Then let me go to nature as I came from nature
to the great cycles of creativity that I have dimly, so dimly, understood . . .
When you commit my ashes to the ground . . .commit them!
For then one cycle of individual life will be over,
and a unit of nature will be separated into its minute parts
for participation in new ways,
as atoms rearrange in the mysterious slow seething of the world.
Just as I have come from infinity, so I return to infinity,
between which events, for a little time, I came to celebrate that miracle
which I could never fathom.
Therefore, when it is time . . . yield me dying,
yield me dead in this tradition-
-earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust–
in sure and certain hope that the dust which bloomed briefly
in my loving will bloom again, bloom again in the renewal of species,
each meaning according to its kind with not even a single day of the mayfly
scorned; that this dust will bloom again and again and always again
until the seas run dry and the mountains disappear.

Mary Jean Irion, 1970
from “Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation”
available from www.alibris.com