sheepoverboard.com

To Live is to Suffer

Life is inevitably pain, sickness, death and decay.

Everything is touched by the shadow of dissatisfaction, imperfection, disillusion.

No one escapes.

Sound familiar? Not just my pathetic publisher on a good day, nor just any of us on our 50th birthday.

Simply the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, philosophy 101, lesson numero oono for every child when a parent dies -

You grow old. You die. Life Sucks

If you’re lucky, you don’t grow old.

SheepOverboard is obsessed with life, the universe, and everything. Especially (and increasingly with age) the moment our bodies fail, launching a dismembering of mind, spirit and matter.

Left alive in this flickering moment we ponder dying or rotting flesh, shell of a person who was, such corpora delicti of life’s offence against itself that draws our bewildered incomprehension toward that dimly perceived and feared Transition, the doorway where time stops, where life’s experience is said to replay, where light claims the pure and burning darkness the fallen, where big bang merges with Omega - where ‘we’ step beyond the paradox of eternity.

Images of Death

Images of death circulate freely now on the net.

We who don’t work with recently and violently deceased, nor have experienced the vileness of war, tend to be morbidly curious - if somewhat nauseous - at first sight of stark destroyed bodies.

Belief - suspended for carnage in horror flicks - returns with vengeance when the victim is real, playing a tortuous kaleidoscope of emotions on an area of mind normally tightly shut.

The Jumper ~ Transformed in the blink of an eye from a human being to its component parts, decelerating from 120 miles per hour to zero - instantly.

Bear’s Meal ~ A sixteen-hundred pounds-weight, 14 foot-high bear ate this unhappy camper’s leg, amongst other tidbits. The creature, later killed, had acquired four 38 caliber and twelve 7mm bullets.

Croc’s Meal ~ (alligator?) Hand of fate. Stomach contents of man-eating reptile, a coffin none of us would wish, at least the way of getting into it.

Snake’s Meal ~ Per the crocodile, above.

Foetus ~ somewhat taboo, but this haunting iconic image can only provoke wonder.

Worse than Death

Most sickening, however, our impunity to a vast community of less fortunate fellow beings who live close to death, in abject misery.

I feel guilty sitting here publishing the image below.

As if it’s going to help anyone and my duty is done.

You feel strongly too, but don’t know what to do, right?

Well, that at least is the first step. Let the feeling grow inside and an opportunity to effectively help will present itself. The saint-like are out there helping, so don’t panic. The more you learn and think, the more effective your help will be when the moment arrives, and how you might help becomes suddenly obvious.

Reflect a little more here with this essay on our Gluttony.