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our avoidance, leading us to consume and destroy the world, …

to be anywhere but here in this present moment where we might make contact

with our feelings of uncertainty?

Crazy Horse reportedly spoke the words “It’s a good day to die!,”

to his assembled warriors as they were about to enter into battle to protect

what was left of their families and tribes.

What does it mean to be able to say “It’s a good day to die”?

Are any one of us ready to die today?

What would a “good day to die” look like?

Would you bring everything to the table, your “A game” if you knew

today was the day?

How much of our attention would we give to each moment of the day?

Overcoming our cultural conditioning, would this very moment be enough, as is?

Will we finally be enough, as we are?

What would you choose to do in your life, in your relationships, in your world,

for it to be a “good day to die”?

What “unfinished business” might you address?

The dominant culture in the world today, transcending nationalities and borders, is a culture out of balance, which has lead to a people out of balance.

A people out of balance with our place in the web of all life, thinking we are, somehow,

above and exempt from the laws of the natural world.

Out of balance with our soul’s purpose and the voice of God speaking within us,

We are out of touch with who we truly are and why we’re here.

What is the connection between our fear, aversion, denial, and avoidance of death

and the condition of our world and our lives?

What happens to a people who view death as a failure, a mistake?

Something we rarely speak about, certainly not in front of the kids,

surely not in party conversation. “Oh, don’t be morbid!”

How do these attitudes affect the ways we treat old people,

people who are dying, the dead?

How do these attitudes affect the way we treat the earth and its creatures?

When we have an “out of balance” relationship with death, we cannot help but be a people

out of balance with life and the life of the earth.

We hear about people dying everyday all over the world,

but how different it feels when someone close to us dies.

There’s a crack in our world, everything gets very fragile.

Funerals and memorial services can be profoundly bonding experiences for a community.

Everyone gets very real when death is close.

What would life be like when the next breath is a precious gift?

Would we have more appreciation, more gratitude for our lives?

Living with the truth of not knowing how much time we have in this life,

would we treat our friends and families, our neighbors, the earth itself,

with more care and kindness?

Would our “stuff” hold such importance?

How do we, as a culture, currently deal with death when it does make an appearance?

When someone dies, our tendency is to immediately call someone to remove the body.

We are uncomfortable around death.

We’d rather ask strangers to take the body away so the next time we see it, it is embalmed

and made to look life-like, or we see an urn filled with ashes.

Only in the last hundred years have we given death care over to a“funeral industry”

and in doing so we have robbed ourselves and our communities, having removed ourselves

from participating in this aspect of life and its teachings.

What part does this play in a disposable culture that worships youth and anti-aging, and has relegated

our elders, as wisdom keepers, to the “elderly”?

There is a movement afoot, a natural death care movement intent on families and communities

reclaiming the work of caring for our dead, not paving a new trail, but simply clearing the weeds from a trail that’s been around since the beginning.

Just as many of us helped to bring the birthing of our children back into our homes, so too, now “spiritual midwives to the dying” are assisting the dying and their families.

Recognizing this, not only as ours to do, as a community, we also recognize it as “sacred work.”

We stand in the truth that who we are doesn’t die, our bodies die.

Our willingness