fantasies of death

I've been thinking about death. I blame my meditation practice. Fantasies of death have been coming to mind while meditating with increased frequency over the last couple years. About a year and a half ago, near the end of a meditation course, a particularly excruciating one arose.

In the realm of apocalyptic 2012 theories, one I've heard is that not only will the earth's magnetic poles shift, the planet's axis will shift, literally role over on its side so that points on the equator will become the new polar ice caps, and the antarctic continent will become habitable. This could happen quite quickly in this theory.

Now, I don't give this much credit. But somehow, on the morning of the tenth day of this meditation course my wandering mind, my whimsical, flittering, fluttering mind landed on this idea, and explored it. I imagined a scenario where it happened so quickly that all of a sudden we at Twin Oaks (where I was still living at the time) would get snowed in before we realized what was happening. And in this scenario there would be now relief, no escape. It would be a death sentence.

Of course, our stores of food and fire wood would keep us alive for some months. Then, gradually they would run out. I knew what I would do. I would meditate a lot. I would prepare myself for death as I've learned to do. But what about Willow? How could he understand what was happening? How could he cope?

I imagined trying to teach this (at that point) four year old boy how to meditate. Sitting with him as he cried, screaming, "why can't we leave?!" or "I'm hungry! Why can't we get food?!" or "I'm cold, why won't it stop snowing!" or "What's going on? What's going to happen?" And I would hold him and try my best to explain. "We're trapped, and eventually the food will run out, or the fire wood. We're going to die. It's going to feel really bad and there's nothing we can do to stop it."

I would try to stay calm, try to keep peace in myself as my heart broke over and over again. As a parent, as a human, one of the most painful experiences I've had to face is seeing Willow in pain, physical or emotional. Often, it's like I'm feeling it, only I feel more powerless, which only makes it worse.

Lately, new fantasies of death have been coming out. In case you didn't know there's been a world food crisis. Millions of people all of a sudden finding themselves without enough to eat. There have been food riots. I've been thinking about that. What if that happened here? Simply not enough food on the shelves to feed everyone, or it's so expensive that people, that I, can't afford to buy enough. What if people rioted? Would I riot too? Would I try to get enough for myself in a mad rush knowing that if I did someone else would go hungry? I'm lucky to be close with people who garden. But what happens when winter comes and there's just not enough?

There are other more plausible theories of catastrophe. Atmospheric, geophysical, solar disasters. All unlikely, but they've all happened before, and could literally happen again at any time. The southeast Asia tsunami. Katrina. The typhoon in Burma. The earthquake in china. I'm lucky. Any one of us is lucky.

Willow and I saw a movie in a planetarium that showed a representation of the asteroid colliding with the earth that wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientist think that in the first hour after the asteroid hit the temperature on the planet reached 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Planet wide black out of ash and dust ensued, dark enough so that plants didn't have enough sunlight to survive for 6 months. How anything on the planet managed to survive that is a wonder to me.

Thinking about all these things, I feel very small. I realize how fragile and insignificant I am in the grandness of time and space and geophysical, planetary, intrastellar phenomena. And then I look around me, in the coffeeshop I'm sitting in, or on the street I'm driving down, or in the dance club with people in their cute outfits doing their mating rituals.

And I think, what is life? What is this complexity of culture we've created that we so take for granted? Large scale cataclysmic events aside, there are the age-old cataclysms of sickness, injury, old age, death.

A friend recently dislocated her ankle in a bike accident. She may never walk right again. Even at 28 years old I'm finding that I gain weight much more easily than I use to, and my digestive system in general is much more sensitive. I have a chronic neck spasm from a childhood injury that will never fully heal, and will probably lead to gradual decrease in mobility the older I get. And I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with an increasing number of ailments.

I firmly believe that facing our pain is most profoundly life changing, transformative, revolutionary, social change-making action we can take. The less afraid of pain we are, the less afraid of death we are, the more open to love and joy and life we are. I've dealt with a lot of pain through my meditation practice, but I know I still have so far to go. I'm still very afraid of pain. Getting shots, or my blood taken, still makes me cringe, for example. And the thought of a painful death, particularly burning to death or drowning, are very hard to think about.

But I welcome these fantasies. I don't dwell on them, but I greet them when they arise, acknowledge them, feel how they feel, and let them pass. I'm grateful that I've started this practice now. It is perhaps naive hope, given the state of the world, that I will live to a ripe old age, but that is what I imagine. May I, and may we all, learn to face our pain and, ultimately, our deaths, with peace and calmness and gratitude.