The Circle of Life, Part II

I ended Part I of this article by pointing out that trees are reborn each spring, live to the fullest in the summer, enter the twilight of their lives in the fall … then, finally, they seemingly die. But, in truth, the trees merely hibernate. It’s more like recycling than death — part of the circle of life.

Death is but an illusion. And not just for trees in the winter. When a human being dies, he, too, is recycled. Not one atom of his body is lost. The atoms are simply rearranged when the soul moves on. How are they rearranged? It’s not our job to figure that out. The Conscious Universal Power Source has it covered. As Deepak Chopra put it in his book Life After Death:

“A drop of water becomes vapor, which is invisible, yet vapor materializes into billowing clouds, and from clouds rain falls back to earth, forming river torrents and eventually merging into the sea. Has the drop of water died along the way? No, it undergoes a new expression at each stage. Likewise, the idea that I have a fixed body locked in space and time is a mirage. Any drop of water inside my body could have been ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.”

When Chopra says “the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight,” it sounds very much like he’s talking about the tiger that used to roam outside my gates. Perspective is a magic tool for easing the pressure of the bonds of daily life … and chasing that tiger away.

Which brings me back to my Ravel’s “Bolero” evening a few weeks ago. My thoughts drifted away from the movie 10, and I began thinking about the recently deceased Paul Newman and a scene from one of his most memorable films, Cool Hand Luke.

Newman’s character, Luke, had escaped from a prison chain gang earlier in the day, and a posse was closing in on him. He takes refuge in an old abandoned church and begins talking to God about what a hard case he has been all his life.

Finally, he gets down on his knees and asks God what he should do. Just then, his fellow escapee, Dragline (George Kennedy), bursts in the side door and frantically warns him that the police are outside. Whereupon Luke, displaying that classic Newman grin, looks up at the ceiling and says, “Is that your answer, Old Man? You’re a hard case too, ain’t you?”

I’ve thought about that scene many times over the years, because the truth is that none of us has a clue about what the “Old Man” has in store for us, and it seems to me that it takes a great deal of arrogance to claim otherwise.

I often think that the world we are so bogged down in is nothing more than a gigantic hoax that nature has played on us. I’m talking about the world we spend most of our time focusing on — the world of television pundits who spew the same old clichés at us day after day … politicians who offer to give us more of our neighbor’s wealth if we will just agree to give them power over our lives … multi-millionaire athletes who lead us to believe that their triumphs will somehow make our own lives more worthy and fulfilling … nonsense and illusions that must surely cause nature to smile at us condescendingly.

In my heart of hearts, I believe that what we normally think of as the real world isn’t real at all. It’s as though we’re all children acting out a play on a spherical stage spinning around in space.

But the trees … and everything else that we call “nature” … perhaps they know the answers to all the questions whirling around in our heads: How did we get here? Why are we here? Where are we going? The fact is that we just don’t know. Walt Whitman may have come up with an answer that transcends all others when he wrote, in his poem Miracles, “To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”

And speaking of miracles, the miracle of spring isn’t as far away as you might think. I love spring, because it invigorates the soul by reminding me of the great circle of life — that nothing ever really dies. If you, too, sometimes have a tiger outside your gate and you’d like to ease the bonds of daily life, I highly recommend that you start taking a closer look at the real world — the world that’s all around you – and spend less time thinking about the shallow, insane world that most of the human race only believes is real.