Monday, June 12, 2017

the same people, deeper than before




I didn’t grow up with any kind of formal sense of heaven or hell.  To be honest with you, I don’t even think in those terms today. I sure don’t think of hell, let’s put it that way. Let’s put it this way:  Do I think that people’s spirits live on?  When I say spirits here’s what I mean.  I mean the people I knew and their personality and their history, I think that they live on somehow. I can’t prove this and I don’t want to get into any kind of intellectual discussions about this. I would not hold my ground.
     I sometimes imagine that my mom is still alive, for instance, in this other world. I just call it the Wild Blue Yonder because I don’t know what else to call it.  I think everybody I knew, who died, are there. They have a connection to who they were, their history of who they were when I knew them. They’re also learning and they’ve grown and they’ve transformed. They are who I know them to be and more. I learned a Native American chant from a mentor. She was more like a substitute mother. “We are old people, we are new people; we are the same people deeper than before.”  That’s what I think about everyone I lost recently.  I think they are the same people but deeper than before.
     Every picture of the earth seen from outer space shows this unique blue planet. You know how they say that every star like the sun has its binary twin, a twin sun someplace?  I think the Wild Blue Yonder has twinned the earth.  Our connections to both are what matter.  “We are old people, we are young people, we are the same people, deeper than before.” 
~
     Grief was once something that was endured; couldn’t be cured.  Resilience…somebody help us if shopping is seen as the cure.  Of course everything is different – if you’ve lost someone, lost an ability, lost your country, lost your job, lost your heart or your hope - everything is different.
     A man I know lost his son to an auto accident.  After he had survived two tours in the war in Iraq he thought for sure his son would be safe.  With tears in his eyes, he told me that he had to find his new “normal.”  We don’t know what that means because “normal” is an inner experience.  Is it possible everything is a spectrum that will curl back on itself, like the infinity of the Mobius strip?           
~
     I didn’t grow up with any concepts of heaven or hell.  The closest to that for me was the rainbow; that spectrum of colors I loved from art class, in my Crayola box, later as a wink and a nod on my car, letting people know that needed to know, that they weren’t alone.  Wild Blue is on the far end of the rainbow’s spectrum. 
     In the Jewish tradition, whenever you remember someone it helps their soul live and move on through the different worlds after this world.  The Kabala, if you’ve seen pictures of it, is a map of this journey.  It doesn’t just go in one direction.  It’s showing the soul’s travels. 
     All relationships have their journeys.  Not everyone is perfect or good. Not even those that died.  We move toward connection through a slipstream of time and spectrums of meaning. 
     I never grew up with any kind of sense about heaven or hell.  But there are days, when I feel the pain of my sister’s loss and then the love from my friend that also feels like a sister to me.  Then I know heaven is a sense of connection, a feeling of being loved and heard.  And I listen. 
………………………..
the end of the wild blues, the beginning of something new

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is from the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O

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