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When we shall die, take us and cut us out in little stars

I suppose the time is fast approaching when I should be thinking about what the years may decide to offer to me; what I want them to offer me -not on a platter, but rather on (or in) something in which I feel content. The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things… as Lewis Carroll wrote in The Walrus and the Carpenter so many years ago.

I have been thinking about it for some time now -well, at least since I purchased a little acreage in the country and have grown pleasantly old on it. I have always dreamed of living amongst a group of trees, especially those that claim membership in the surrounding forest.

There is something peaceful about the forest clearing where my house was built; a house where something as simple as sitting on its porch in a gentle breeze is akin to a front row seat in a concert theatre -each tree waving its arms like the string section of a symphony orchestra with the tallest trees amongst them taking turns as its conductor… or me when the mood strikes.

I have a special affinity for living things, not to mention their ability to postcede my meagre time on this earthly stage. I am not envious or bitter about this -we cannot all have starring roles in a play- but I would like to think I could accompany the players in front of the curtain for a while: the trees especially.

Perhaps I have not given sufficient consideration to the process by which my wish could be granted, but sometimes wishes are like that aren’t they: often more hopes than instructions. But I think there are times when most of us live in that tenuous reality; when we reach out into the night that covers us, black as the pit from pole to pole, thanking whatever gods may be for our quite conquerable souls, to paraphrase the first part of Henley’s famous Invictus poem.

Maybe it is an attempt to repair our collective neglect of the world that succoured us for so many years; or maybe it merges into a more selfish hope to extend our identities our essences a little longer: becoming a tree, or a plant -merging somehow with the ecosystem. I might not be there, but surely some of my atoms will be absorbed into something beyond the current me. Maybe I can find a job in another living entity, another identity, without soiling the one I left: the only ecosystem play in which I had even a minor part…

As with many of us close to the final act, with only a walk-on part in the play and no invitation to appear in an appreciative curtain call, I suppose I’d like to think I was nonetheless listed in the program notes as having contributed favourably to the performance. I suppose that as well as some sort of memorial stone it’s the best most of us can expect. When the eulogy is over, memories fade unless there is a reminder somewhere: something that triggers them.

Can Nature offer redemption of a sort for past indignities -or, at least, a quiet absolution? Although I can’t think of any major crimes that I have committed against it -none that most of us would think to condemn I hope- there have been minor transgressions I’m sure. I have thrown things in the garbage that likely continue to vex the ecosystem; burned wood in my stove that no doubt added a burden for the atmosphere to overcome; I raised sheep for a while, despite their inevitable methane production unable to be neutralized by the carbon dioxide captured by trees on my little hobby farm. Only little things like that perhaps, but they add up when practiced over a long life.

Although it’s obviously an inadequate list of the multitude of things that probably do not constitute indictable offences for most of us, I still feel there are a host of inadvertent misdemeanours for which I must answer some day. Since they are minor and largely unreported, I’m sure posterity will have little if any case against me; but still, as Walt Whitman wrote in one of his Song of Myself poems: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes. I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.’

So how might I try for reconciliation; how might I undo a lifetime of minor and often unthinking infractions? Is there a chance for something approaching transubstantiation for an agnostic, earning absolution without benefit of clergy or liturgy? I do not wish to comb the catalogues of methods to recoup environmental favour -it is probably too late for that. The sins of a lifetime must surely be too thick to dissolve; does forgiveness ever remedy past wrongs? Can Nature actually forgive…?

I’m told that although ashes from cremation contain some nutrients for soil, on their own they are quite alkaline and sodium rich and may harm plants growing on them. I suppose they could be mixed with compost or diluted with charcoal as buffers, but no doubt they require a lot of preparation before planting something on them. Care, in other words; forethought…

But isn’t that how we could have been treating Nature in the first place? Shouldn’t the decision to bury one’s ashes require planning? Prescience; circumspection?

Not to make too big a thing out of a topic most of us would rather ignore, doesn’t Death present us with a second chance: an opportunity to aim in a better direction for once; a time to set things right?

I’m sorry to add to our fears of mortality; I rather prefer Shakespeare’s Juliet and her wish for Romeo’s fate: ‘When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.’

Me, I have no such hopes. Living for so long adjacent to the forest, I could wish for no greater destiny than to have my suitably-treated ashes buried next to my favourite grove of cedars, with a young and hopeful sapling planted on top of what’s left of me. Someone may wish to conduct the forest symphony once again with its new member swaying in the wind. I will be there, listening still… and playing…

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