This image is split between night and day, The living world versus the spirit world. The birds set forth on a celebratory procession to greet the owl. The Harbinger of death. He rings his horn to alert the spirit world that a new soul is entering. The cloaked figure represents the portal by which souls cross over Into the afterlife. There, the soul is greeted by the moon, the Egyptian god of death Anubis, and cypress trees which represent the afterlife because they grow towards the heavens. Then we see the salmon at a stage in their life cycle where they swim up stream, lay eggs and die.

There is no life. There is no death. Only cycles. There is life in death, and all that lives, lives to die. It’s a shame that the west has indoctrinated our culture to fear death and to view it as termination and defeat. Death is change. From death is born plant life, from death, perhaps an expanded heart. Death is a renewal with deeper beginnings and profound understandings.