When death comes
...when death is near, the vulture takes wing
When death comes, when death is near, the vulture takes wing. It sees death, feels death, senses, smells death and rushes toward it with grand bravery, sense of sacred duty and purpose. Vulture alights at the carcass and picks at the dying flesh, possibly vying with others to find the sustenance, the sense, the meaning in the passing of life, dissecting that which held that body, that life together. As vulture takes serious, life-sustaining consideration of the corporeal edifice, without pause it submerges it's head into the cooling gut, into the inner workings of the life gone by the wayside.
It matters not how, under what conditions, but it engages each death with deliberate efficiency. The vulture seeks truth, seeks reality, seeks what is left behind that has any chance of sustaining life, seeks the integrity, now in early stages of decomposition.
Vulture does away with that which would seek to poison the lives and livelihoods of those lives that remain. Vulture, the clarifier. Vulture, the truth-teller. Vulture, the harbinger of the power of legacy, the champion of egalitarian engagement of our worth and our shortcomings, transforming that which is fetid in us into clarity.
The vulture transforms, transmutes and transfers that which is toxic to the community of life into a new level of purity. Vulture takes antiseptic shits. Vulture, in its humble, beautiful, regal power stays clear of the residue of death, evolutionarily removing the feathers from its head so it can re-emerge safe from remaining bacterial harm. Vulture makes sense of death, looks deep into it with a power unlike (m)any others. Vulture is a protector, a great winged guardian of the community of life. Vulture is a guardian of life by looking at death directly, boldly, flatly.
~~~~~~~~
May we look directly, boldly, flatly at what in our lives, personally and communally, and deaths needs processing, transmutation, engagement, illumination and transformation. What is it that vulture senses that needs to be transmuted, that needs to be consumed and purified? What ideas are ideas that need to pass away in the sacred enegetics of decomposition? What ideas, systems and structures are rotting, rotten, that require truth to be told about them? What is being left behind that is toxic, dangerous, bacterial in its transmission and risky, fatally risky not to look in its face and tell the truth about its fetid presence? #Decolonize