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enjoy it. Today we are working through Meditation 16 from book four, which reads as follows,

many grains of frankincense on the same altar. One falls before, another falls after, but it makes no difference. This one took more effort than

other meditations to navigate and to get the most out of. I wasn't exactly clear on what the

meditation meant at first pass. At first, I thought it was a reference to the idea that we all

die at different times, but nonetheless, we all die. And so the timing

of our death doesn't really matter. But the more I looked into the use of frankincense in Greek and

Roman culture, the less and less I was sure that it wasn't a statement about honoring or remembering

the dead in general, the same way we might today visit a loved one's grave every year or something

and leave flowers and memory of when we lost them. The original text, in reviewing it and

attempting to bring it into modern language myself, didn't seem very different. And I'm talking

about the Coyne Greek here, which is the dialect of Greek that Marcus wrote the meditations in. Here is what I came up with

...