Conversation Time With Jordan

So..lately, I've been bombarded by death. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that this whole civilization thing is the reality, but my inner animal comes to the surface way too often for me to be fooled for long, especially when it comes to death. I think, as living and thinking creatures, we spend our lives doing this crazy, instinctual dance with death, even though we know that, as always, we will have to succumb....again and again and again. Not just physically, in the end, but also mentally, with the deaths of our loved ones, the deaths of strangers that we hear about daily, the lost pets on the sides of the roads we drive on, the bugs on the windshield. Death reminds us everyday that it is reality, and yet somehow we manage to compartmentalize that reality, always putting it in a place that we don't believe will effect us, at least here and now. My civilized side does its best to put death in its appropriate box, covered by its appropriate lid, and believe that the lid won't come off until that day, far in the future, when I decide that I'm ready to take the lid off and deal with it. My animal side is still pretty strong though, and it knows that no lid is going to keep death away...it won't even keep the idea of death away. My animal side knows that no one could ever really put death in a box anyway...it's like air. It's always there...it is in the food that I eat, the books that I read, the songs that I sing, the relationships I make...it is, as Walt Whitman said, under my boot soles. I heard a song this weekend that said, among other things, "Life taught me to die." I wonder if anyone ever really learns that lesson...I guess it really doesn't matter if they do. Either way, the only thing I'm learning is that boxes don't work...life happens in circles.