a matter of matter

Isn’t it strange to have a body? To be alive and dying, all the time. Last night, watching a fire, I thought, the wood doesn’t mind being burned, becoming ember, ash, smoke, air. There are things we can only become by dying, both the act and the process that takes a whole life to happen. I am interested in those things, though I know I can’t know them. To be interested in the unknowable is, I think, to be interested in the divine. I know that the deeper into the self we dive, the closer we come to the divine. Not the ego, but the internal internal. The point at which we are so interior that it’s all light, all spark, all of the fashion, trappings, furniture of externally dictated identity fallen away. Just the Self and the Everything, entirely porous to each other. This must be what it is in the womb. Gestation a microcosm of how we are held by the Everything, and how we move away from it to experience physical life. One thing I remember from high school physics is that matter is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. The matter of the wood does not cease to exist when it burns, but is transfigured into new forms, separate from where we found it, which is of course separate from its form as tree, as sapling, as seed. My grandmother died this year, after 100 years in her small, strong body. Remembering this about death, that it is not a destruction but a transformation, a release of both the physical structure of the body and the Everything stuff of the spirit, helps me. Death makes sense in this way, and holds then no urgency and less dread. Which is how I want to live.