What nature can teach us about death

What nature can teach us about death

I’m very fortunate to be staying with family up on the Sunshine Coast of Australia for a few days. It is so very beautiful here. From 3 sides of the apartment I can see the ocean.  It’s stunning.

I’m not sure if I’ve always felt the affinity I have now for the ocean, but the first time I remember it clearly was when I was 23 and moved to Japan.  It was my first solo trip out of NZ and I was in a tiny Japanese town with nothing but a local mall (and a world famous formula one racing track, which meant nothing to me!) living with 2 girls who didn’t like me (nor I them), and teaching English (which made me nervous as hell to begin with).  For the first few months I felt lonely, isolated and often miserable.

So on my days off I would walk the half hour down to the pretty crappy beach covered in big concrete blocks and sit before the ocean.  And I loved it.  I would sit before the water and it made me feel connected to the rest of the world again.

12 and a bit years on and I love more than anything to see the ocean, to be near it. This might sound a bit woo woo (at least if you’re not a bit woo woo yourself) but over the past year the ocean has become one of my greatest teachers and mentors.

I sit and watch the waves rolling in and out and think about how that is very simply what nature does.  It changes.  It comes and goes.  It rises and falls.  And the ocean has no preference. No expectation.  No attachment.  The waves aren’t meant to be a certain size, a certain length, a certain age.  They roll in, they crash, they are absorbed back into the ocean.  Birth, life and death – nature has no preference because all is growth, all is change, all is transformation.

We are part of nature.  We are born, we live, we die, we are absorbed back into nature.  Take that literally or metaphorically. Take that as a physical or spiritual absorption – whatever makes sense to you.

Now and again you hear people trying to attribute human emotions to nature…..but nature doesn’t cry over change…because that’s what birth, life and death are …change. Part of a cycle, part of a whole. No guaranteed length.  In nature all is part of an ongoing pattern of change and no one piece is more valuable than another.

Our lives are the same.  We are born, we live, we die. Just as nature intended.  No set time, no guarantees.

Except for change, constant change.  Make peace with that and you change your relationship to death.

And that changes your relationship to life.

If you feel a link to nature this is a great way to explore the idea of death.  It doesn’t matter whether it is the ocean, the stars, the trees or the birds that draw you…spend some time sitting before nature and see what it has to teach you about death, life and everything in between.

Kristie

xx

Tagged as: bereavement, death, grief, nature