Rebirth

We who watch death in every form are the ones who suffer. It is painful to say goodbye to our spouses, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, friends and most of all, to our children. Our life, like theirs, changes. Our life, unlike theirs, is still focused here. The person who made the transition was part of our habit, our identity, and our relationship with the world around us. When the person no longer exists in that capacity, we suffer a loss of identity. They don’t. We do.

Recognizing My Part

We all hit speed bumps and yesterday was mine. Feeling overwhelmed, it came to me "If it's not part of God, it's not part of me!"

Death Is a Colossal Birthday Party

When you turned twenty-one, are you the ten-year old you were once? Of course you are but you neither dwell on or are attached to having been a ten-year old at one time, although you can remember age ten when you are twenty-one. The memory of this life feels like that, like a moment in time or a movie you saw. You will recall it with complete detachment. In your earthly life, any age is only one stage of an overall lifetime. Each age has allowed you to gather enough experience to easily move on to the next age and is usually marked by a birthday party. Death, on the other hand, is one colossal birthday celebration!

We Die Daily

We die every night to the day that just passed. We die to the day because it no longer exists except in a memory cell. One day we will die to this life altogether. For most, the first thing we notice is a burst of beauty and a loving feeling. This impartial all-enveloping light, love and spiritual knowingness doesn’t adequately translate into any language because our recognition of It is a non-language.

Its light and love are indescribable; you just are and you know it! You and the Self are indivisible yet individual. Fame, power, money, monarchy, gender, age, race are unknown giving rise to the question, are the renowned world and religious leaders, the famous, my mother and your mother still the same persona now that they have stepped from human sight?


Yes and no. You will be the essence of you with an added experience, one that incorporates your immediate past life in the same way that you incorporated the experiences of your life at incremental stages.

Three Responses Are All You Need

It’s taken me an entire lifetime to learn I only need three responses if something doesn’t set right with me.

1) To the pompous: Listen and when they are done say, “La-tee-da.”
2) To the fix-it or nosey busy body: Let ‘em ramble on and when they are done say, “Yes ma’am,” or it could be a “sir” but usually it’s a female. This isn't the old world polite "Yes ma'am," it's the tongue-in-cheek kind.
3) To escape the control freak and manipulator: Say, “I don’t know anything about that.”

Death

Throughout recorded history and from every corner of the earth, we have made death the ultimate human tragedy using it as a central theme in an endless stream of real life headlines, operas, movies, television, and books. Because it is a painful experience to say good-bye to those we love, we have created ceremony upon ceremony in the hope it will ease if not erase our pain.

Eventually, though, the natural grieving process gives way to letting us move on; while death caused by accidents, massacres, murders and deviate acts leaves life-altering chasms in our hearts. Sometimes our hearts heal and sometimes they don’t. Not even the passing of eons seems to erase the pain caused by acts of cruelty and terror.

We are still reminded of the Christians who were eaten alive by Lions and of those who have been bludgeoned, buried alive or burned at the stake over thousands of years. There are still many among us who were imprisoned in Hitler’s camps of terror and still awaken each day to the memory of a human sea of living death.

And who was more terrified on that day of horror September 11, 2001? Was it the four pilots who could see what was happening, the passengers who were gripped with fear, or the thousands of people who blinked on one side of reality and awakened on the other? Where did these people go? For those of us who are left behind, how do we stop crying? Does not this give voice to yet another reason why it is important to put a new face on death altogether?

Old Is Not On My Wish List

James Poniewozik, Time Magazine, January 17, 2000 wrote “…remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it.”

Old is not on my wish list, of course, but dead isn’t either! Happiness though, like Poniewozik points out, is accepting the inevitable outcome of life is death. Once we do this, an emotional shift of sorts takes place. “Have to” shackles seem less important and many simply disappear.