A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [27]
Today I am in an airplane. As often happens when I fly, I am thinking about death. As we pass over waves, mottled and un-moving at this distance, or tiny specks of houses, house upon house in straight rows or loops that curve in patterns predictably similar from city to city, I sometimes picture—when the plane drops or skips from turbulence—the craft breaking up, or a wing tearing off, or an engine disappear. Then I picture the plane falling. I wonder how I would spend those last moments, and I perform anew the calculations to reveal how much time I would have before I hit the ground. Let's say we're at 32,000 feet. Distance equals half the acceleration times time squared. Acceleration equals thirty-two feet per second per second. Time squared equals two thousand. The square root of two thousand is about forty-five. Forty-five seconds to live.
Below us, there are dry hills, gray, with white roads crawling over them.
Out of nowhere I think of my grandmother. The last words my mother said to her had been "I love you." If this plane fell from the sky, I wonder, would those be my last words? Would I look one last time at the backs of my hands, and say, "My god, how good to be alive"? Or in the shock of it all would a stream of oaths fall from my mind, perhaps stopping breathless on my lips, held back by the same shock and terror that created them?
In these times, times I consider my own death, I often remember that strong white Pekin, and I pray that whenever my own death comes, whether I fall to the earth before I finish this sentence, or gently fall asleep fifty years from now, that I may approach it with the same grace and magnanimity that I first observed in that duck.
I am not a Buddhist. Yet there is a Buddhist story that I hold dear. A monk walks in a forest, and chances upon a tiger. The tiger chases him, and the monk runs until he comes to a cliff. With the tiger on his heels, the man grasps a vine and clambers down. Another tiger appears at the bottom. As the man hangs there, a mouse crawls from a crevice just beyond his reach and begins to gnaw the vine. Death above, death below, and death in between. He sees a big ripe strawberry near his mouth. It is delicious.
In this moment, flying miles above the strawberry fields of California's San Joachin Valley, I think that I would change the ending of this story. Instead of giving the doomed man a strawberry, what if we leave him alone with the two tigers, the mouse, and the fraying vine? For the last time, his arms grow tired, he feels a familiar ache deep in his muscles. For the last time he catches his breath, feels a rasping in his throat and lungs. He feels this, and a thousand other things. It is all delicious.
My god, I think as the plane hits another patch of turbulence, how good it is to be alive.
...
The dog who used to eat eggs suddenly died. One day we walked to get the mail, both dogs dashing in circles around me and causing me sometimes to stumble or slow, and always to smile. When we got home, I noticed that Goldmund, the large one, was wobbly on his feet. I went to the barn to collect eggs. By the time I came out, he couldn't stand. I ran inside to phone the vet, then to phone my mother to come help. When I returned he could not