Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

More cicada lessons

Zenchick has a beautiful post about cycles and transformation and finding spiritual messages when you aren't looking for them. (Oh, and cicadas, and everyone knows by now how much I love cicadas.)

But seriously...she found a quote from Basho Matsuo:

Nothing in the cry of cicadas suggests they are about to die.

I found what I suspect was the same writing as a haiku, translated a bit differently:

In the cicada's cry
No sign can foretell
How soon it must die.

After I read this I heard from my mom with the results from my aunt's doctor visit. My aunt, who is 86, appears to have a tumor on her lung. She had lung cancer a few years ago, but other health problems since then make her a poor candidate for surgery, and my aunt has decided she doesn't want surgery anyway. She's not pulling a Final Exit, but she wants to limit her health care now to maintenance, not major repair. And she says she's not afraid to die.

I have no doubt that she's being honest. She's 86, the last of her generation in the family, and she has a very strong faith that there is some heavenly reward. If you talk to her, there's nothing in her song to suggest that she's going to die.

I fear death, literal and metaphorical. I fear death, loss, change...I am the classic miserable person who is miserable because I want permanence, which is probably why I'm drawn to Buddhist teachings.

I'm struggling mightily with the big deals like death. I'm making little tiny steps of progess, though, with the smaller things. Like my computer...it's hosed. The demons are in control; when I turned it on yesterday (not even logged on to a browser, just booting up) I had such an onslaught of malware that it crashed. I can't even get the clean-up programs run. I think I'm going to have to wipe the drive, even if I do lose all my pictures. I'm not happy, but there are worse things to lose.

And what was going to happen to the cicada pictures anyway? My niece would be standing there some day saying "Does anyone want Aunt Nic's bug pictures, or should I just throw them away?"

Posted by Nic at June 3, 2004 09:24 AM