Martin LeFevre: Practicing Death

It’s hot, but not too hot for a short hike in the Upper Park at noon. The grasses are desiccated, and the hills are somber brown, but the cliffs still beckon the eye and speak to the heart.

At the first gorge, some middle age guy is looking through binoculars at the college kids swimming in Salmon Hole over 100 meters below. Then an old guy with walking stick and an attitude walks up. A longtime local, he says he’s been coming to the canyon in the semi-protected Upper Park for 60 years. He derisively comments on how a lot fewer young people use the park than in the olden days, ‘because they’re on computers or playing video games.’

Completing the loop, I walk back through dense foliage just above the stream, before coming to my favorite swimming hole. A college-age couple precedes me down the short, steep, rocky path. Another couple is already there, sunbathing on the rocks near where I usually take a sitting. The first couple walks further upstream, and I remove my boots and shirt and take a shallow dive into chilly water.

After a delightfully refreshing dip, I find another sitting spot in the shade a hundred meters or so upstream. The college kids who were there when I arrived are loud, or rather the guy trying to impress the girl is, but they leave before long.

Some distance away, a naked old fellow who’s there almost every time I am, wades into the creek to cool off. Swimming clothes were almost verboten in Upper Park during the hippy years; now they’re optional, though it’s almost always men who do the Garden of Eden thing.

The solitude and stillness of the canyon begins to seep in, and meditation ignites. Questions come up, are clarified by spontaneous bursts of insight, and fall away. Death, the ever-present actuality we humans are continually pushing away out of fear, comes near. Then, for a few timeless minutes, death is transcended.

With the complete negation of thought and personal concern, the sacred simply is. It brings with it a consecration from the infinite.

Suddenly a Great Blue Heron flies low and slow directly overhead, its crooked neck and huge wingspan rendering it a thing of immense beauty and wonder. The sitting is over.

Can one practice death? What is the place of death in a healthy, vibrant life? Is it precisely the awareness of and contact with death what gives one a healthy, vibrant life?

The incalculable carnage from wars is not death; it is organized murder and mayhem. The terrible diseases of man, such as the affliction of HIV-AIDS, especially in Africa, are not death; they are waste. The industrial slaughter of animals for our own appetites, rather than the necessary killing that prehistoric peoples practiced, is not death; it is barbarity.

Death is something immeasurable, synonymous with the source of creation. Death is not a one-off, either in an individual’s life or anywhere else. Seeing it as such is to miss life itself, because there is no life without death. I’m not concerned with what happens after death, but with what happens when one is aware of death, without fear, during the bloom of life, which is the only way one can be truly aware of it.

It surprises me every time when a deeper meditative state ignites, how near, indeed how omni-present death actually is. I don’t mean in the way it’s usually said, (‘the fragility of life,’ how one can die at any moment, and all that rot). I mean the completely non-morbid essence of it, how every moment life is dying and being reborn. Only humans don’t know how to die, though the evolution of conscious thought presents a challenge that other animals don’t have—the knowledge that one’s life will inevitably end.

Contacting the essence of death is foundational to the continuous renewal of life. Can one, on a regular basis, fearlessly and cheerfully touch the actuality of death? Yes; that is practicing death. Then, if one does not put off what is inextricable from life, when one’s time comes, would it not be much easier to let go?

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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