Seeing the South Valley trees turning from green to gold lately
reminds me that October is a time for transition. With every gust
of breeze, leaves cascade down in their annual autumn
transformation that serves as a gentle reminder that nothing in
life lasts forever.
Seeing the South Valley trees turning from green to gold lately reminds me that October is a time for transition. With every gust of breeze, leaves cascade down in their annual autumn transformation that serves as a gentle reminder that nothing in life lasts forever.
This time of year always makes me deal with the unavoidable fact that our lives are always changing. And this month has been especially poignant for me in regards to dealing with the notion that nothing is permanent. The point was brought home last weekend at a special public lecture at the Morgan Hill Library promoting the new Body Worlds exhibit at San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation.
On display in the library’s community room was a torso of a woman who had donated her body to be preserved for scientific educational purposes. In a groundbreaking process called “plastination” invented by a German anatomist named Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the corpse is kept from its natural decay by filling its cells with a polymer resin that hardens the body into an anatomical artwork.
If you happen to visit The Tech exhibition, which goes on until Jan. 26, you’ll see the bodies of 200 people preserved in interesting poses such as a ballet dancer or guys playing a game of poker. It gives visitors an appreciation of what miracles our physical bodies truly are.
Seeing the torso up close at the library’s special lecture, I marveled at how the human body preserved through plastination can seem like a beautiful sculpture. Without the skin covering it, the torso showed various layers of our anatomy. I could see that our bodies are a complex integration of systems – such as the muscular system, the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, and the various organs – working in collaboration for the common good of the whole.
On the physical level, the human body might seem like an intricate machine, but there’s something much more to us than just mere flesh and bones. Our bodies house some seemingly undefinable aspect of our deeper selves. Call it “a soul” or “a spirit” or “a consciousness,” our amorphous selves dwell in bags of bones until we come to that season of our lives when, like falling autumn leaves, it’s time for us to make the transition from the material to the spiritual realm.
Every historical era recognizes this fact of the impermanence of life. And I noted this earlier this month when I spent a day in San Jose visiting the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and The Winchester Mystery House. Like Body World exhibit at The Tech, these two tourist attractions make us confront the transition zones of our mortal being.
At the Egyptian Museum, various mummies and burial paraphernalia paint a portrait of a civilization seemingly obsessed with life after death. Like we do today, those ancient people tried to find ways to deal with the uncertainty of what kind of realm might exist on the other side of death’s door. The museum also has on display dioramas of the pyramids and tombs of pharaohs and queens showing the extent humans will go to honor the dead with a place of burial. There’s also a reconstruction of an ancient tomb that visitors can wander through and get a sense of what it’s like inside one of these burial chambers.
A short drive from the Egyptian Museum, Sarah Winchester’s world famous “Mystery House” also demonstrates how humans deal with the afterlife. Like the pyramids of Giza, it was built out of a kind of respect for the dead. According to the legend, Mrs. Winchester feared the spirits of people killed by the Winchester rifles her husband manufactured. So she had carpenters work on her labyrinthian home non-stop day and night for 40 years to provide a sanctuary for these souls.
Like the Egyptian Museum and the Winchester Mystery House, the Body Worlds exhibit reflects human nature’s concern about the transition zone between life and death. The Egyptians would certainly be impressed by our modern-day preservation of corpses using resins. But instead of preserving the bodies for a possible afterlife in paradise, these people have been “immortalized” in plasticine to educate visitors on the wonders of the human body.
As the changing trees remind us, nothing is permanent. At some point, we all will shed our material selves and go through the transition zone into that unknown realm. And perhaps, just like the autumn leaves, in that zone we will turn from green to gold.
