End

“I can hope how this will end.”

Lent is a meditation on death. It mirrors the agricultural cycle and perhaps emerged because of it — a time of year where everything looks barren, dormant, bare. The thrill of harvest is long gone. The winter warmers around Christmas are gone. Plant life is retracted, cold, and apparently lifeless. Buddhism calls its death meditation “Maraṇasati” and it invites us to contemplate mortality. Death can strike any minute. All things must die. Who are we without our bodies? Scientists from biochemistry to physics talk about how organic matter will decompose, rot, and, when conditions are right, become reconstituted in new life, like flowers emerging from the grave. These, too, will die and the cycle will restart. There is always a Lent coming or going or here.

In drama, we talk about cycles like this, too. The upward swinging cycle that emerges in new life, abundance, and joy is comic in nature. The downward cycle that results in death and reflection is tragic in nature. These dramatic trajectories tell us how to understand this part of the story, even as there is always another story to tell. Recognizing that this part of the story is not the whole story is a crucial part of growing up, I think, of saying goodbye to the ego, and of allowing things to die so that they become something else — not so we achieve something else, but so that something new can die as well. With our view on the whole cycle, we can recognize that every tragedy is a comedy waiting to be told. And every comedy will soon draw us back into the ground to mourn and wait a while longer.

Breath is a way of practicing death: inhale life-giving air; expel life. Start again.