The blarg has been populated overmuch lately with thoughts of death and of passing, and this is the last post on the subject, I promise. Happier topics are on the horizon.

But in the meantime, I have to reflect on the subject of burials. As much as I understand and appreciate the power and the lure of tradition and ceremony, I just don’t understand it. I never have, and I don’t know that I ever will.

There is something strange — I’ll even say, for me, unnatural — about making all this fuss over a dearly departed loved one’s body, draining it of its fluids and preserving it, saying these lovely things over it, reflecting on the life lived, and then carrying said loved one up the side of a hill to leave them in the ground.

Shakespeare once said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “…We are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.”

Moby said, “We are all made of stars.”

The things that make us up — the energy, the atoms, the dark unknowable forces of creation, whatever — move out of phase with our bodies as we die and return to the chaos that spawned us. Burial maybe slows that process down a little bit, but in the end, we all turn to dust. I don’t understand the point in putting it off by putting a body in a neat little box.

We are humans. We are more than the skin we inhabit. We deserve more than a six foot by three foot plot in the ground when we meet our end.

When I go, I want to be scattered over the ocean or over a mountaintop or maybe in the coffee of a bunch of pretentious coffee snobs.

…This doesn’t particularly jive with my theme of writing motivationals. Or maybe it does. But I think maybe mostly it doesn’t.

Ho hum. Regular programming will return next week.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.