Know Thank You

I enjoyed reading a number of posts today on the Frugalfam blog, “helping average families to survive and thrive during these challenging times.” The author resides in the UK and writes engagingly of the ups and downs of living an environmentally-friendly lifestyle as inexpensively as possible. She was shaken by some recent deaths in the news, and it prompted me to share with her my own view on death:

Life as a force goes on, even though individual lives do not. People and other animals and plants of all kinds will continue to live and die; humidity will rise and rain will fall, seasons will come and seasons will go, and the earth will continue to function, even without our presence. The atoms that form what we call our body now will be recycled by the earth and emerge at some point in the future in entirely new ways. The same natural processes that break down our vegetable tops into compost and nourish beautiful new plants will also break us down and allow us to nourish beauty. It is incumbent upon all of us to nourish the earth’s natural beauty throughout life, and having done so we have nothing to fear in death. Death just becomes a transition; a continuation of the same process we had already started.

The earth never tires of nurturing us; find the time to give something back. If you haven’t done so already, start composting. Plant something in the ground, or in a pot. Remember: we aren’t separate from nature; we are part of nature.