Fighting to Live, Learning to Die

Wendell Berry, a farmer and a poet, seems to understand life and death at a depth I have no yet conceived of. I was reading some of his poems today while sitting in my car, José, near the woods outside of Astoria. One of his poems, "A Wish to be Generous," says:

“All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may known
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.”

The last phrase, “my life a patient willing descent into the grass” nestled into my soul as I read it.

I have struggled for life. Life has been a fight for me. Not in terms of my physical health, thought that has also been a tricky thing, but in terms of my spirit and mind. Keeping the desire to live alive within me has been a fight. I have fought for it. I fought fiercely, and I still fight. I love living, but sometimes giving up feels so tempting because I fight hard to live. My emotions overwhelm me so quickly and so often because it seems I feel everything deeply. Feeling so deeply hurts and is hard, sometimes I would like to give up and rest without feeling. Yet I keep fighting day after day, and I find joy day after day, or I don’t and I try again the next day. Living is a war for me.

Then I read, “my life a patient willing descent into the grass,” and I realized I will die. My body will shut down at some point and I will die. I am fighting so hard for life and at some point I will die no matter how hard I fight.

One of my favorite Jon Foreman songs is “Learning How to Die.” The chorus says:

“All along, thought I was learning how to take,
How to bend not how to break,
How to laugh not how to cry,
Really I’ve been learning how to die.”

I keep thinking I am fighting for life and learning to live, but if I am heading towards death with every breath I take in, maybe what I am learning is actually how to die.

I have learned patience in this fight. When I am overwhelmed with emotion and feeling I have learned to be patient with myself and give myself time to feel it until it passes. I thought this was learning to live, maybe it is learning to die, though. Rather than clinging tightly to what is happening right now I am learning to patiently, and sometimes willingly, let things pass through me or away from me. Rather than insist I stay at school I recognized it was time to leave, and rather than fight that surrendered to the reality within me and let school slip away from me. That sounds more like I am learning to die than learning to live.

If that is what I am learning, than why am I fighting so hard to desire life? I will die, and my life, it seems, will be spent learning how to die. Maybe I am fighting for the wrong thing. Could it be that fighting for a desire to live is the wrong thing to fight for? It could indeed if Wendell and Jon are correct. What do I fight for, then? Do I fight at all? Or is life a surrendering, a slow and painful surrendering to death?

I don’t know.