Death always wins — so does life
A famous actor has died, a big name, a man who once did an iconic scene as a knight playing chess with death. ‘Death won the game’, someone on Facebook said. ‘Death always does’, someone else answered.
It struck me like a particularly narrow-minded remark, for I have long stopped seeing it that way.
I know, I know, we don’t like to think about our bodies as entities that will expire and perish, to be burnt or interred and consumed, one way or another. It confronts us far too bluntly with the fact that we don’t have an answer to the question where our personalities (or our souls, if you like, take your pick) go when that happens. A hereafter, a rebirth, the void? We don’t know and therefore, we are afraid of it.
The only thing we can say with any kind of certainty, is that no form of energy in the universe (and all matter, including us, our bodies and our thought patterns, is a manifestation of energy) is ever lost. All is recycled and put to a different use, one way or another.
That’s not even floaty New Age stuff, that’s physics. Or biology, if you like.
To say that death always wins, is therefore a typical human statement, fear-based, fact-wanting. It’s like saying the moon always beats the sun. Or ebb beats flood. Or exhaling wins from inhaling. Both are simply phases in a much bigger and more complex process, slices of time that both have their rights and their moment. Sure, ebb will always pull the water back to sea. Just like flood will wash it ashore again. It isn’t a fight, it’s a dance, a balance.
All in the cosmos builds itself up, one way or another, serves a purpose, knows a certain amount of time in that shape, and subsequently decays again. Its building blocks, up to the very last and very smallest of them, will be reused for something else.
Growth as a goal in itself is a cancer cell’s philosophy. Life forms have to decay and disappear in order for the greater whole, of which we are all a part, to be vibrant and healthy. It sounds like modern heresy in these overly mediatized times of anti-bacterial soap, sterile hospitals and panic over a nasty virus, but death is no enemy we should battle always and on every single occasion, on principle.
Life can only truly sustain itself if it is also allowed to die. That man should somehow be above this dynamic, or outside of it, is one of the most dangerous and nocious illusions our prefrontal cortex has ever suggested to us (and it’s the direct cause of the ecological drama we are headed for, for what else have we been doing, and are we up until today doing still, but worshipping growth as a goal in itself?).
All of the above does not mean I underestimate what impact death can have on us in our personal lives. We are social, emotional creatures, we love each other and we crave connection.
When someone dies, we miss his presence, her voice, their hug, the jokes, even the arguments, the things we felt when we were close to them. There is no denying that. And the sorrow of loss can cut to the core. That’s alright, it even has a beauty to it. For often we, too, will grow, precisely for owning those feelings. Pain will expose our deepest, most vulnerble parts, to ourselves and the world alike. If someone we love dies, a part of us dies with them.
But in both cases, that is exactly how space becomes available for something else to be born, as well.
So bring on the Magician, the shaman holding a star in one hand and a pomegranate in the other, connected to all that grows and dies in the cosmos, all of it one big promise of life and decay, of darkness and light. For what are the seeds of a dead fruit but tiny galaxies, ready to be born in the dark soil of a new universe?
Death always wins. Thank the heavens it does. For that is exactly the way this world works. And so does life.
A note on the images:
For over two decades, I have been working with the tarot, not as a divination tool but as a road to deeper insight in the present. The last couple of months I have been immersing myself in the imagery of the Marigold Tarot. A lot of people intuitively shy away from it. They consider the images to be sinister, especially because of the consistent use of bones and skeletons instead of recognizable figures. But bones, I learned, are nothing more than a deeper layer, beyond skin. They do not represent death, they represent the core of things, the underlying forces, the structures that carry us. Combined with the starry skies, the botanical richness and a number of well-chosen symbolisms, it makes these cards among the best and the strongest I have worked with so far. Those who are will to put aside old clichés and are open to their very sensuous and sentient approach, are rewarded with messages of great subtlety and deep gentleness. Let this be an invitation, as vast as the night sky.
