Mors omnibus instat.
(Common grave inscription)

Death follows everyone.

(pron = mohrs OHM-nih-boos IN-staht)

Comment: Death stands against everyone who thinks of death as an enemy or a
threat, that is. And, in our culture, that's pretty much everyone. I wish we
could reflect on this without getting into religion, but that does seem to be
the problem. In the west, religions have taught us through our parents and
others as we were growing up that death was the enemy, something to be feared.
In various religions, death is held at worst as a threat of eternal punishment,
and at best as a control over our behaviors. It's sort of the cosmic version
of "be good and I'll give you some candy", and "if you are bad, I'm going to
hurt you."

The reality is that we simply don't know about death except that it happens to
everthying. (Emphasis is on "know". We believe many things about death, but
belief is what we do in the face of what we don't know about. When one knows,
one does not have to believe). It happens to everything, and it happens every
day.

Every idea comes, has a life, changes, and dies. That is, every idea that we
have comes, stays around for a while (a few minutes, an hour, several days,
years, etc) and having lived out its usefulness, vanishes. The flowers in my
garden are the same. They sprout, bloom, display their beauty, dry up, drop
off the plant, and are gone--at least as flowers. They actually leave their
material in the soil and nourish the plants that come after them. In fact,
they become nutrients for the flowers that come after them. In fact, they
become part of the flowers that come after them. In that sense, death is more
like coming and going and coming again. It's a wave in a growth cycle that
keeps happening. I am not proposing a belief here, but simply observing what
happens with death in my garden.

Today, I will have 50 minutes with 5 groups of students. The life of our time
together will have a beginning, a time together, and an end. The end will come
before I am ready for it to, in some classes (and may not come quickly enough in
others!) but that is only true if I have an agenda that I must control to the
last movement. Otherwise, today, my classes will arise; I will enjoy them; and
they will depart. And the 150 of us who intermingle in those arisings together
will have left something of ourselves in each other. Our time together will
give birth to other arisings and departures.

This Latin verb "instat" can make for two very different translations: death
follows everyone. Or, death threatens everyone. WE can choose to see death in
everything that we do, a natural part of a natural world. Or, we can see it as
an enemy which tinges every day with unspoken threats. I think we have to
decide which one allows us to live our best life.