For the past month, I’ve been living by the ocean. The salty air and the proximity to the great and mysterious womb of the earth fill me with a vibrant, ineffable joy - the shy kind that disappears if you focus on it too much. It must be held with a soft touch, lest it slip between the grip of my fingers. I am learning to sensitive myself to the pleasant hum of praise buzzing in my bones as I take in the beauty around me.

On a misty walk through my neighborhood this morning I saw a car parked directly in front of a No Parking sign and couldn’t help but feel a resonance. Talking about death in a fiercely death-phobic culture is uncomfortable to say the least, but more than that it often feels like a direct and egregious violation of the rules.

Yesterday I lamented to a new friend that positioning myself as a death contemplation doula, an advocate for reflecting on our relationships to our own deaths, is a recipe for feeling embarrassed on a pretty much daily basis.

I’ve been trying to wrap words around these feelings for months and each time it feels like a child’s drawing, a modest gesture toward the real thing...but liberation demands we say it however we can.

I moved recently and finally found the moment to get acquainted with the garden that my housemate has been lovingly cultivating over the past few years. Changing into work clothes and putting my boots on, I expected a reprieve from the world of death and dying I am immersed in on a daily basis.

A poet's reflections on mortality

How would our lives change if we lived like we really knew they were going to end?

A reflection on my relationship with death