i think about cycles too often

“The Life/Death/Life nature is a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by reanimation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life. Everything – the sun, novas, and the moon, as well as the affairs of humans and tiniest creatures, cells and atoms alike – have this fluttering, then faltering, then fluttering again.” – Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves 

Most of what I’ve been thinking too much about recently has been the unyielding cycle of death and rebirth in life. In the last few years it has become abundantly clear that the intuition I shoved deep down when I was eighteen was right about what would make me happy. I’ve been thinking about the grief I’ve had to work through around the many versions of me that have existed and those futures that I will never see because I buried most of those dreams. I wake up glad those graves exist, and sad that I had to dig that many six foot holes.

It also seems like there is a large death that hangs in the air. So much of what I’ve seen post election has been about the oncoming death of the current american empire. What will never cease to amaze me about people’s surprise and chagrin that there could ever be a collapse of a current empire is this: the founding fathers built this entire hellscape around their want to emulate the roman empire. How hubristic for those men to think that they could outrun the curse of gods that haven’t been properly worshiped in generations. The sheer amount of history that was ignored in order to create what has become an empire worse and less reigned in is staggering. And yet – take a short wander around the news cycle. People wringing their hands about the abomination of an administration about to take hold of the country for another four years, discussing the massive economic decline that we’re about to enter….

My darling, the decline is here. It has begun. The rot has been spreading for some time now and has now started to seep outside and into everyone’s everyday life. Get accustomed to it. Understand that apathy will not save you. Your unwillingness to say or do anything will be a problem once the institution lets you know how expendable you always have been to them. Death comes for us all in the end, and the great equalizer does not just save herself for human life. She comes for all things in this universe, and it is past time for her to come for this farce of a country. 

This constant cycle of death into life is the only thing that continues to give me hope. If there is one thing that I have learned in my life thus far, its that where there is an ending, there is a beginning coming into its own. I am forcing myself to believe that this new beginning has to be good. It has to be something that will overcome what has transpired over the course of the history of this country. It’s also the thing that gives me hope for my own future. 

I work in a hospital, often with patients who think that they are inching closer to death. Whether or not this is true is a whole other discussion, but a number of them believe that and it is something heavy to have to sit with. Hospitals themselves seem to be institutions dedicated to the study of the many ways we slowly rot to death. The life/death/life cycle is never more apparent as an everyday reality than when I clock in. All of us sit with it, in it, around it, and have to put aside that we are not constantly looking at it in order to leave the building with our sanity. Maybe it’s just me – most of the people I work with are insanely fascinated with how the human body works (clearly something I do not care about for the most part). 

I once had a patient who told me that he was never worried about going to the hospital for major surgery or anything, because everything took him one step closer to reuniting with his deceased wife. Reader, when I tell you I sobbed when I got home that night – I mean that in the way that while writing that I teared up thinking about that conversation. I get emotional every time I think about it because that is the kind of devotion you only read about in books. This man revels in his constant decline because it will eventually bring him to the beginning with this wife that he has been waiting for for years at this point. He sees his death as the next part of the cycle of life of the love he has for the woman he married years ago. 

There is an ancient tumblr post that is one of my favorite things to revisit. The op is demanding a mushroom give them the name of god with a gun to it, to which it replies: “can you feel your heart burning? Can you feel the struggle within? The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. You cannot kill me in any way that matters.” 

When asked to clarify the meaning, the op simply tells us that decay exists as an extant form of life. The entirety of this post has stuck to my soul as if stapled inside my chest since the first time I saw it. Decay truly straddles the line between life and death. Not fully one, not fully the other. 

The internet has unending jokes about bed rot and videos about cleaning up depression rooms and the like – our decay has already begun. We live in what seems to be an unyielding reality that has inflicted depression more and more on all of us. How, then, are we supposed to suffer through and make something of a world beset with a rot we cannot seem to kill? 

Life exists in a multitude of ways. The life/death/life cycle is one that I find myself drawn to over and over again. Creating that which comes next has to come from a place that does not exist strictly from death or life, I think. Our collective decay must become where life grows for the future. This sentiment might be too optimistic for most, but I find it difficult to fully give into the inherent nihilism of the times. The sun still sparkles on water, flowers still spring up between cracks in pavement, and the laugh of someone I love will never cease to make me think that there is more to this horrific rot our oligarchs have thrust upon us. 

I wish I had some deep, beautiful words of wisdom to impart. Something to give for you to carry with you while you feel the weight of the world. There is only the unyielding faith that I have in the ability for the human spirit to persevere in the face of decay and death.