When Death Comes...

 Today's Stoic reading was on facing death, the reality of death, not shying away from the reality that just as a human is born, a human must die.  We are not eternal creatures but mortal.  The fact of our mortality must be embraced and understood if we are to live our life to its fullest.  We need to craft our lives like a work of art; a treasured pot crafted on the potter's wheel, a painting full of colours and shading, subtle nuances that make a primitive craft a work of art.

Crafting our life is the work of a Stoic, living according to Nature and OUR Nature is the way that this work of art can come to see the light.  Reducing our lives to what truly brings us bliss and peace, discarding the excess and living authentically.  This is my quest, my "sacred" charge from the Universe.  To live life fully according to the best of my nature and Nature itself.

When Death Comes – A Poem by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

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

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

I want to be the bride married to amazement and the bridegroom taking the world into my arms.  I want to know that I crafted my life to be something real.  I want to have fully lived and not just visited this world.  Let's all strive to find our bliss, get rid of the affluenza, embrace the Stoic life and live fully in this world of wonder and amazement.