Spiritual Guidance: Death

“It is said that the swan is mute its entire life. UPon the threshold of death, however, it sings one achingly beautiful song that steals the final breath from its chest, and then it expires upon that ultimate sigh. It is the most heartbreakingly wrenching song of ending.

“But the song of the phoenix… ah, the song of the swan cannot compare. When the phoenix sees death beckoning, she lifts her voice in a tragic song of pain, of rending, of sorrow… that yet cannot mask the most intense joy, for she knows that as the flames lick at her heart, the heat is quickening the egg in which her successor sleeps. Her death-flame is its lifespan; one is linked inextricably to the other. and thus she was tied to her predecessor, and she hers and she hers to the beginning of time. She sits in her deathbed upon her next and she submits to the inevitable hand of fate. As the fire burns searing hot and white, she spreads her wings and breathers her final song of expiration.”