Relaxing Into Mortality

Overcoming the cultural domestication of resisting this eventual inevitability

From Unsplash

What did people do before modern medicine promised to save them from dying?

Before scientifically informed anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-pathogenic protocols became the expected norm? Before birth and death alike fell prey to becoming medicalized traumas, inflicting untold pain and suffering in the attempt to outrun the very same thing?

How did we relate to death in a world in a world where death didn’t hide?

Our culture has hidden death

Before science and technology took over the world, mythological stories guided our understanding of the mysteries. Evidence-based science told people back then that the gods controlled the world. So that’s the framework on which most people built their lives.

We learned of gods that both came from and controlled aspects of our natural world. These were stories of gods who were born, and gods who were killed. Everything was a part of nature. There was nothing besides nature to these early ancestors of ours.

As Sophie Strand wonders in her insightful book, The Flowering Wand, what happened to our consciousness of vegetal cycles of birth, life, and death when we…