Writing about the death of someone I did not know, I took a short walk in the snowfall to think.  There’s a purity about snow.  I remembered white symbolizes death in Japan.  Purity is erasure, a blank slate.  Death is erasure of the filigreed world, that Baroque montage of shape, color and sound, the chaos over which the mind’s net is cast.  Perhaps the chaos seems more a Jackson Pollack painting than the self-confidence and realism of the Baroque.  Death is the word we Homo Sapiens have for a return to the void from which we came.  I’d like to imagine that a “good death” is a return to our origin, a homecoming to the earth…

I walked and captured some photos of the pure snow, casting in relief the forms and shadows of nature that are vibrant in spring, summer and fall.  A stone lantern, the Tōrō originally associated with Buddhist temples, now are common at neighborhood Shinto shrines and in residential gardens.  The stream is partially frozen, quiescent, as water flows beneath the surface.  And the stone Buddha is iconic.  Layers of meaning are conveyed by the impassive, knowing gaze of the Buddha.  T. S. Eliot express it best in the poem Little Gidding,

And all shall be well and
And all manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

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As you might expect I do have a tune to offer for sustenance of the spirit.  This one by John Prine moves me.  Is not compassion called for by all our striving, — the successes and failures that sum up a life?

Angel From Montgomery

by John Prine and Bonnie Raitt

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child that’s grown old

If dreams were thunder
And lightning was desire
This old house woulda burnt down
A long time ago

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

When I was a young girl
Well I had me a cowboy
He weren’t much to look at
Just a free ramblin’ man
But that was a long time
And no matter how I tried
Those years just flow by
Like a broken down dam

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

There’s flies in the kitchen
I can hear them there buzzin’
And I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today
But how the hell can a person
Go to work in the mornin’
And come home in the evenin’
And have nothin’ to say

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

Lyrics by John Prine