Living in a Time of Dying - Abridged

Summary

Living in a Time of Dying is a spiritual manifesto for our times. It undertakes the sobering task of inviting us to feel the full weight of not only the inevitability of death, but the impending collapse of our human civilization, as evidenced through the social, psychospiritual, and ecological crises that we face in the 21st century on this planet Earth. Written for all those struggling with grief and fear about the future of our world, it offers a deeply poignant and compassionate vision for how to live in such times with integrity, courage, and grace: how to embrace the painful challenges of grief and rage without drowning in despair, how to hold hope alive without dissociating into fantasy, and how to root oneself in the nourishing and connecting power of love.

The authors engage in a back-and-forth duologue of lyrical prose full of deep psychospiritual wisdom, incisive social commentary, and solemn ecological alarm. Informed by his 50 years of Taoist practice, Horden graciously invites the reader into a perception of self and world that is both immanently entwined within and transcendently outside of the attachments and identifications of this human world of space-time. Tauck penetratingly articulates the relationship between internal psychic strife and the social and historical traumas wrought by colonization and supremacisms in the external social world. Together they weave an intellectually cogent, psychospiritually profound, and emotionally tender vision for how to embrace this thing called living.