Death and Taxes or Why I Carry a Pocket Knife

Benjamin Franklin once said that there were two certainties: death and taxes. However, Death remains the lone contender on our carbon based, water covered planet when it comes to ecology and renewal. Surely, taxation is a certainty on this primate ship called Earth, but it will last only as long as our systems of order and control.

I was inspired to write about Death in India where it is something that is unhidden and natural. There is no hiding it, bodies are burned on the riverbanks, bodies are thrown into the river and dead dogs lay on the side of the road. Death, decay and putrification are everywhere. It smells, it assaults the senses and if you are not used to it, it can be terrifying and gross. The beautiful thing though, is that in India they understand something very deeply that we have forgotten; without Death, there is no Life.

When you are born you start on your journey to Death and in Eastern philosophy, when you die, you are on your way to being born; the big circle of being. Native philosophy also supports this idea, the Medicine Wheel used in ceremony and ritual is a physical manifestation of the circle of life that we all walk from cradle to grave; it is a journey that none can escape. It is a journey that not many pay attention to or have a relationship with, rendering Death unpalatable and spearheading a multi-billion dollar "scary" movie industry and a lone holiday where Death has become a commodity; a kitsch plastic skeleton sold at Wal-Mart for $1.

I came to know Death intimately over the last year and I now consider her an old friend. Preceding my father's death I spent a considerable amount of time connecting the dots between Death and fertility, Death and goddess worship, Death and the cycles of the biological world. Even during my under grad I studied genocide and at that time hoped to follow in the footsteps of Clea Koff, The Bone Woman, who worked on the mass graves in Kosovo and Rawanda as a forensic anthropologist.

I also have a secret inner science geek that loves fungus and mushrooms. Out of death comes life and as such my fascination and relationship with Death is two fold, it feeds my inner anthro science nerd and creates fertile soil for my sense of spirituality.

This is why I started carrying a pocket knife, you never know what little treasure you are going to stumble upon out in the great wide world.

Which brings me to the photo of Bree and I in woodland drag.

About a year ago we were in the process of fastidiously making those ostentatious costumes. I am also an avid fan of symbolic ritual; bringing something from the inside into the outside world or bringing something from the outside into the inner world. The costumes in question were meant to represent our understanding of and appreciation for the power of Death; most importantly it's symbolic ties to the changing seasons, the sacred feminine, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, life and subsequent decomposition...all things squashed, burned at the stake or relegated to the sanitary napkin aisle by the great European patriarchal boot stomp.

The costumes were meant to not only capture those larger meanings or larger "Deaths", but also infinite smaller ones; changes in jobs, relationships, families, changes in perspective, changes in habits or patterns...for all we all go through many mini-deaths throughout our days, weeks and years and how we recognize and celebrate those is often how we interpret and live out the BIG ones. Much of the symbolic rituals have died out in our culture a long with rights of passage and solstice and equinox ceremonies; leaving us drifting rudderless and unconnected from the world and the cyclical fleshy bodies that support us.

These particular costumes were a call to come back to life in ritual, a celebration of friendship and the variety of mini-deaths we had shared and in that there was tremendous meaning. There was also meaning in how the costumes were made, each piece painstakingly collected or extracted from nature or given by a friend over the course of a year; all animal skin, beach glass, feathers and bones.

I don't use the word "extracted" loosely. I made several elated phone calls from the end of the point to Bree happily telling her what kind of corpse I had stumbled upon, noting bone size and length as well as possible costume placement. After finding something, the options were to either bury it and wait or break out the ol' Swiss Army and take the parts I wanted and boil them at home.

Hey, its simply the time saving option when you need to remove fur and flesh from bone. I also now know why witches got such a bad rap; it is certainly fucking freaky if it is outside of your paradigm to be comfortable boiling a dead thing (other than meat that comes neatly wrapped in plastic and foam, of course).

I once got a phone call from a friend while boiling a skull on the stove top. He asked, "What are you up to?" I replied, "Uhhhh...um. I'm not sure you really want to know."

And isn't it just that way with Death?

But look on the bright side, and yes, I believe there is a bright side to Death; make her a third party to your life and live in the present. Grieve the endings, accept the losses and use it all to fertilize the garden of your inner being. Learn what you will from her and live, truly live, and if you must boil a skull on your stove top be thankful that they no longer subject people to water boarding for engaging in nature related rituals, at least for now they save that for terrorists.

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Norman Cousins