Death
Code of the Sith
There is no peace, there is anger.
There is no fear, there is power.
There is no death, there is immortality.
There is no weakness, there is the Dark Side.
I am the Heart of Darkness.
I know no fear,
But rather I instill it in my enemies.
I am the destroyer of worlds.
I know the power of the Dark Side.
I am the fire of hate.
All the Universe bows before me.
I pledge myself to the Darkness.
For I have found true life,
In the death of the light.
The Old Man
Where there is a road an old man walks thinking, bent under the weight of his soul clinging like a child to his back. Ra spits his words into the dirt where they cover themselves and wait like seeds. The wheat will rise up singing.
The old man walks in circles beneath the circling sun. He makes a journey for himself from mewling infant to old man, old man to renewed God.
The snakes comes to take his heart, finding there the sun.
~From Awakening Osiris
Becoming The Phoenix
I flew straight out of heaven, a mad bird full of secrets. I came into being as I came into being. I grew as I grew. I changed as I change. My mind is fire, my soul fire. The cobra wakes and spits fire in my eyes.
I rise through ochre smoke into black air enclosed in a shower of stars. I am what I have made. I am the seed of every God, beautiful as evening, hard as light. I am the last four days of yesterday, four screams from the edges of the earth ~ beauty, terror, truth, madness ~ the phoenix on his pyre.
In a willow I made my nest of flowers and snakes, sandalwood and myrrh. I am waiting for eternity. I’m waiting for four hundred years to pass before I dance on flame, turn this desert to ash, before I rise, waking from gold and purple dreams into the season of God.
I will live forever in the fire spun from my own wings. I will suffer burns that burn to heal. I destroy and create myself like the sun that rises burning from the east and dies burning in the west.
To know the fire, I become the fire. I am power. I am light. I am forever. On earth and in heaven I am. This is my body, my work. This is my deliverance.
The heat of transformation is unbearable, yet change is necessary. it burns up the useless, the diseased. Time is a cool liquid, it flows away like a river. We shall see no end of it.
Generation after generation, I create myself. It is never easy. Long nights I waited, lost in myself considering the stars. I wage a battle against darkness, against my own ignorance, my resistance to change, my sentimental love for my own folly. Perfection is a difficult task.
I lose and find my way over again. One task done gives rise to others. There is no end to the work left to do. That is harsh eternity. There is no end to becoming. I live forever striving for perfection.
I praise the moment I die in fire for the veils of illusion burn with me. I see how hard we strive for truth, and once attained, how easily we forget it. I hold that fire as long as I can. My nose fills with the smell of seared flesh, the acrid smoke of death, so that years from now I might look on that scar and remember how it was to hold the light, how it was to die and come again radiant as light walking on sand.
I change and change again, generation after generation. I find anguish then peace.
I am satisfied with my birth and the fate to which it led me. I do not regret the discomforts and terrors of my mortality any more than I regret the company of angels. I have entered fire. I become invisible, yet I breathe in the flow of sun, in the eyes of children, in the light that animates the white cliffs at dawn.
I am the God in the world in everything, even in darkness. If you have not seen me there, you have not looked. I am the fire that burns you, that burns in you. To live is to die a thousand deaths, but there is only one fire, one eternity.
~From Awakening Osiris
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Antidotes To Fear Of Death
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
~ Rebecca Elson
Ask Now Of Death
Then Almitra spoke, saying,
“We would ask now of Death.”
And he said:
“You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day
cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death,
open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one,
even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires
lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow
your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams,
for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd
when he stands before the king
whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling,
that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind
and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing,
but to free the breath from its restless tides,
that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top,
then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs,
then shall you truly dance.”
– From The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
Nephthys
What magnetic pull
we are drawn to at the end
of our light, the darkness
encircles us with her strength.
There is no escape
from the unknown expanse.
She brings you to the badlands.
She carries you to the dry barren
stretch of sky
where the stars too have been extinguished.
Hawks cry their parting love.
Women wail and she heeds
their pleas with unyielding love.
As all are born,
so too must they go.
into the dark expanse.
~Jeszika Le Vye
Viking Prayer Before Battle
Prayer Before The Final Battle
“Merciful Father, I have squandered my days with plans of many things. This was not among them. But at this moment, I beg only to live the next few minutes well. For all we ought to have thought, and have not thought; all we ought to have said, and have not said; all we ought to have done, and have not done; I pray thee God for forgiveness.”
~ Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: “The 13th Warrior: ”
How We Survive
If we are fortunate,
we are given a warning.
If not,
there is only the sudden horror,
the wrench of being torn apart;
of being reminded
that nothing is permanent,
not even the ones we love,
the ones our lives revolve around.
Life is a fragile affair.
We are all dancing
on the edge of a precipice,
a dizzying cliff so high
we can’t see the bottom.
One by one,
we lose those we love most
into the dark ravine.
So we must cherish them
without reservation.
Now.
Today.
This minute.
We will lose them
or they will lose us
someday.
This is certain.
There is no time for bickering.
And their loss
will leave a great pit in our hearts;
a pit we struggle to avoid
during the day
and fall into at night.
Some,
unable to accept this loss,
unable to determine
the worth of life without them,
jump into that black pit
spiritually or physically,
hoping to find them there.
And some survive
the shock,
the denial,
the horror,
the bargaining,
the barren, empty aching,
the unanswered prayers,
the sleepless nights
when their breath is crushed
under the weight of silence
and all that it means.
Somehow, some survive all that and,
like a flower opening after a storm,
they slowly begin to remember
the one they lost
in a different way…
The laughter,
the irrepressible spirit,
the generous heart,
the way their smile made them feel,
the encouragement they gave
even as their own dreams were dying.
And in time, they fill the pit
with other memories
the only memories that really matter.
We will still cry.
We will always cry.
But with loving reflection
more than hopeless longing.
And that is how we survive.
That is how the story should end.
That is how they would want it to be.
- Yānā Moon: Charge of the Dark Goddess
- James Cheney: Invocation To The Dark Mother
- Daniel: Prayer Before The Final Battle
- blessed obyno: Queen of Ghosts
- blessed obyno: Queen of Ghosts