“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.