On Darkness, Death, and other Parts of Life

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the passing of Halloween, autumn is fully upon us.  There is no denying it now. My morning alarm goes off in the pitch black of night; we sit down to supper in darkness.  Leaves have fallen to cover the sidewalk and whatever dog poop that might be there.

Time to shift gears.

Death is a part of life.

The trees spent the summer growing their leaves out toward the sun, making them out of air, water, and a few other ingredients taken from the soil.  

The leaves have now fallen and will spend the winter in decay.  By decay, I mean they are themselves food for bacteria and various other microorganisms.

The poop under the leaves will decay as well.

It all goes back into the system of life.

The Indians, the indigenous peoples, understood.  They believed everything was living. They believed even the rocks were alive. And consider this: rocks are broken down by lichen and other organisms.  Their components are released into the soil and into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The rocks themselves are a part of the system.

The Indigenous Peoples thought the earth itself was alive. Some of them found the notion of plowing the earth to be as offensive as cutting a woman’s breast.  The earth was their Mother.

The Earth is our Mother. We--Life--springs forth from it.  Life on Earth is made from it just as each of us is made from our mother’s body.

That is a good paragraph.  Reread it. It will do you good.

But I digress.

We who live in the northern hemisphere are now going into our time of darkness; our time of death. We mark this with Halloween; with All Saint’s Day’; with El Dia de Los Muertos.

We think about those we love who have died. We think about our own death.  We think about the day when we ourselves will fall like leaves onto the Earth to be taken apart and put back into the system.  Even dead we are part of life; like the soil; like the rocks that become the soil.

But that is just a part of it.  There is a layer of human life that is above just eating and drinking; urinating and defecating. 

Satan tempted Jesus to turn the stones to bread. Jesus replied that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

When we die, our lives are broken down by those who are left much like microorganisms break down the leaves.  By our lives, I mean our actions, the way we conducted ourselves, the way we treated others. This can begin at our funeral in the pastor’s homily as he lays our life out as an offering. That casts the pastor doing something analogous to what a vulture does to a fallen wildebeest, so I think I will not press that analogy too far.

In any case, our deeds become a part of others' lives as they choose to repeat them.

Talking about death, talking about the dead is a necessary and good part of life.  We honor them and we serve ourselves by emulating what was worthy in them.

They live again to the extent their lives were words from the mouth of God.

During the summer, we are turned outward into the world.  The World of Light and the World of Life is all around us. When the light recedes, we turn inward.  We examine ourselves.  We assess who we are, and we plan who we would like to be.

We sit in front of the hearth (usually tuned to Netflix or Amazon Prime) to contemplate who we are, to plan who we would like to be.  Can we make the actions of our lives to be words coming from the mouth of God?

We think such things when the darkness and cold are at our door like a pair of starving wolves.

The sun will come again. Life will begin anew.

Until then we wait.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )