Our bodies easily know a Truth that our minds struggle to grasp.
The physical form naturally embraces the inevitable, sinking toward the earth, releasing itself without attachment, accepting the darkness that consumes it as part of the same cycle that brings the light. The body knows how to age. Cells know how to die. Blood knows how to leave the heart and find its way back again. Eventually, the body will return itself to the earth, becoming something else without asking permission or needing to know what comes next.
There is a willingness and surrender in the body that my conscious mind envies.
Because my mind fights the night.
It grips tightly to the illusion of permanence even while knowing that change is the only constant. It creates identities and stories and futures and then becomes devastated when they change. It loves people and animals and places while quietly constructing a world in which somehow they will always be there.
My mind knows how this ends. It just doesn’t seem to want to believe it.
I keep wondering why.
Why would we be given the ability to understand our own impermanence and simultaneously possess a mind so resistant to accepting it? Why can I comprehend death, anticipate it, imagine it, fear it, grieve it before it has even happened?
There is something seemingly cruel about this, and yet I find myself calling it privilege.
I don’t know how other animals experience their own mortality. I watch them protect their lives, flee danger, seek safety, care for their young. Their bodies clearly want to survive. Mine does too. But I wonder whether they lie awake imagining their own absence. Whether a moose standing quietly in the aspens considers that someday there will be aspens and no moose. Whether a bird anticipates the grief of losing another bird while they are still sitting together on the branch of their nest, feeding their young.
We can.
We can love someone and simultaneously understand that one of us will eventually experience a world without the other.
What a strange thing to know.
Maybe stranger still is how successfully we forget.
I move through most days as though the people I love will remain where I left them. I make plans months into the future. I assume another summer, another birthday, another morning waking up beside the same bodies I know so well. I become irritated by inconveniences and impatient with time as though there is an endless supply of it somewhere.
And then death comes close enough for me to remember, and for a brief moment, everything becomes painfully beautiful.
A hand. A voice. The way sunlight comes through the window. The rise and fall of a sleeping chest. The ordinary ritual of someone walking through the door.
I have seen enough evidence to know that death has the ability to make life exquisitely clear, and yet I continue to drink the nectar and ignore its origin, pretending sweetness simply appears in the moment without acknowledging what gives it its taste.
Death has been pouring that exquisite nectar the entire time.
How much of what I experience as beauty exists because it is temporary? How much of love’s intensity comes from its vulnerability to loss? Would a sunset hold the same beauty if it remained forever? Would I press my face into my dogs’ fur with the same tenderness if their bodies were eternal? Would a human life feel precious if there were an infinite number of days available to live it?
I don’t know. My usual answer these days.
More questions than conclusions, a subtle indicator that I am sinking deeper into a comfortable friendship with the mysterious–the peculiar experience of being human at all…
We have this consciousness capable of observing itself. I can experience my life while simultaneously wondering what it means to be experiencing my life. I can question where I came from, where I am going, what I am, why I am here. I can look into the night sky and recognize both my insignificance and the absolute enormity of getting to witness it.
Why?
What do we gain through the experience of questioning our own existence?
What does consciousness learn through separateness?
I keep returning to this idea of Source, Creator, God, consciousness, whatever word we use for something I cannot possibly name with certainty. If there is some kind of wholeness from which we came, I wonder what it would mean for wholeness to experience itself.
If everything is everything, where is the contrast?
How does wholeness know wholeness?
Maybe it requires the experience of separation?
Maybe consciousness fractures itself into billions of little perspectives and, for a while, each one forgets where it came from. We become bodies and names and histories. We become me and you. We experience longing because there is distance between us. We experience belonging because we have felt alone. We experience reunion because we once believed ourselves separate.
Maybe even death becomes something different from this perspective.
I wonder whether the body remembers something the mind has forgotten.
Maybe that is why the body can move toward the earth with such inevitability. Maybe some ancient intelligence inside of it recognizes the cycle because it has always belonged to the cycle. The same matter that temporarily becomes me has been countless other things before and will become countless other things after.
And still my mind says, But I am me.
I find that beautiful, too.
There is something tender about the mind’s insistence on itself, its desperate desire to remain this particular collection of memories and relationships and experiences. Maybe resistance is part of the privilege too. Maybe knowing death and struggling against that knowledge creates some dimension of being alive that surrender alone cannot offer.
I keep wondering what we gain from the tension.
The body returning.
The mind holding on.
The soul watching both.
Death waiting patiently nearby, less like a stranger approaching from somewhere in the distance and more like a companion who has been walking beside us from the beginning.
I don’t know what happens when we die. I don’t know whether Source is experiencing itself through us, whether separateness is an illusion, whether consciousness continues, whether the body possesses some wisdom my mind cannot access.
I only know that I am here for this brief and impossible moment, conscious enough to know that it will end and human enough to occasionally pretend that it won’t.
And this contradiction seems to be part of the grand experiment.
Maybe the question itself is part of the privilege.
So I keep drinking the nectar, and every once in a while, I remember to wonder who poured it.
