For one reason or other, or a combination of many, the various animal species become extinct. Life blooms and fades. The mystery of its temporal survival on life’s stage remains just that, a mystery. One observes the many patterns and organizational skills exhibited by the multitude of species, each furthering its maintenance and survival. Although often explained biologically or environmentally, one is impressed by the individual ants building their anthill, by the migration of the geese and the butterfly, by the bees and their honeycomb, etc. Call it instinct or the unknowable, but the intelligent human being seeks an answer to the patterns observed and to the activities characteristic of one’s own species.
Human beings find themselves in this same cycle. One observes that the human is endowed with the tools to continue the physical cycle of the human species. The human being adapts to the chaos within its species and seeks security for one’s self, family, and friends. While finding it easy to believe in the permanency of death for the individual ant, goose, butterfly, and bee, within the continuance of its own species, man tends to deny the permanence of his own death while the human species continues on its cyclical existence.
To be involved in the cyclical world phenomenon and yet embrace the elements true to the family, remains the human family’s challenge. The human family is composed of all the families of the world, and each family is a part of it. One must be both the tree and the forest, and able to see the near and the far.
Politics has turned the world upside down. The driving force of the human family, peace, mercy, kindness, and caring, has become secondary to power, wealth, greed, and pride. It has become difficult to recognize true togetherness, and not become simply robotic, intellectual individuals seeking security. The age of intellectualism has arrived with its compartmentalization, industrial machinery, usefulness and profit. One tends to ignore the whole relational event involving person, family unit, and the world family of humankind.
To go very far one must begin with the very near. One must consider how one fits into one’s own family, recognizing insensitivity, insecurity, attachments, biases, and one’s love, caring, and kindness in family life. One appreciates the expansion of good family values directed towards races and nations. The cyclical journey is an interesting one. Its beauty is revealed when one finds oneself, the infinite dimensions of one’s being. To see and be involved in the near and the far is the human perspective, or as some may say, “to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
And now I am putting on my shoes, tying up the laces and going for a walk. One might say, “I hope he takes a package of gum with him,” or perhaps, “he’s one individual in the cyclical flow of humanity.”
In this cyclical world, the marvel and majesty of death is as beautiful as the marvel of birth. They are the bookends of one’s life in the cyclical world. Death is neither the self’s escape from misery nor the pursuit for personal happiness. It is not qualified by thought or memory. It is somewhat similar to birth.
The Voice of the Plowman 