Death was a new one for me too.
When you die you enter what I'll call moribund. I like the word moribund and think it should be used more often.
Anyway, so you go down. You're laying on the ground and you have 4 skills. Throw a clomp of dirt, stun, skill 3 (for my ranger it's have my pet come heal me) and 4 is call for help and gen a little health.
Basically, the red bar above your skills are your moribund state health. By the time that empties, you need to either be healed by a PC, by your pet (or whatever skill 3 is for other people), or kill a mob. Note if someone kills a mob near you you'll stand back up automatically. After you die, you can be revived by another player so long as you don't respawn at a waypoint.
There is a basic penalty though for dying, but it's very small. Usually you receive a minor health penalty for a while, and usually an item of armor on you breaks and ceases to function until you repair it. Those broken hearts on the map are repair NPCs, and it costs like 20 copper to actually repair something. Pretty nominal.
Also, crafting is actually divorced from gathering, in that you can gather everything. Make sure you always have a set of gathering tools (scythe, axe, and pick) and GATHER GATHER GATHER. You get XP, about as much as killing most mobs, for each item you pick up. I average around 30-40 xp per tree I log for example. When you hit a spot where you've done everything and need to level grind to advance your personal story, consider crafting. It generates XP as well. Cranking out level appropriate weapons generates 4-500 xp a pop at first. Quite lucrative. In fact, mastering a craft supposedly is worth 10 levels of experience, and you can respec, so in theory if you have the materials you can level cap purely off of crafting.