Tag: Death

“all of my enterprises will fail” (Stephen Jenkinson)

fool

Sometimes you hear something that shakes you in a way that won’t be unshaken, or at least that’s the way you hope it’ll be; that the cracks will ache enough to remind you the ground’s not as solid as you pretend it is. This piece from Stephen Jenkinson is one of those times.

“People say to me all the time, ‘How do you keep going? What’s the point? How do you ask yourself to keep going, when the futility is so palpable?’ And I say to them, ‘hey, the last part of what you said is the answer to your question.’

I know all of my enterprises will fail. I know that already. I’m not doing this, any of these things, holding out hope that somehow anything’s going to change as a result of doing them. All I’m trying to do, is, participate in some small way, in the small collection of memories that will accompany my death. That’s all I’m trying to do. Is have a small part to play in whatever those memories might be. Understanding now that the way I’m proceeding is helping to author those things that people will remember, if they’re inclined to. But there’s not much more to it than that. But, that is not a recipe for futility, that is what I’m trying to to say. One of the things I learned at the deathbed is, that’s the whole thing. That’s the magic of it, is that our willingness to remember turns out to be a kind of banquet, that we don’t know how to invite anybody to, and we’re not sure how to cater for it. But the remembering is the food.”

—Stephen Jenkinson, in an interview with Ken Rose

Stephen Jenkinson: The innate skill of obedience

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“Every natural thing in this world has the innate skill of obedience. With the North American history of slavery in plain view, and with every weekend Buddhist looking to kill every Buddha they meet on the road, obedience generally goes against the North American grain. As adults, we are not big on obeying. The quality of being obedient is not much sought or taught, except to small children while they are small. Etymologically, obedience has nothing to do with being some kind of slave. It means instead a willingness and an ability to listen to what is, to attend to it. Obedience is a following the grain of things. With that skill of obedience, every natural thing knows above all how to be itself, come what may. Dying is a natural thing, and left to its natural self each living thing knows how to die. The body has the genius of a natural thing, and it knows how to obey the accumulation of time, wear and tear, disease and symptoms. It knows how to stop. But med-tech, not in any sense a natural thing, knows how to subvert the way disease and symptoms have of keeping and marking time, and in doing so it subverts the body’s knowledge of how to stop.”

—Stephen Jenkinson, “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul”, North Atlantic Books, 2015, page 51.

Desert lessons

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The desert does not fear death. The desert mouse fears the hawk, the desert deer fears the human, the human fears itself. But the desert is not afraid. It is beyond fear, larger than every life in it; and at the same time, the desert is every life in it.

The desert is not separate from lives filled with fear, and hunger, and contemplation. It holds these, and every step and screech, every birth and death, every flight and stand, every shift and growth; it holds them but it is not held by them. It is not trapped by them.

In the desert, death is natural. A carcass drying in the sun, a prickly pear cactus decaying into the ground, an insect serving a snack to a bird. There is no shame, no judgment, no restraint, nothing but what is.

What is natural in me is co-opted by discontent, desire, doubt, uncertainty. And this, too, is natural. But unlike the prickly pear, or the prey, living shoulder to shoulder with death, I push away anything I don’t want to face. Sensations and feelings arise and I step aside, half here and half somewhere else, watching uncomfortably.

But what I feel needs me in order to be felt, like the desert soil needs the prickly pear’s dry husks, like the hawk needs the mouse. If I’m unwilling, what I need to feel doesn’t go away, it slumps between life and death, not lived and not let go either.

As nature ourselves, why is it so hard to live naturally? Why do we serve ego over essence, building layers and barriers between our minds, our bodies and what is? Why do I fight against the process that is my life, that is life — the process that I have no choice about inhabiting, from the moment I’m conceived to the moment I die?

How much easier it would be to surrender to what is, as nature calls so softly, and sometimes harshly, for me to do. As God calls so tenderly, and sometimes forcefully, for me to do.