Once

What happens when you die?

The stone tossed into a pond may no longer be visible, but the waters surrounding where it fell ripple ever outward.

~ ~ ~

Additional thoughts on this topic: Out of necessity, we carve the world up into grammatical categories.  But when dealing with meta-physics, we run into all kinds of philosophical pseudo-problems. 

For example, I am a noun, and I do verbs.  There is a separation made between me and my actions.  But from another perspective, is it not more accurate to say that I am this particular action in this particular moment?  And these actions radiate outward affecting people, places and things in who knows what ways. 

If there really is this kind of ontological seamlessness between what we call nouns and verbs, then what we call birth and death are really only belong to the nominal reality, and what is immediately visible to us.  

The truth is, every thing we do, whether out of love or hate or mere indifference, we carry a great response-ability for this very moment—nothing can be taken back, nothing can be erased from the vast web of causality out of which we arise and act within. 

If there is an immortality, it is not that of some imagined self-subsisting unchanging ego—but rather it is of our actions, how we inter-act with everything and everyone around us on a daily basis.  We continue—but without this ego—in the myriad ways we have touched those around us.

It is in this sense that birth is no creation from nothing, nor is death annihilation—everything IS, yet this IS is also endless flux, the formation and dispersal of myriad beings.  All that remains is our resolve to embrace both the terror and beauty and the sorrow and the joy in which we share within this brief notch of time.  

“Let us suppose that we say yes to a single moment; we would thus have said yes not only to ourselves but to all existence.  For nothing is isolated, either in ourselves, or in things.  And if happiness makes our souls vibrate and resonate even once, all the eternities will have been necessary to create the conditions of this single event, and all eternity has been approved, saved, justified, affirmed in this unique instant in which we have said yes.”  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments: 1886-1887

~ ~ ~ 

Once for each thing.  Just once; no more.  And we too,
just once.  And never again.  But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, IX (translated by Stephen Mitchell)