Views that rites of passage revolves around death of loved ones.
Death dances around us constantly. Watching the seasons change, mourning the loss of a familiar four-footed or winged friend, aching for the Maypole tree that once stood tall and green, we honor the death of all living things as part of the wheel of life. Losing a parent, love, child or friend is different. Our sensitivity to human death is heightened by our connection to human energy. And energy, transformation, and life are what we dance with as we circle around death.
Our concept of death reveals the profound wish that we may all "fly like eagles," that we are "drops of rain returning to the ocean," and that we will die in a circle of candles and chanting friends. This perspective of death is very pretty, and at first it was appalling to think that we, as Pagans, are denying some of the grimmer realities, like the reality that many of us will die in hospitals, in pain, with "work" undone. Although we do have aesthetic, hopeful images of the process of transformation from matter to spirit, it is not because we are evading unpleasant truths, but rather that we are in a relationship with energies we are just beginning to "know" and as yet have no better way to describe.
Many Pagans believe quite firmly that death is a part of the wheel of life, a form of transformation, and that they share this belief with other Pagans. Those who have experienced personal loss felt that those who have not yet experienced grief see both dying and loss as more an intellectual concept than a profound reality.
Air. An element of beginning. Our initiation into adulthood often takes place when a parent dies, and you can no longer be "one of the kids," no matter how old you are. One woman expressed herself most emphatically, saying, "In a symbolic way, the loss of my mother has never ended. When she died, I had to learn to mother myself. There was no one else to do it." Other people referred to this aspect of growing up, and agreed that quite often the "mothering" that they needed and had to learn to do for themselves, was not necessarily anything their real mothers would have done. Beneath the grief for one's parent a child is revealed, crying into its pillow, desperate for someone, anyone to make it all better -- the need to not be responsible and mature when bad things happen. One man told me, "The day my mother died, my High Priestess said to me 'today you are really a man,' for I could no longer base my actions around her approval or disapproval. I was now responsible for my own life, my successes and failures, in a new and frightening way." Another man felt that the death of his father affected him similarly, as he had used his dad as a measure of his own growth and success.
Death dances around us constantly. Watching the seasons change, mourning the loss of a familiar four-footed or winged friend, aching for the Maypole tree that once stood tall and green, we honor the death of all living things as part of the wheel of life. Losing a parent, love, child or friend is different. Our sensitivity to human death is heightened by our connection to human energy. And energy, transformation, and life are what we dance with as we circle around death.
Our concept of death reveals the profound wish that we may all "fly like eagles," that we are "drops of rain returning to the ocean," and that we will die in a circle of candles and chanting friends. This perspective of death is very pretty, and at first it was appalling to think that we, as Pagans, are denying some of the grimmer realities, like the reality that many of us will die in hospitals, in pain, with "work" undone. Although we do have aesthetic, hopeful images of the process of transformation from matter to spirit, it is not because we are evading unpleasant truths, but rather that we are in a relationship with energies we are just beginning to "know" and as yet have no better way to describe.
Many Pagans believe quite firmly that death is a part of the wheel of life, a form of transformation, and that they share this belief with other Pagans. Those who have experienced personal loss felt that those who have not yet experienced grief see both dying and loss as more an intellectual concept than a profound reality.
Air. An element of beginning. Our initiation into adulthood often takes place when a parent dies, and you can no longer be "one of the kids," no matter how old you are. One woman expressed herself most emphatically, saying, "In a symbolic way, the loss of my mother has never ended. When she died, I had to learn to mother myself. There was no one else to do it." Other people referred to this aspect of growing up, and agreed that quite often the "mothering" that they needed and had to learn to do for themselves, was not necessarily anything their real mothers would have done. Beneath the grief for one's parent a child is revealed, crying into its pillow, desperate for someone, anyone to make it all better -- the need to not be responsible and mature when bad things happen. One man told me, "The day my mother died, my High Priestess said to me 'today you are really a man,' for I could no longer base my actions around her approval or disapproval. I was now responsible for my own life, my successes and failures, in a new and frightening way." Another man felt that the death of his father affected him similarly, as he had used his dad as a measure of his own growth and success.
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