Back in July I was asked to contribute a review blurb to an upcoming book called Death & Sex. The request came from Dorion Sagan, one of the book’s authors—an amazing writer and a friend of this blog. I immediately said yes. I was sent an advance copy of the text and spent the next few evenings unable to put it down, rapt.

The book is a hybrid: two essays by different authors bound into a single work. Tyler Volk’s Death examines how our passing feeds the greater cycle of life, our bodies breaking down into food and energy for other animals and plants. Our greatest personal fear is thus recast as an ecological act of self-sacrificial love. It’s a deeply spiritual view of dying.

Dorion Sagan’s Sex suggests that our procreating has cosmic implications. We reproduce to continue life. And viewed from the perspective of thermodynamics, life on Earth actually exists to help spread the concentrated energy of our sun into surrounding space. Nature likes its energies evenly distributed, and we ease an inequity: we take in localized sunlight and disperse it into space as heat.

Simply by living we’re doing God’s work, spreading the good solar news.

Death & Sex is out now, and my review blurb is printed inside. This blog post is to thank Dorion Sagan and Chelsea Green Publishing for the honor and pleasure, and to turn you on to a fine, fascinating read.