I wrote this earlier this month and have been toying with it for a while–but I decided to share it today.

There’s something sentient in death.  It’s 3:33 pm on 1/9/2024 and I’m watching the snow fall in the most abundant and beautiful way.  It’s torrential, we can’t keep up with it to shovel.  But it’s settling.  It’s quiet and peaceful.  The Earth is still very much alive but we all go to sleep at this time, or at least we are meant to.  Beneath this blanket of snow, deep, heavy with wet, barely able to move, we are meant to rest.  We are meant to tuck in and heal and recover.  We are meant to find the peace inside.  Death in this season is a thing, yes, but it isn’t death as we think of it.  It’s the passing of the season, the sign that more growth is to come.  This is the fallow season, the protection and preparation for what is next.  The hibernating for new birth to come in spring.  This is when we say good bye to the old and let it rest.  We let it sink beneath the cover of this heavy snow and become one with the earth again.  The tress too are covered with a thick blanket of snow, branches heavy but still holding their own.  They’re more still than normal, proudly holding what they carry.  They will come out of this different, weathered, and bare, but ready to grow into their next phase of self. 

There is something forlorn in this season, yes, because it speaks of the passing time and things we may not see again.  We must lovingly let them go because it was their time.  A colleague’s dad died yesterday and she came to work today, slightly bereft and perhaps bereaved in her own way, but she still came in and didn’t shed a tear.  Her emotions cut off as she mentioned how emotional her siblings are.  I’m not sure the entirety of the story that would bring her to feel that way, and I know that people don’t always share all of their experiences for whatever reason—life is complicated and we can’t always take things on the surface.  We each handle death in our own way but it’s a misnomer to say it’s the end.  Some of us are more in tune to the beginning that comes with the end (or the perceived end) or we are simply more aligned with the flow of life.  In that regard, death is the rising of a different consciousness.  Just as we let this season come to rest, there is much activity beneath the surface, the energy isn’t gone.  Energy moves and transmutes and changes and exchanges, but it isn’t truly gone.  Even as a memory, that energy is still there. 

Yes, there is sentience in death.  It is another form of awareness.  It is a hanging on of what we knew though our physical form is in a different light.  As quiet as this is, there is still some form of life there.  Death, too is aware.  We are trained to have an odd relationship with death, at least in our culture.  We hide from it, we fear death.  I fear death all the time.  There is so much to experience in this form and I want to experience it all.  But the truth is death is an exchange of energy.  It’s a new form of consciousness that our physical form can’t keep up with.  As we shed the body, this mortal stuff, we become aware again of something else.  The winter isn’t death even though it is the end.  So too is the nature of death.  It is merely the end of a chapter in our lives, the end of a way of being.  Death itself is sentience.  It is consciousness and it waits for us to be aware.  As we say goodbye to our loved ones, as our loved ones wait to say their final words to those who aren’t present, they are aware of how they are transitioning. Something we face every day.  Every day we have the option to decide how we view it.  We live a million ways in each moment that passes us.  Feel this depth. Feel this healing, feel this rest.  Feel the weight of the world and awe at the miracle of it—love it while we are here.