Julian Summerhayes

“I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that.” ―  Martin Prechtel,  Secrets of the Talking Jaguar Grief. Right there. I can't escape it -- now, not ever. And you? We think of it as feeling: "I lost my mother/father/friend." It sits behind everything we think and do -- for a while at least. But what if grief was something more profound? Like...? Being a faithful witness to everything that our loved one stood for and represented to us and their community. Better still, our practised grief was celebratory in its purview -- something that we forever demonstrated in our words, deeds and life. Right now, I'm wrestling with all those people who I once knew and those...

  Death -- our death -- should inform our lives, but it rarely does. It all comes too late. But imagine it: being told the precise day you'd leave this world. Would it change the way you saw your life and lived it? Who knows?  Right now, gripped as I am by the memories of my ancestors, I feel an overwhelming sense to sit with the knowledge, the absolutely certainty that I've got limited time available to me. And that doesn't mean, as I did previously, I want to run scared. Instead, I've a celebratory feeling in and around death. That's not dark, nor morose. It's life -- all of it. And you? Do you think about the end? Perhaps not. It's too soon. But one day you and others will have to comprehend what it means to be gone.  I find that more a little sobering, but in the meantime I'll keep leaning into my mortality to explore how my life should and must change to recognise the finality of this gift we call life. Love, Julian Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash

I know, it's hardly the most appealing title but that's life, right? Two sides of the same thing. And yet, what do we do? Rush forward in the hope of finding meaning in our days. We seldom do. What if, instead, we embraced death in the same way we sought to strangle life? What if? But even to posit the question appears nihilistic, practically defeatist. It's not always been like that -- I'm convinced of it. When life was short, often hanging by a thread, I'm sure we weren't seduced by (at the very least) the word voodoo that surrounds the 'D' word and so much more. What am I advocating for? Honesty, openness and, dare I say, truth. If not that, then what? Long life, quick death. That's a myth. In fact, with our medically-disposed, buy-more-time way of seeing the world, all we're doing is buying us more death. Yes, you heard me. And that's a new phenomenon and one, in my humble view, we're not equipped to deal with, lest still discuss in c...