Sunset at Wright’s Beach and Memento Mori

Here are some pictures and a one-minute video of a beautiful December sunset and some massive waves crashing down at Wright’s Beach along the Sonoma Coast in Northern California.  With each passing sunset and sunrise and moment, I feel that I am inching closer to death.  And even though my death may still be far away, reminders of its inevitably are everywhere.  I remind myself in not a forlorn or morbid fashion, but with a sense of urgency that the clock is ticking and that there is no time to waste on petty, material, superficial lifestyle choices and slaving away at jobs you are disinterested in and thus neglecting that which you truly care and are passionate about.  I thank my lucky stars that I am fortunate enough to have the freedom and resources to do what I need to do in order to become who I want to become, but the other end of this bargain is that I must put in the hard work required to achieve my dreams.   To me, the ultimate failure in life is to be lying on one’s deathbed in regret of all the substantial things one wanted to do and could have done had you only had the drive and determination to see them through. (In my case, lying in my bed this morning, imagining myself as an old man in the state of regret, I was thinking: “I would regret not writing all those stories that I wanted to write, and now it is too late.”   At that point I leapt out of bed and got to work.

In the Out of Your Mind lecture series Alan Watts covers the concept of Memento mori in at least two chapters, one titled ‘Willing to Die,’ and the other titled ‘The Aversion on Death.’  I’ve included both in the YouTube video below and have transcribed some of each lecture here. 

You can’t hang onto yourself, you don’t have to try to not to hang on to yourself.  It can’t be done, and that is salvation.  Memento mori: be mindful of death.  Gurdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and every person you see will soon be dead.  See it sounds so gloomy to us because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death. 

                                                                                                                              -Alan Watts, Willing to Die

We all know we’re going to die, but it’s sufficiently far off that we can put it out of our minds.  And anybody who does put it into our minds in the ordinary way is taken to be a skeleton at the banquet, a Cassandra, and gloomy.  So that the old fashion preacher of bygone days who preached about death, and those monks who kept skulls on their desk and all that sort of thing is regarded as very morbid.  Why, in the baroque times there was a fashion for a while of making tombstones with marvelous sculptures with skeletons and bones all over them.  And on the Via Veneto in Rome there is a Capuchin church where down in the crypt there are chapels where the altar furnishing and everything are made entirely from the bones of departed monks.  Then we have among Tibetan and Buddhists graveyard meditations, and they have trumpets in Tibetan Buddhism made of human thigh bones, and they have cups…ritual cups made of the domes of human skulls.  And we say all that is very morbid. 

                                                                                                                                -Alan Watts, The Aversion to Death

Shaun Gladwall, Orbital Vanitas, 2017

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628

  Hans Baldung, Three Ages of Man and Death, 1540-1543

 Suzanne Anker, Vanitas (in a Petri Dish),2016

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins, Rome

Part of my work space, filled with Memento Mori from the natural world.

Sunset at Wright's Beach slideshow:

The day’s end is upon us
The lonely night awaits
The drums of death are beating
To the rhythm of your fate 

-Walter Lloyd Waterson

There once was a world
Filled with beautiful girls
Old castles and marvelous things

Like bridges and songs
Blue skies and white swans
Rivers and mountains and seas

There were churches and bells
Heavens and Hells
Men who would die to be free

Yet these men were slain
And the world did sway
Away from a beautiful peace

And just like before
The demons of war
Emerged like a fatal disease

So the bridges and songs
Were forgotten and bombed
And Hell on Earth did man see

-Walter Lloyd Waterson