The earth gives us life. The world around is beautiful and meant to be viewed with respect and wonder... The Sioux holy man, Black Elk, expressed it well when he said that any place you are is the center of the world. This beautiful creation is always speaking to us, it is just that we sometimes do not stop to look and listen. We forget to see as we were meant to see, not just through our eyes, but through the eye of the heart.
The only way to avoid death is not to be born in the first place. In death there is union with the Beloved. The real skill is to reach the secret of death before dying.
We prepare for death, or rather eternity, by consciously adjusting the focus of our life so that it is not upon our personality and the flowing world that spawns upon it, but instead upon our individuality and the Great Fullness with which we are one. This process of focusing our attention is called meditation. In meditation we die to the personality and are reborn as something much greater. That rebirth is not a sudden or one-time event, but is a gradual process in which we become ever more focused on who and what we really are behind the mask of personality ... the process of dying to death by being reborn to reality.