Pondering death, and life

I sat for a while outside in the late afternoon, taking in the pleasures that spring has to offer. The air was warm, the birds sang and there was an assortment of brightly coloured and scented flowers around me. I could not bring myself to partake in the type of joy that such a moment should bring.

In such a moment, filled with sunshine, I could feel that death loomed over me. Not my death, but the death of another. Who? I don’t know, not yet anyway, but it hovers there, waiting for the moment to deliver dark news to me. All I can do is patiently wait… and perhaps dream.

Dreams of death, a gift bestowed upon me for as long as I can remember. Whenever I have a bad dream, I know that it means that someone I know, or once knew, will be meeting their fate soon. My dreams generally require deciphering, never telling me out right who exactly it is that’s inviting me to their funeral. No, most of the time I would have to wait to hear who it was before the dream and its images would fall into place. I seldom wait long though, usually about three days. If I already know of whose death I am to expect, then this waiting period sometimes allows me time to deliver unfortunate news to the loved ones of the soon to be deceased.

I can see death too, though this is a much newer sense that I have developed through my practice of energy healing. So how does death look to me? It is a grey lifeless energy that cocoons the body and spirit of a person or creature that is going to die. This energy is very unwelcoming and carries with it a clear message: It’s too late.

Something I have always been able to do though is smell death. It carries with it such a pungent odour that it seems to permeate every part of my being and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It is an unmistakable scent and there is nothing that can be compared to it, (I’m not talking about the smell that surrounds the sick and their diseases, or the smell of rotting or burning corpses these are entirely different olfactory assaults). There is quite simple only one way to describe it, and that is that it smells like death. This smell can linger around a living person, floating with them as they move but carrying with it the grim reality that time is up.

As I sat in the sun, I didn’t dream or have visions, I did not see or smell death, these things would only have reassured me of what I already knew. I could feel it in the air around me, thick and heavy, and my intuition told me to brace myself, foreboding news is coming.

In the northern hemisphere our Pagan peers are readying themselves to celebrate Samhain. This is a time when the veil between life and death is at its thinnest. Often those who are barely clinging to life will slip away at this time of year. Here in the southern hemisphere we are preparing for our Beltaine festivals. We will be celebrating life as the Goddess becomes pregnant with the God.

I part of me feels and understand that what is being celebrated in the north will affect us here in the south, and vice versa.

Both hemispheres experience an increase in pregnancies, births and deaths at this time of year, as well as in April when the seasons have reversed and we celebrate the opposite Sabbats.

This reinforces the understanding of balance and interconnectedness that we all share on the earth, no matter where we are. With the world being one large community, there are no longer any restrictions and we can freely admit this to one another.

So for our friends who are on the other end of the world, from us in the south, know that a part of us celebrates your autumn with you, and we share our spring.

In life there is death, in death there is life and we are all connected in every aspect of this cycle, celebrating it as the earth turns.