One of the old Zen practices was to meditate in a graveyard and to even meditate upon or near a decaying corpse. We are doing the same but just won't admit it. The world is decaying around us and beneath our butts all the time (and always has been). It is not proper to mention it.
The myth is if we exercise more, eat the right foods, think the right thoughts, live in the right town, use the right deodorant, invest in the right schemes, we and the world around us will stay forever young -- "those who decay and die just don't have the right attitude. Thank God I'm not one of them!"
And I'm not just referring to our personal corpses we keep dragging around, I'm talking about the entire organic world -- our everyday reality. Haven't you noticed? It keeps needing shoring up. We live in a rotting corpse theme park and pretend that it's just not so.
Yes, yes, I know. We are supposed to look on the bright side. Well, that IS the bright side. It is reality. This world is always falling down all around us. Have you not noticed the dust, the perpetual dust on your furniture? Even the most obsessive-compulsive of us can do no more than keep putting lipstick on the corpse.
Meantime, flowers grow out of the compost. And make more compost. For more flowers. Decaying ones. "And the painted ponies go up and down."
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True, life fluxes through the cycle of Life and Death. People cling to delusions tenaciously out of fear. We mostly fear death. We desire the world not to change, but change is the only constant. We forget that birth and death are just doors or aspects of the same thing - the ebbing and flowing of Silence into and out of this world.
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