Sabbat. Maybe because I was born
in early November. Maybe because I
have always loved Fall over all other seasons. Even that quiet waiting period I learned to love in upstate
New York, between when the leaves have fallen and the snow comes. Maybe because I have a contrarian
streak buried too deeply to excise. As one joker put it. “Life is a sexually transmitted terminal
condition.” Whatever the reasons,
I have always been drawn to Samhain.

When I was much younger I trued to imagine what a diet would be like that killed nothing. The best I could come up with was milk, honey, and unfertilized eggs. Everything else involved necessarily killing something. Even vegans not only kill the plants they eat, the farmers that grow those plants kill insects and often other animals, to protect their crop.

I will always take pleasure from an encounter I had with a comfortably smug Western Buddhist in San Francisco some years back. I believe it was at an American Academy of Religions conference. He told me that in time everyone would rise to the level of moral development he possessed in being a vegetarian.

I suggested he think of the following two examples. A hunter gets up in the morning, goes out, shoots a deer, brings it back and feeds his family. He does this several times a year, but otherwise leaves the woods alone.

The farmer gets up in the morning, cuts down trees and brush, killing those who live in them as “collateral damage.” Then plows up the field, killing other animals that live below the ground. Afterwards he plants his seeds, and then protects them and the plants that sprout from them from birds and animals. In some cases he must use lethal means to do so, as anyone who has dealt with gophers knows. All so the vegetarian will know there is no blood on his plate of spinach.

He had no answer. There was none.

Death is Always With Us

As soon as life arose, death entered into the picture. And the evidence is that multicellular beings arose when one single celled critter engulfed another, but rather than digesting it, entered into a symbiotic relationship with it. Without multicellular beings we could not have arisen to worry about the place death plays in a Sacred world.

The fruits we enjoy developed to be as appetizing as possible, so that someone would eat them and deposit the central seed elsewhere, helping to spread the plant, be it an avocado, peach, or honey locust. In the Americas some are now almost completely dependent on humans to survive because the megafauna of the Pleistocene that used to eat them and excrete the seeds are extinct. The same principle holds for the berries we eat. And of course, in eating a fruit or berry, we consume the cells that surround the seeds. So strawberries, cranberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries are all testimony to the importance of death.

If we look at plants and animals, most produce far more seeds and offspring than ever make it to maturity. All beings would increase exponentially until the planet was nothing but oaks or grasshoppers or guppies or people if death did not prune them back, usually drastically.

Everywhere we look, we find that all we treasure most comes with death. Death is apparently a feature, not a flaw.

As we approach Samhain, when we honor death and the end of things before the wheel of life turns again, I think it is well to think about these matters. I hope to do at least one post weekly on death.