Living and dying

In a peaceful moment, I wandered as I occasionally do to the website of a chap who's taught me a lot. The trouble is, I keep forgetting his lessons! He is the Barefoot Doctor, and he always switches on something good for me. This is his website.

In one of his posts, he talks about making friends with your death. Whether it happens in seconds or years, the switching off of our life is the one thing we can be totally sure of.

He points out that once we accept that, then we realise we have nothing to lose by living life's adventure to the full.

"You can still distract yourself with the games of the world but are no longer fooled into believing them to be the reason for living and so stop taking so seriously whether you’re winning or losing," he writes.

It reminds me of a couple of fragments of Mary Oliver's poems that speak the same language:

Tell me, what will you do with your one wild, precious life?

and

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

Our magnolia tree, flowering today, as it does at the beginning of every spring.