Life and Death

 

Life is the companion of death;

death is the beginning of life,

Who can understand

how the two are related?

But if life and death are companions,

why should you be concerned?

All things are connected at the root.

We arrive here from the unknown

and go back to where we came from.

What people love about life

is its miraculous beauty;

what they hate about death

is the loss and decay around it.

Yet losing is not losing, and decay

turns into beauty, as beauty

turns back into decay.

We are breathed in, breathed out.

Therefore all you need

is to understand the one breath

that makes up the world.

The Master is always conscious

of the mistery at the heart of all things.

Stephen Mitchell, 

in, "The Second Book of the Tao"