When You Wake Up, Your Dead
“I can tell you, then, that I am afraid of death. Not of what we imagine about death, for this fear is itself imaginary. Not of my death whose date will be recorded in the civic registers of the state. But of that death I suffer every moment, of the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood keeps asking , as yours does: “What am I?” and which everything within us and around us seems bent of stifling. When this voice does not speak - and it does not speak often! - I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver. I am afraid that one day it will fall silent forever, or that it will wake up too late - as in your story of the flies: when you wake up, you’re dead.”
- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1981
“In the garden the door is always open into the “holy” - growth, birth, death.
Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden
we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.”
- May Sarton