Tag Archives: Death

PROMPT: Long Life

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Daily writing prompt
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
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Living a long life while physically and mentally capable = great. Living a long life when you need advanced technology to achieve it and you’re just lying around like a slug without the ability hold a simple conversation = the worst circle of hell I can fathom.

One of the few books I’d recommend for everyone is Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal” which shows that our great pride in increasing human life expectancy is not all it’s cracked up to be because the average quality of life at death has dropped in the process. Essentially, people are completing the marathon because we are dragging quasi-corpses over the finish line rather than allowing them to fail gracefully.

PROMPT: Magic Genie

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Daily writing prompt
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
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For any wish number one, wish number two always has to be that one suffer no adverse consequences of the law of unintended consequences (i.e. like Midas who turns his food and even his daughter into solid gold.) Wish number three should be that the receipt of wish number one does not rob one of any experience that makes one a better version of oneself in the long-run (e.g. like the lottery winner who had been chugging along through life just fine and then ends up broke and suicidal because of both the additional pressures and the lack of need to be frugal and satisfied with simple things.)

Personally, I don’t know that it’s worth it. The bill always comes due.

But, if forced:

1.) To be contented with what is.

2.) Healthfulness all around.

3.) To die a good death (in due time.)

PROMPT: Putting Off

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What have you been putting off doing? Why?

I’m putting off death for as long as I can remain healthy (by and large.) Because I like living.

FIVE WISE LINES [September 2025]

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The aim of introduction is to conceal a person’s identity.

George Mikes, How To Be an Alien

From the beginning our philosophers have tried to teach us how to die,
and our poets have taught us that to contemplate death
is to learn to live.

Jonathan weiner, Long for this world

Nothing is harder to see into than people’s natures.

Zhuge liang [a.k.a. Kongming], The WAy of the General

To know how to eat is to know how to live.

Auguste Escoffier

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

Mark twain

“Precept-Breaking Monk” by Ikkyū [w/ Audio]

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A precept-breaking monk for eighty years --
   still, I'm ashamed of Zen that ignores cause and effect.
 Sickness is the result of past karma.
 Now how can I honor my endless connections?

Translation by Kazuaki Tanahashi and David Schneider in: Essential Zen. 1994. HarperSanFrancisco. p. 126.

“Monody” by Herman Melville [w/ Audio]

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To have known him, to have loved him
   After loneness long;
 And then to be estranged in life,
   And neither in the wrong;
 And now for death to set his seal—
 Ease me, a little ease, my song!
 By wintry hills his hermit-mound
 The sheeted snow-drifts drape,
 And houseless there the snow-bird flits
 Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:
 Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
 That hid the shyest grape.

“Drinking Alone in the Rainy Season” by Tao Yuanming [陶渊明] (a.k.a. Táo Qián, or 陶潜]

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Whatever lives must meet its end --
   That is the way it has always been.

If Taoist immortals were once alive,
   Where are they today?

The old man who gave me wine
   Claimed it was the wine of the immortals.

One small cup and a thousand worries vanish;
   Two, and you'll even forget about heaven.

But is heaven really so far away?
   It is best to trust in the Tao.

A crane in the clouds has magic wings
   To cross the earth in a moment.

It's been forty years of struggle 
   Since I first became reclusive.

Now that my body is nearly dead,
   My heart is pure. What more is there to say?

NOTE: This is the translation of Sam Hamill found in The Poetry of Zen (2004); Shambhala Publications: Boston, MA, p.24.

Rainy Day Graveyard [Free Verse]

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Rainy day
   Graveyard:
 
Green grass
   Glistens 
   Between row on row
      Of low gravestones.

Droplets dash
   Against the marble
   And against
      The brass plaques --
         Silently.
   Though a steady patter
      Of drips on leaves
      Sings through.

A poncho-clad figure
   Walks through the 
   Sprawling war memorial ---
      Alone.

Immortal’s Limerick

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There once was a wise Daoist Immortal,
   Asked the secret to long life, he'd chortle:
 "If you can stand masses
 Who behave like asses
   You're enlightened -- 
                             but better off mortal."

“Epitaph On The World” by Henry David Thoreau [w/ Audio]

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Here lies the body of this world,
 Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.
 This golden youth long since was past,
 Its silver manhood went as fast,
 An iron age drew on at last;
 'Tis vain its character to tell,
 The several fates which it befell,
 What year it died, when 'twill arise,
 We only know that here it lies.