Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, March 1, 2012

Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

Rabindranath Tagore


Superb! Poetic. Insightful. But … it makes me uneasy. It seems to belittle the value of our earthly Life.

However, I think about it. And then I see the mythic import of it.

I could almost make this my “mantra” as I close my eyes each night and fall into that mystery we call sleep, of which we have no lasting memory except the shocking flashes we call “dreaming”.

To die is to let go of what is Past. “Tomorrow” we awake to a new Life. It is resurrection. Death and Resurrection is the Reality. Or, perhaps, as Strauss expressed it in his wonderful tone poem, “Death and Transfiguration”.

Every morning that we awake to Consciousness, it is “the dawn”.

And it is radically “New”.

The lamp goes out as we close our eyes. We “die”.

We open our eyes; a Dawn beckons us to Life.

One day, it will be different.

It will be a dawn we have never seen before.

But we will not be afraid. We’ve been prepared for it.


Brian+