Like you, I try to step back from the hourly news summaries of grim events and terrifying prospects. I try to remind myself of the larger, unchanging realities of Nature and to calibrate my response.

Consider this bald fact, dryly expressed: “Organisms are relatively transient entities through which materials and energy flow and eventually return to the environment.”

No argument there. It’s an unassailable truth.

It’s a scientific-sounding way of saying that “the great Globe itself and all which it inherit shall dissolve.”

It’s a way of asserting that “every flower and face and thought that I have known, together with all that my fellows have thought and dreamed and made” will, as a matter of indisputable fact, “return to the environment.”

How shall the wise respond to such truths?

Shall we passively, merely observe?

Shall we weep because everything transient?

Or shall we rejoice at the endless flow of “materials and energy?”

When we come upon the phrase, “All flesh is grass” in the book of Ecclesiastes, we recall Brahms' great, dark setting in his German Requiem, the climactic moment when the four-part chorus, eschewing counterpoint, sings in unison, with inexorable force: "Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras."

It’s a bitter pill. We’re all just grass, cut down, thrown into the fire, consumed and forgotten.

Ah, but there is another, opposing way to regard that short phrase.

Walt Whitman announces it in Section 6 of his “Song of Myself”:

“The smallest sprout [of grass] shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

Read aloud those lines at my funeral!

Whitman inherited that notion from good old Heraclitus.

This ancient Greek philosopher believed in the unity of opposites and harmony in the world. He was famous for his insistence on ever-present change as the characteristic feature of the world, as stated in the famous saying, “everything flows.”

When Heraclitus says, “All flesh is grass,” he is smiling, joyfully affirming the unending cycles of life. He is saying, "Just think! All flesh is grass! Isn’t that amazing? How splendid!"

I set to music the following fragment, one of Heraclitus’ few surviving writings:

"All flesh is grass.
The rain falls, the springs are fed, the streams are filled and flow to the sea.
The mist rises from the deep and the clouds are formed and break on the sides of the mountains.
The plant enfolds the air, water and salts, and with the aid of the sun, expands by vital alchemy into the bread of life, enfolding this into itself. Animals eat plants and a new incarnation begins.
All flesh is grass."

In my setting, each line is presented and repeated with the next line layered over top of it until, just as in Nature, all the phenomena are happening at once in an exhilarating jumble. Then the texture thins and clarity returns. Then, again, in keeping with the rhythms of Nature, complexity returns. And then comes clarity once more. The piece ends as simply and quietly as it began: all flesh is grass.

Grass being incarnated as flesh, and vice versa, I titled the piece "Incarnation."

To hear a fine performance (it begins and ends very quietly; turn up your volume) by the Cincinnati Camerata under the direction of Chris Miller, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.