.:Conversations with Death:.
Oct 2021 / April, June 2022

○● Cell 1: “A First Visit from Death, October 2021” ○●

Before sleep last night I was visited by death.
I asked this presence: what do you want from me?
I want to work with you for processes of transformation.
What are you?
Transformation.
One thing into another.
The changing of forms.
Compost for growth.

I am not death. I am simply change.
I am not to be resisted. I am not to be feared.
I am a tool for growth and rebirth.
I am the foundational stone of life.

And You. You are here, always.
I have met you before in many shapes and forms.
And yet still, you forget me again and again!?!!
Misunderstanding my purpose.

I am for shedding. I am for lightening the load.
You think I am dark? A tragedy?
I am the greatest freedom and expansion you will ever know.

I am a tool, a gift, a mystery, a doorway, a portal.
I am the womb that brings you back into the sweetness of embryonic oneness.
Wu chi. The hug of nothingness from which all things are born.
Primordial soup from which all things emerge.

I am a temporary exit chute before you become the next you.

Work with me.

○● Cell 2 - “the threads of fate, April 2022” ○●

So much confidence in talking with them.
I don’t dare, something holds me back.

There is something I see: mushrooms on the left side, crystals and fractals and plants growing out of all the entrances and exits.
So it's not not living?
And what’s that river everyone talks about? Did you ask anything about that crossing?

The closest I get to death is through my own compost. My own personal decomposition inside, eating and dissolving and letting it out in changed matters. Cycles. Where is death in that cycle?
I remember seeing only void when I was a child. I couldn’t sleep at night. A soft scary blanket would cushion me, wrap me; I was gone and I wasn't. What was? I was afraid of not thinking anymore, not feeling.
I will never forget that, I never forget about death, even though I understand the necessity for all living matter to dissolve and grow again, standing still and still moving.

But … I have so many questions.
I feel I am moving closer to not needing answers anymore, but I continue to wonder. I know its not darkness, i know its openness, growth, a framework of earthly existence before moving to another form.

Who told me to be afraid of you? When did it start? Could there have been another end to the beginning and another beginning to the end?

You, death, look beautiful in that image I hold in my hands in front of me.

○● Cell 1: “Off the past, the future is harvested, April 2022” ○●

I see death as more active than void.
Void is the isness. Death is a player, an advocate, a constant process. It is not the inertness we label to a stiff corpse, it is so much more than this one moment and even in this moment so much life is still present all throughout the entire vessel, especially at the microscopic levels.

Maybe this is our own narcissism as humans that thinks once our animating spirits leave the flesh suit that it’s game over. But no! Of course the game of life continues on, as all the cellular entities of flesh, bones, blood, bodily matters transmute themselves in processes of decomposition.
Or better re-composition.
The out-breath going back down into something that will then expand and become very large again.

Maybe the collection of cells on their way down will get burned at high temperatures, a fast transmutation into ash, but then as they are later released back into soil, air, water - what happens next?
Do you really think this so-called ‘dead’ matter ceases to interact with all the rest of so-called ‘living’ matter still out playing in the game of life? No of course not, they still interact and feed and bond and exchange as live cells, and in this ash form still hold considered structures and aliveness.
From the ashes many things can feed and nutriate and grow, and the ashes also grow in return, learning through their new collaborators as they dance together.

We never leave the system.

Our flesh is grown in a womb from nutrients taken from the soil, the sun, water, fire and meditated by the system of our mother’s own landscape to grow our form. Ripe matter that is grown on decomposing matter of the ones who came before in the cycle.

Off the past, the future is harvested, therefore the future is also the past and the past is also the future. No matter ever truly exits this neverending interplay.

And Death, what do you add to this here?

You don’t dare talk with me, so called death? But yet you utilise me every day in your bodily functions.
Matter comes into your system, matter comes out.
I am simply the one who guides the matter in the out processes. A very necessary role, as without my guidance I think you would all be constipated.

River of Styx is the so-called river of crossing into the underworld. But it’s not my language, it’s yours. I’m not really one to categorise into under and over, it is you all who like to place me under, making yourselves higher on an imaginary plane.

Again I am a passageway, a transition point, an axis, an acceleration, a rebirth, a birthing canal even, a herder from one state of being to the next.
It is interesting that people like to associate me with darkness and the night. I do just as much work in the daytime too. The sun is a great collaborator of mine.

You will notice in the tarot decks I am not the end of the journey. I am only at point 13, actually quite early in the journey. Many decks even removed the name of ‘Death’, which I prefer, as it is through that naming that I often become so flattened and misunderstood in people’s minds. They see that word and get all fearful and overdramatic. Honestly I’m not even such a dramatic character. I really hold just a simple role of herding, guiding matter gently between one state to the next, between one container into the next, out of a cocoon and into flight. A mediator for complex metamorphosis is what I really could be called.

○● Cell 2 “did i listen to death”, April 2022” ○●

Tonight I thought about threads; weaving threads through human bodies and more than human bodies and through any existing matter, earthly or not. It’s a thread of connection that does not care about the terms living or dead. A thread that does not know time, but that moves back and forth fluidly, carrying nutrients through cycles, waving in cycles.

Listening to what comes, I think of past, present and future. Those goddesses of what we call time; the Norns. They might be shown in the dark, but they thread light through what we call opposites of life and death.
The Oak in front of me is 500 years old. That is the blink of an eye; what are some human years in that regard?

Wenn ich an deinem alten Stamm lehne, verdampft auf einmal die Angst; löst sich auf wie ein Staubpartikel. Aber zu Staub werden ist nicht das Ende, sondern der Anfang des Komposts in dir, in mir, in uns. Das ist es doch, was Du mit dem Übergang meinst, oder? Von Einem zum Anderen. Ich verstehe, mein Körper versteht, er/sie/es fühlt. Wir sind gemacht aus lebendigen Elementen der Verwesung; sobald das Licht uns berührt, bewegen wir uns auf eine neue Form zu. Ist es nicht ein Paradox, dass die Menschen ständig ihre äußerliche Form ändern wollen, obwohl wir doch nur aus sich verändernder Form bestehen? Getragen vom Kompost unserer Vorfahren?
Manchmal grabe ich meine Füße tief in die Erde, sie werden warm und scheinen auszugreifen, Wurzel zu werden. Vielleicht wird sich mein Knie irgendwann in einen Baumstamm verwandeln und ein neues Zell-Kollektiv gründen.

The sun is your collaborator, the symbol for them is a dot within a circle, it's a sun surrounded by a circle, that is at the same time a cycle.
We categorize circles as equally distant points in a circling line and a cycle as something that is completed but also can return; the never ending, every point in space and time on those cycles are always different, already transformed when the sun comes out again. Maybe they are never ending processes woven by Circe as the sun’s daughter.
I wonder, what happens when your collaborator explodes?
Who lights your sparkle then?

I exist beyond those cycles, in and around them.

Jedes Ende ist auch ein Anfang, jedes Licht ist auch Dunkelheit, jeder Kreis auch eine Linie. Ich existiere außerhalb eurer Kategorien, im Grunde bin ich ebenso das Leben, ohne mich gibt es kein Leben und keine Transformation, das habe ich ja bereits gesagt. Und doch sehe ich, was schwierig für euch ist. Die Form nicht selbst bestimmen zu können macht euch Angst. Das ist der menschliche Makel der Kontrolle.
Komm spiel mit mir. Mit einem Teil von Dir, eigentlich mit dem größten Teil deines Körpers, bin ich bereits verbunden. Der Rest ist nur Fluss. Ihr selbst wisst, dass euch das Element bestimmt. So viel Fluides in Euch; so viel durchlässige Materie, die ihr selbst nicht in Händen halten könnt und doch wollt ihr das Fließen aufhalten. Ich muss schmunzeln bei dem Gedanken. Seid ihr nicht alle Sonnenfänger*innen, Anbeter*innen der Wärme, die alles verschmilzt und aufbricht?
Sobald ihr eine Schrift setzt, verabschiedet ihr Euch, hinterlasst eine Spurt; das reicht als Form, wenn das ein Trost ist.
Ist der Neubeginn aus dem, was ihr Staub nennt und ich fruchtbare Erde nicht viel aufregender als die menschliche Angst?

I see now what the need and desire is, the pleasure and the pain, the circle of the woven threads. We imagine for ourselves that there is an ending, so that we can feel the pleasure of what we call life. We construct binaries between those de/re compositions to be able to feel.

Was wäre wenn wir die Camille Stories fortleben, in jedem Erdpartikel, Pflanzenkeim, Blütenpollen oder Insektenfühler? Kann es sein, dass wir dafür erst von unserem menschlichen Thron herabsteigen müssen?

○● Cell 1: “Death of a Bee / What could you grow within an ice-age?” ○●

After all we discussed, I as the human who is speaking right now is noticing the contradictions within myself on this topic. While I can bring through ideas of death in the larger picture as a transformation and know on a metaphysical level that I am infinite, still in this life, in this body, with this one name I was given, into one family line, I have to admit I am still attached. So very very attached…

I was taking a bath last night and a bee flew in through the window, buzzed towards me and fell in the water behind me. I went to rescue it out of the water in which it was drowning using a nearby thermometer (which by the way, a very good bath starting temperature is 36°C). During the rescue attempt I accidentally stabbed the bee with the thermometer, it didn’t move so much after this. I realised I had brought it irreversibly close to death.
I didn’t feel good about my role in collaborating so directly with death.
I put the bee onto the soil of a pot plant inside to rest, it had one wing less now.

The next morning mysteriously it was gone, I guess it didn’t die?
That day there was again a new bee with two wings trapped inside the bathroom, again unable to find its way outside. This bee I moved directly out the window using a piece of paper to collect it, noting that I was acting as a herder between one container to the next, like what death had previously shared.
A house is just another container. Our bodies, also a container.

But the point I wanted to get at with all this is that while I can relate to all that death shared in these last writings, as a human in this container I am still so attached to my life and those around me, and that there is so much intensity in the experience of physicality in this reality we find ourselves in.
Although nothing really goes anywhere other than here (here as the wider cosmic soup of existence), the brutality of change and extreme metamorphosis of forms can be very cutting to the heart. It’s comforting to try to falsely grapple onto the idea of solidity and put things into an imaginary freezer to stop them from decomposing. But what would you do with such cold inertness? How would you grow new flowers within an ice-age?

I like how you put your feet in the earth to connect with your ancestors. Do you think yours all live in the soil?

○● Cell 2 “did i listen to death”, June 2022” ○●

I walked barefoot many times in the last days, sometimes from morning to evening and also at night in the garden, with the moon shining down on us. My feet got calluses but it felt good.

I felt the soil.
The big toe connected to the Akazia root system close by… from here I thought that yes, my ancestors all live here: the trees are our ancestors, trying to help us understand the cycles we cut ourselves off from all the time.

I felt the soil and the plants, the critters living in it and the waters moving through the different ground levels, but to be honest, I am not sure I felt my human ancestors down there. Have they attached themselves somewhere or have we attached them to something when they died? I wonder where they are. I often am not able to call on them in other ways than through old photographs.
Where i “come from” we put up stones to remember those who died, but those stones are more for us than for them. How do we care about the bodies and forms that our human ancestors will transform into? We hold onto images and it cracks open our heart, we prefer squeezing our emotions into stone and boxing the dead bodies into the ground.

My first dream here, where we are now, surrounded by stone that is so alive and hosts us, was about being buried alive.
But I was not afraid and I wonder why. Has something changed in me? Do my body and soul and etheric being know something that my mind can’t yet grasp?

My second dream here cut through bodies like through liquid, anger and rage, limbs falling off, hearts and organs being taken out of jealousy. But people did not seem to die from it. Maybe what we are actually dying from is something else, it’s our anger, our false guarding, our oppressions. Death sounds like the dissolving of all those… but where to?

When I woke up I longed for a body to hug.

My third dream was a chase, but i can’t remember if i was chasing or being chased. Many inhabitants of a village died, nobody knew why; death was just landing on us like a fly.
Death was just there, it didn't surprise anyone, but it was bloody and tragic and full of pain. A pain that we accepted. Is that the kind of death that humans are calling for at the moment? No one I knew was dying, but humans by the numbers.

Someone asked me this week if i hear the transformation in my voice, I do. But do i also believe it? My body, that container you spoke about, is holding that voice and is transforming. Maybe from there we can follow the rattlesnake sound of it down the spine and plug it into the soil.
I am so attached to this container, too, so how can we ground it in a way that it still feels steady when we let go of it?

Maybe we can weave some threads together.