The life is due to the collecting of the breath.
When that is collected, there is life;
when it is dispersed, there is death.
Since death and life thus attend on each other,
why should I account (either of) them an evil?

‘Therefore all things
go through one and the same experience.
(Life) is accounted beautiful
because it is spirit-like and wonderful,
and death is accounted ugly because of it is foetid and putrid.
But the foetid and putrid is transformed again
into the spirit-like and wonderful,
and the spirit-like and wonderful is transformed again
into the foetid and putrid.

Hence it is said,
“All under the sky there is one breath of life,
and therefore the sages prized that unity,”‘

–Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou, trans by James Legge

How could this possibly be an extension of the Christmas story?  Where are the heavenly hosts singing?  You know the angel choir that provided the sound track for the shepherds who visited, and who then returned to their jobs singing hymns as they went.  I get carried away!  What is this meditation upon the cause and effect relationship between life and death?  How does the newborn infant, (is not every birth a mystical, indescribable event), related to this rather serious Taoist meditation on the reciprocity between life and death?

A new born makes clear just how extraordinary life is.  Life is breath.  The infant’s first breath is proof that the child lives independently of the mother.  Breath is indicative of energy utilization by the organism, the spark-of-life glows.  The inability and ultimately failure to function by energy exchange, intake of oxygen, and exhalation of carbon dioxide, is an overly sterile description of what we mean by death.  The narrator observes that life and death are opposite sides of the same coin.  It is universal that we appraise death as ugly, repulsive, the inception of decay.  However, by observation life and death is a reciprocal cycle, a transformation between a mystical newness, and decay and dissolution. A co-dependency.

There is a unity between opposites, labeled to be in radical opposition by our manner of speaking.

Are we not seduced by language?  Life in all of it’s majesty, the magnificence, is still a harbinger of death.

The unity, the oneness of all things, is there for your and my observation, a breathing child lying in a manager.  All under the sky there is one breath of life…

Merry Christmas.  A choir of singing angels is unnecessary.