Not Dead Yet!

One of my pointedly few vows for blogging was never to apologize for periods of time without writing.  Nothing to Attain continues to attain nothing, and all is well.  


Pari-Nirvana Sesshin happened in February.  Not surprisingly, my mind really does not want to meditate on death.  It writhes around in a weird mix of humor and anxiety, making for a bit of a turbulent week.  Interestingly, one meditation that did settle my mind was the closest I could get to meditating in the charnel ground:  Imagining my own body decomposing, in as much detail as possible.  Except that I have very little training in biology of any sort, and I avoid zombie movies, so there are lots of blanks to fill regarding this process.  


But I got curious about it.  So I got home, googled around and found a couple books to help me.  You've probably already read it, but Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach!  How did I miss this?  Why didn't you tell me?  


The third chapter is about the University of Tennessee's Anthropological Research Facility, aka the "body farm".  It is as close to a charnel ground as we might get in our culture, and provided exactly the kind of detail about what actually happens to bodies when they are left to decompose on their own schedule.  Mary Roach:

Do you recall the Margaret Hamilton death scene in The Wizard of Oz?  ("I'm melting!")  Putrefecation is more or less a slowed down version of this.  

Beetles, maggots, and bacteria, oh my!  Such a powerful antidote to body obsession and stuff obsession.  It occurred to me that all the calcium supplements I take will just end up in the ground someday, one way or another.  Impermanence.    


I learned that the creator of the body farm also wrote a book called Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales.  It's on my list.  I think these windows into forensics are way better than those CSI shows, which I also avoid.    


Our Sangha has a yearly poetry gathering online every March.  One of the week's themes was on death.  Here is a poem I wrote for that the other day: 


Meditation on Death and Life
Everything falls apart.
Starting with our jaws, as we meet death
with open-mouthed amazement.
The bacteria in our bellies loosed like a tsunami
liquefying and changing the landscape.
Not to mention to the janitorial crew; millions strong and teeming.
Indeed affirming the lives of flies,
thanks to whom, the traveling swallows,
snapping their beaks audibly in the fields,
feed baby birds with hungry open mouths.