Eats & Eaten — Luke Turpin

10.17.23

There’s this line from a song that’s lodged in my head. It goes:

“Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed.”

Adrienne Lenker from the band Big Thief wrote it. And since I heard it almost 2 years ago, it keeps coming to mind.

“Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed.”

This line is about life and it’s about death. It’s the cycle I exist within and fuel. Today, I eat. Someday, I am eaten. I looked it up and a safe estimate for the complete decomposition of my body (except the teeth) is about 200 years from today. I take a big breath and imagine myself decomposed into soil, which here in the Hill Country is fine as sand and cut with limestone. This is my future: fine as sand and cut with limestone. It’s not so bad.

Wendell Berry has convinced me that soil is a gift. So that’s what I’ll be. I will nourish another and cease to choose. The disguise of disconnection will fall away while the atoms that once made ME will be given away free of charge to spring onions, limestone, and juniper.

This dose of perspective interrupts the regularly scheduled programming going on in my head. Death is in the building. It soaks life with meaning, doesn’t it? I scoop my son into my arms with a vigor that only impermanence affords.

But it’s not always so tidy.

Thoughts of death flow another way too. Namely into pain and loss. Facts are: either I will go to your funeral or you’ll go to mine, on and on across people I care about. Loss at scale rudely shakes my snow globe. The imagined pain gets big, clumsy, and hard to find a use for. How can I honor this truth without following it into indulgent self-pity?

Or let’s try on a fleshy example, something present now.

I am currently dealing with a sore knee. Not injured, just sore. It amazes me how much this soreness pisses me off. I might rehearse the truths of “becoming the gift of soil” but when it comes time to actually start falling apart I have zero acceptance, only rage.

Being dead may be a comfort, but the dying wrecks me. Maybe that’s the tension which brings the Eats & Eaten line back to mind again.

Anyway, I made this sticker (with Gianni Yarto’s help @mean.boy.atx) to remind myself that I’ll be eaten someday.

Thanks for reading.