Taking Our Turns
Taking Our Turns in Life All of us living beings: we’re here for awhile, and then it’s time for others. It wouldn’t work to live forever. The earth would get too crowded! We tend to feel we’re different than the other plants and animals. When we die, it tends to be a tragedy. But we accept the death of other things as just the usual way of the world. It might be helpful to remember that we all live and die, taking our turn, all our fellow living neighbors and us. This might make death more acceptable, and life becomes something like a gift. There is so much diversity of all life on our earth: Some life lives only a short time, like caterpillars and their butterflies. Like garden plants gone with the winter. Some live very long, like the tall tree, towering over us smaller creatures. Imagine what wisdom such long-living plants can accumulate over a lifetime. We sit at their feet with awe. To ease our own fear of death, it might help to sit in a wild natural setting, quietly ...