RE: Existential death

Malcolm Riddoch writes:
>Is Presbyterianism a tranquilized fearful fleeing in the face of death? A
>strange question...is a sober humility towards death in general the same 
as
>a nervous refusal to contemplate death? I'm not suggesting that my
>antecedents were into contemplating an authentic relation to death in a
>phenomenological sense ie ownmost death as the limit of the possibility of
>experience, where existential death is not itself an event that can happen
>but that is nonetheless certain at any given moment and that therefore
>defines life as being towards death in a temporal sense...

malcolm,

I think religion operates although on a slightly different plane. Now it 
may be that one could "die" to the self or to the other, and through a 
series of conversions arrive at the self one truely is through adventure, 
sex or death. Apparently Augustine - or was it Will. James had numerous 
conversions, or deaths of the self. If we were to only talk about death of 
the body, or the mind and leave out the soul, or the psyche, and so 
on....or old ways of thinking and doing and being, then...

what contemplating of death
are we to do on a sunny morning
in the hills
within freedoms sunlit porch
with no one else around
and alone left among things
meandering streams
left barren by a wildfire
some years before

with all this presence
and reminding of death
what reflection is there of death
what
with willowy catkins frogs croaking
creeks murmuring

and then near the lakes still in flood
the geese honking
snow receding along the shore

everywhere life and death
stillness and motion

strange the great hulks
of massive timber left chared and barren
in the openings of planted pines
made by man
not one left alive
and to my surprise no progeny
in my surveys except one in 80 hectares

at the end of day i contemplate the entire
raw parts of my feet
and feel no pain in my heart

i sense a restlessness
in me in them
is it due to all
all this movement

in winter stillness
the geese and loons somewhere near
mangroves just as noisy and restless
meandering Baja
[John Foster]

Anxiety seems another word for being apprehensive about things, or even 
solictious as an act of being careful about the future.  



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