Imagine Living for 500 Years

a slow-burning imagining, stitched with moss and marrow

Last week, I began a new series on death and dying. Between that and some medical things I have been dealing with, I got deep into my own thoughts.

I’ve spent a lot of time inviting others to consider what they’d do with just three months to live. It’s a powerful question. A deep nudge toward clarity.

But this time, I wondered…

What if we flipped the hourglass?

What if, instead of racing toward the end, we stretched time wide and let it hold us?

So I asked myself a different question.

What if I lived for 500 years?

If I had 500 years, I wouldn’t just survive them. I’d shape them.

Not into a monument. But into something breathing.

Something strange and sacred and fully, deeply mine.

I wouldn’t stay polished or palatable. I wouldn’t become easier to explain.

I’d move like water through seasons.

I’d let myself become more than one story.

There’d be no single thread to follow.

I was never meant to be just one thing.

Not just a death doula.

Not just a grief guide or a teacher or an artist.

Not just a problem-solver.

Not just a daughter, or sister, or friend.

I was meant to be a constellation.

Shifting. Layered. Glorious in my contradictions.

In the early years, I’d continue my work.

The sitting, the witnessing, the remembering.

I’d become a master archivist of the sacred, strange, and deeply human.

I’d write things down so they wouldn’t be lost.

I’d document death rituals across cultures.

Witness thousands of grief journeys.

Carry the unspoken words of the dying in my skin.

I’d become a global steward of end-of-life wisdom.

I would write stories that cracked people open in the best way.

Stories that didn’t seek to comfort but to awaken, to witness.

I’d teach with my whole body.

Let the pulse of grief be felt in every room I entered.

Soon, the world would feel too loud, and I’d go to the forest.

I’d go quiet because the trees were speaking.

Because somewhere between the roots and the rot, I’d find a version of myself I hadn’t met yet.

I’d live in a place where moss creeps up tree trunks like memory.

Where the air holds old stories and the soil remembers every footstep.

I’d wake when the light told me to.

Eat food that makes my bones feel steady.

Speak only when something true needs saying.

Forget what day it was and not care.

I’d walk barefoot on the forest floor and let my body remember it belonged to the Earth, not to a system.

Eventually, I’d come back. Changed.

Not softer, not harder. Just more myself.

Not as a teacher or a healer or a guide.

Just as a woman with dirt under her fingernails and a softness in her chest that couldn’t be rushed.

I wouldn’t explain why I left or what I learned.

I’d trust silence more than plans.

And I’d stop apologizing for the way my brain works, for how much I feel, for all the things I’ve always been told were too much.

I’d challenge entire institutions.

Not with loud slogans, but with quiet slowness.

With rituals that refused to be efficient.

With questions no system could answer.

I’d birth new forms of belonging.

Speak directly to those who feel like they don’t belong in time, because now, I know what that truly means.

I’d bring rituals back to parenting, to friendship, to aging.

I’d challenge the culture of burnout and replace it with rest as resistance.

I’d help the world remember how to feel again.

And when everyone else was striving for legacy,

I’d be in the forest.

Barefoot.

Painting my palms.

Offering a broken shell to the river as a prayer for someone I’d never meet.

I’d help species say goodbye to each other.

Write grief guides for children born on a burning planet.

Teach artificial intelligence how to understand the concept of heartbreak, because everything that exists deserves to be felt by someone.

By the time I reached my final century, I’d live only for myself.

There would be a moss-covered cottage on a forest ridge, where moonlight made lace on the floor and every room smelled like cedar and ink.

There’d be bowls of dried herbs tucked into corners.

Paintbrushes that hadn’t been cleaned in decades.

Journals that no one else would ever read.

And a softness I’d finally stopped resisting.

I’d wake when I wanted.

Talk to birds.

Light candles without a reason.

Fall in love with the way the wind moved through the pine needles.

Forget most of what I was supposed to care about.

I wouldn’t give advice.

I wouldn’t offer solutions.

I’d just sit in the doorway, wrapped in something soft, and let people feel safe in their own strangeness.

When it was time to go, I wouldn’t resist.

I’d leave a note on the back of a leaf and pin it to a tree.

“Let me become compost.

Let me be a whisper in the pines.

Let the forest remember I was here.”

And that would be enough.

Because if I had 500 years,

I’d use them not to escape death, but to intimately companion it.

And in doing so, I would become a living archive of what it means to be human.

We don’t get 500 years.

But we do get this moment.

This one, wild chance to honor our contradictions, to feel deeply, to walk barefoot on the soil of our becoming. Maybe we don’t need more time. Maybe we just need permission to live like we belong to ourselves again.

So here’s your invitation:

If you had 500 years…

What would you let go of?

What would you gather?

Who would you become?

Leave a note below. Let yourself wander.

Love today,

Heather 🌸