What do you think about this?
Long before hospice nurses and heart monitors, the peoples native to this continent had their own understanding of what happens when a life ends. These were not one belief but many, spread across hundreds of distinct nations, yet some threads appear again and again, and they are strikingly beautiful.
Many traditions speak of the spirit not ending, but traveling. Among various peoples, the band of the Milky Way overhead was seen as a road, a path of souls that the dead walk on their way to the next world. Some held that a relative or a guide comes to meet the newly departed and lead them along it, so that no one makes the journey alone.
There are the messengers, too. In many Native cultures the appearance of a certain bird, an owl, a crow, a hawk, at the moment of a passing was understood as a sign, a soul carried or a message delivered between worlds. Smoke rising, a sudden wind, an animal that lingers and meets your eyes. The veil between here and there was not a wall but a thin and crossable thing.
Makes you wonder whether people who lived so close to the land understood something about death that our modern world has talked itself out of believing.
Is it all just old comfort dressed up as cosmology, or a kind of knowledge we have lost? What do you think these traditions were really describing?
