## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Jenkinson]] - Full Title: Die Wise - Category: #books ## Highlights - All lives are lived in the swirls and eddies of what has gone along before them. Then, with a little time passing, we ourselves, our lives and all we hold dear, become what has gone before, a swirl or an eddy or both. Things might be different, we could really learn something, if we could see our lives from the shore of Life: “Ah look, there’s my life going by, trailing everything I meant and didn’t mean, the end of it clearly in view.” ([Location 274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=274)) - As a rule, nobody in our time asks you to do your life’s work. More often, at least in the early going, you have to do your life’s work as a self-appointed task. And in the early going you’re not very good at it, which can be humbling. It is a learning thing, expensive, demanding, relentless. That’s how it has gone for me at least, paring down the list of reasons I was born until only a few likely candidates were left standing. ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=308)) - Dying wise is a life’s work. Dying wise is the Rhythm, the Story, around which human life must swirl. ([Location 361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=361)) - Facts happen once and typically fade and so have nominal use, I would say. But true things are true because they happen and happen again, sometimes in heavily altered form, and so are a trustworthy signature of the Makers of Life, as clear as the whorls of their thumbs. ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=368)) - All of us are bound to each other now by the shared obligation of securing good dying from the mayhem of managed, muted expiration that has become the norm. ([Location 391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=391)) - Dying well is the same kind of act as Gandhi’s cotton spinning or salt harvesting: a nonviolent insurrection that dares the status quo to oppose it or prevent it. Dying well gathers adversaries. Of this you can be sure. ([Location 401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=401)) - Seeing the end of your life is the birth of your ability to love being alive. It is the cradle of your love of life. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=417)) - The ending of our lives is the shore that the current of our lives laps up against. ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=427)) - Here is the logarithm of progress: The more you pursue being saved from the drudgery of going through your days, the ordinariness of being around, the venality of physical limitation or vulnerability, the more is taken from the physical world to provide you that salvation and the more remote you will be from what grants you your security. That is an ecological and spiritual fact. ([Location 478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=478)) - As adults, we are not big on obeying. The quality of being obedient is not much sought or taught, except to small children while they are small. Etymologically, obedience has nothing to do with being some kind of slave. It means instead a willingness and an ability to listen to what is, to attend to it. Obedience is following the grain of things. With that skill of obedience, every natural thing knows above all how to be itself, come what may. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=998)) - You will remember that the English language verbs have tenses (three main ones, a miserly number considering that many indigenous languages have rafts of tenses, and this paltry choice forces us to see life in a strange, progressive, and linear fashion), and they have voices. In another miserable victory for our binary, oppositional way of seeing things, there are only two voices for our English verbs: They are either passive or they are active. ([Location 1309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N6PBCPS&location=1309)) - Tags: [[blue]]