A Place of Dust

72.

A Place of Dust

The first thing you have to know about life, says Akaviah, is that you will die. Now we can begin to talk.

How frightening it is for a person to live in the presence of the sentence of death, to know that each passing day brings one closer to it. So much fear can flow from this recognition, so much despair. Yet Akaviah suggests that you live in full view of that finality. Your life emerges into the finite, accompanied by the absolute presence of death and unable to escape from it. You are a soul immersed in a body that is continually wearing out from the moment it comes into the world. Therefore, read your life as a story, realizing that from the moment it began it is headed toward a conclusion. Only then will you understand your own non=reecurrence, the rare chance given to you in which you are now situated.

And be comforted by the knowledge that your final motion to that of a body embraced by the depths of the earth, its path touching that of the unending world, arrival after arrival, departure after departure. “Dust” refers to a bit of soil, fertilizer for those who come after. From this maggot infested place, from the place of primal creatures without limbs or actions, one sends a last signal of one's love for children, the world, God.

Tamar Elad=Appelbaum