have no empathy, but when’s the last time you saw a neurotypical person with that much involuntary empathy for a plant?

The redwood sorrel comes from the redwood soil, and the redwood soil is sacred to me.  The soil is the place where you can most readily see the processes of death, decay, and rebirth taking place over and over again on a daily basis.  When I think of my father dying, I think of the redwood soil, and I wonder what plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria he will turn into — and what they will turn into.  

Because there’s our literal descendants, the ones that come from spreading our genes through sex and reproduction.  But in death, we have a chance to have an entirely different kind of descendants.  They feed off of our bodies, our ashes, our composted remains, and whatever else is left of us.  We are conditioned to view this process as ugly.  There are good evolutionary reasons for our disgust at the sight or smell of a decaying body.  I am not immune to that disgust.

But it’s also profoundly beautiful.  And beautifully profound.  No matter what happens to any of us, once we die we will have more descendants than we know what to do with.  And those descendants won’t be limited to our species, or even to the animal kingdom.  It will be everything that feeds on us — and everything that feeds on them — and that is how life continues, and that is another way of having descendants.

I want to be a redwood tree when I grow up.  I want to be put in one of those Swedish compost machines and then buried under the Mother Tree.  Barring that, I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the Mother Tree and in the surrounding forest.  I want to become part of the forest that has given me everything important in my life.

Some people believe that once you are dead, your body isn’t you anymore.  I have mixed feelings about that.  I’ve seen recently-dead spirits, and had other people see exactly what I saw, often enough that I know there’s something of us that goes on beyond our death, although I believe that this is a short-term state, that ultimately, if everything goes right, it gets reabsorbed into Love, in the same way that our bodies get reabsorbed into the ecosystem.  But I also believe that our bodies are made of all these parts that have tried to stay alive for so long.  We are not just a mind, and not just a brain, and not just intelligence (and our brain is not the only intelligent part of our body).  We are cells that want to go on living, that go on cooperating with each other, that are important, that most humans in Western society pooh-pooh because they don’t want to see how much of themselves is collections of cells working together in amazing and wonderful ways, ways that show that the cells themselves have a drive to life as extreme as any our brain can concoct.

And when we die, and those cells begin to break down, they are what get eaten up by all the plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals that break down our remains.  We can do things to slow down this process, but not by much, and it wouldn’t be good to slow it down too far anyway.  We don’t belong taken out of the cycle of life and death.  We exist there for a reason.

And somewhere, right now, a single redwood sorrel plant, surrounded by all of its redwood sorrel friends, is reaching up to the light, feeling what only a plant can feel.  For the very first time.

And somewhere, right near it, a human being is picking another redwood sorrel plant and eating it.  And as sie eats that plant, the plant becomes part of hir.  

Nearby, another redwood sorrel plant dies of old age, turning brown, wilting back into the soil it was born from, becoming food for all kinds of microbes and plants and other creatures.

As long as we are tangled up in this cycle, we are never dead.  We go on to feed someone else, who feeds someone else, who feeds someone else.  And those are our descendants just as surely as any genetic grandchildren are.  And however much we may turn up our noses at the stench of decay, the fact of decay is one of the most beautiful and elegant solutions life has ever come up with.  Without it, we would have no life.

And the whole thing is run by Love.  And Love is in the soil, the soil is where I can see this aspect of Love operating the most, and that is why redwood soil is so sacred to me.

Every time I think of my father’s death, I think of what he will become.  He will be absorbed into the highest Love there is.  He will be absorbed into the plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria that consume his body.  And these are not contradictions.  These are not the ‘higher’ and 'lower’ aspects of death.  They are one and the same thing, and they are beautiful.

Notes:
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  5. tinytigerstripes said: Thank you for writing this.
  6. withasmoothroundstone posted this