A Year to Live

The intention of this work could just as easily have been represented by the heading ‘A Year to Love.‘ The thought of death offers an opportunity to broaden our appreciation of being alive. It offers the opportunity to broaden our love of life by including death. It might seem paradoxical, but our vitality is enhanced by intimate familiarity with the presence of death in the midst of life.

If words refer to experiencing, then what do we make of the words ‘dying’ and ‘death,” when we aren’t referring those words back to some kind of personal experience? Without referring the word to our experiencing bodies, it has no grounded meaning at all. What we are doing, when we avoid the thought of death (our own death and that of those we love)? Aren’t we allowing fear to create the meaning of the word ‘death.’ If we avoid thinking about it, the words around death become empty of experiencing, uninformed by real living; because they are then formed only from our imagination. Further, our fears generate the imagined spectre of annihilation. Which we counter with fantasies of eternity. Doesn’t sound smart, does it, to leave the meaning of birth and death solely to our fearful imaginings? The Buddha’s way places death in perspective – as something which itself dies.

What could the experience of death mean for us, when enriched by intimacy with life in its wholeness? Given the certainty that we will separate from those we love – when either they die, or when we die – can we invite the knowledge of death into our hearts and embrace our loved ones in the fierce light of reality?

It’s perfectly natural that living things die. It’s perfectly natural that we grow old. It’s perfectly natural that we separate from those we love. My interest in this work is to find the life-forward movement which may be there in the encounter with death, and to explore the possibility that love flowers with such an inquiry.

My Zen teacher Subhana Barzaghi told of how she asked the yogi Father Bede Griffiths, “What about death?,” and how his answer was: “Ah, Death! Death is a sacrament.” These pages will explore what that could mean, and how that could be a felt experience.

I hope you’ll accompany me in this year long inquiry.

  • Christopher, February 2025.