Death. Last Friday, I discovered a dead possum in my backyard. Two days of heavy rain later and this is what was left.

When I first encountered the body, I felt fear. Amazing how something that cannot harm you can still bring you to that place. When I sat with the fear, I realized it was actually a fear of vulnerability and the unknown. Ah. Yes. Hello again.

There is a beauty in death, when we get past the fear. Death is not the ending that our small selves think it is. It is actually an opening. Perhaps when we fear dying, we are really fearing the incredible vastness that we have chosen to forget we are.

Perhaps this is the lesson that possum offers- a sense of the balance of life and death. Sometimes we stay alive by pretending to be dead. And sometimes we face death to recognize how much we value life. They are two sides of a coin, neither better than the other in the big picture of this vast and sacred Universe.