After your death you will be what you were before.

Like others I spend a lot of my time trying to photograph the beautiful side of life. But one thing is certain - all living things, however beautiful, will die. A whole set of organisms, from bacteria and fungi to vertebrates, make their living by decomposing and re-cycling the dead. Without them life would have come to a very messy end a long, long time ago. 

This young badger was killed by a car just 5 days ago. If you look closely you can see a couple of green blowflies had already started to lay their eggs on the carcass, starting the process of recycling the corpse.

The extra, taken this morning, shows that the maggots, the gulls, the rodents and the foxes have started with the recycling process and soon the badger will be gone, incorporated into who knows how many new bodies. Gory, but all part of the eternal recycling of the star-dust of which all we living creatures are made.

The quote in the title is from the works of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. 1788 -1860.