When I die…

“Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being.”

Elizabeth A. Johnson

When I die…

Do not fill my body full of embalming chemicals trying to stave off decomposition. Also do not burn me, releasing my carbon dioxide into an already overburdened atmosphere. Rather, plant me. Make of my remains an offering at the alter of Mother Nature, so that I might be reincarnated as the Earth.

What? Reincarnation, you say? What does a life long skeptic know of reincarnation? I say that I have been reincarnated a thousand times already during this one lifetime. Everywhere I go, I shed bits of my self like fairy dust. Hair and skin cells are taken up by mites and fungi; those in turn are consumed by insects, lizards and birds. The atoms of my breath have been taken into the bodies of the flowering trees. My tears have evaporated and risen up to be reborn as clouds, which in turn rain down to feed the earth. Every day, I am reassembled into the world around me.

A few years back, while walking through the woods in the mountains of New Mexico, I came across several old trees, toppled over, roots exposed, bark peeling.  They struck me as the greatest teaching on impermanence the world had to offer.  In the area surrounding the great cadavers I noted tiny sprouts of saplings just emerging from the seed, growing in close proximity to towering trees in the fullness of their long life – the entire life-cycle, there on display.  On closer inspection, I saw within the decaying wood fungi, like flowers growing from the mulch, and a myriad of burrowing termite holes – the very substance of the tree being reincarnated before my eyes into its next life.  The soil becoming rich with the carbon and nitrogen once embedded in every cell wall.  A young sapling taking up the nourishment provided by the corpse of its ancestor.  

The green leaves of the mature tree release fresh life giving oxygen which is then taken up into my lungs, reincarnating as me.  Floating bits of pollen enter my respiratory system and are taken up by passing phagocytes, hungry eaters of the immune system.  The pollen is digested and the various molecules are expelled into my blood stream to be taken up and incorporated into my cellular organelles.  What was alien, other, tree, is now me, reincarnated.  The termite too is made up of what was once tree.  The woodpecker who eats the termite, another life in the long chain.  Does the woodpecker remember its past lives as termite and tree?

We are all the same being – the fungus, the termite, the woodpecker, and me. The Zen Master says, “The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.”

As I am a continuation of my ancestors, so too my daughters harbor molecules that I once called my own. As they gestated in my womb, they were formed from the very elements of my body. My atoms live on in them still, as atoms from my mother abide in me. The odds that anyone now alive has molecules in their body that were once part of another specific person (the Buddha for example) are hotly debated.  People smarter than me have attempted to do the math and the results range from extremely slim chance to absolutely, you have breathed several thousand molecules from Jesus’ last breath.

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?”

Rumi

So, I entreat you once again: When I die, give my body to Mother Earth. Allow the karma, good and bad, built up in my bones over this lifetime to determine my rebirth. Whether it be as a humble blind worm wriggling through the loam, or a majestic bird of prey gliding on the wind currents. Facilitate my immortality. “Take your hat off, boy, when you’re talking to me and be there when I feed the tree.”

Metta

A word to my non-Buddhist friends: In our western culture, contemplation of one’s own mortality is often viewed as morbid and to be avoided at all costs. In contrast, the Buddha taught his followers to frequently meditate on the inevitability of one’s own death in order to better understand impermanence. I would like to reassure you that I am not in any way suicidal. Nor am I keeping secret some grim diagnosis. This post has been several years in the writing, perhaps sped along by the passing of my mother in 2017.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Mark Twain

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