This week the cycle of life and death has been very evident.

We’ve watched otters catch and devour writhing fish, an eagle tearing apart a lamb.
We’ve eaten meat raised in fields fertilised with seaweed torn from the seabed by winter storms.
We’ve marvelled at sand that sparkles with mica from rocks eroded by frost and wave.
We’ve walked along beaches strewn with empty shell and bleached bone.
We’ve considered the vulnerability of tiny goslings and young trout and how low their chances of reaching adulthood.
We’ve talked of the preciousness, the sacredness, the beauty of both living and dying.

Because, of course, both are just a part of the whole, the intricate cycle that is existence. One isn’t good and the other bad. It’s just we’ve lost our connection to dying, to accepting that both living and dying are intrinsically linked.

We live as if we will live forever, despite knowing that is untrue. We shy away from death, from dying, from reality.

And yet each day, vegan or carnivore, we kill so we can eat, it’s a natural part of life, its just most of the time we are distanced from this reality by shrink wrap and freezers and buy one get one frees.

Each day we unknowingly or knowingly walk past people facing their mortality. Each day in our communities, people are grieving and facing loss. Each day in our local hospital or hospice or quietly at home, people are dying.

How much more vibrant, how much more cherished would life be if, as individuals, as communities, as a society we embraced death as openly and uniquely as we embrace living?

I’m finding that the liminal path I’m walking is the most enriching, the most revealing, the most empowering place to be. Yes, it is also scary and bleak and lonely at times, but oh…it is so very full and rich and beautiful too.