A Jisei: A death poem

I’m at peace now

Now in my half life, half death
I’ve come to know I am the earth.
I feel earthly rhythms I’ve never felt or knew about before.

I feel my earthly connections viscerally . . .in myriad . . .ecstatic ways, to every rhythm of earth. . .
every rhythm of the cosmos
I am at peace

My age has gifted me with remarkable sensitivities,
despite my fading essence.

I feel gravity ebbing from me as I return to the womb of Mother Earth.
I levitate as I barely graze the land,
suspended in a watery amniotic,
rocking gently to earth’s rhythms.
Gently hugged. . . enshrouded
Becoming one with the earth. . . at peace.

Annual and circadian cycles animate
and regenerate my life forces every morning
awakening my blood as my heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature rise in sync with the daily rhythm.
I feel them ebb as daylight fades.

I feel my kidneys and liver awaken and stretch as I do now.
I feel these same circadian cycles in sync with bacteria, algae, insects, birds and mammals.

All living creatures pulse with the cadence of life in unity.
I am at one with the living world.

I am more aware of the complex network of my many bodily fluids, each connected, not just to my bodily functions but to earth rhythms

In the majesty of the cosmos I swear my cerebral spinal fluids can detect the earth’s Milankovitch tilt,
in progress as the Earth’s axial tilt shifts between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees
and back again every 41,000 years.

My pericardial fluids sense the infinitesimal wobble in the earth’s 26,000 year cycle.

I revel in the ecstasy of the nighttime explosion of seminal fluids.
I feel viscerally the new moon and lunar cycle and my essential fluids rise and dispel with neap and spring tidal rhythms.
At especially sensitive moments. . . I buoy at solar tides.

I am energized by earth’s passage through spiral arms of the Milky Way when Earth is bombarded with cosmic rays.

I hear the songbirds
but now I know they are singing to me.
Yesterday they were so vocal I sang thanks back to them …..
they were silent for hours.

Where do songbirds go to die?
They, like I, will just fly away to the heavens and won’t come back.

Afloat on my back in Georgian Bay, my arms and legs splayed, staring up at the endless sky,
I am aware now that I am the water.
I feel my skin melt and dissipate as I float
and I become one with the water.

On a walk in the woods I am like a waft of warm air and the leaves ruffle gently from my presence.

I feel now the flow of my synovial fluids in my limbs
that ebb and flow with the rhythms of the forest I walk.
I am the forest. I feel it in my bones.
I am ‘shirin-yoku’ ( forest-bathing)
The forest trees know I am coming. . . I speak to them underfoot.
I know this . . .
My ‘earthing’ connects me directly to the fungi underground
-the mycorrhizal network ( the wide wood web)
connecting the roots of trees and plants,
sending warnings of danger
They know I am a friend.

Paracelsus (b. 1493), reminds me ,
“The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician.”
I heal, as I fade.
I am awash in the millennial flow and rhythms of energy, alive in Mother Earth,

A trace in the orchestral majesty of life.
I am at peace.