It is strange how life turns out sometimes. How you end up where you never thought you would, and how life sends you down weird twists and turns and across misty, dimly lit landscapes. By the time you are my age, you are used to meeting yourself, both your good and bad, your bright and your dark and you realize that it has all been training in 'the decision'.
My dearest friend in the world is walking down the path to death, release and a new reality, with great strength and forbearing. She is not ready to give up yet and she is fighting. The medical people have all but given up on her and offer palliative care - she is having none of the damned chemical invasion, intervention. She is going the natural route. For now she is holding her own. I am walking this road with her, however she chooses to walk it and I cannot fathom how she must feel and I am dreading the day that my footsteps echo alone. This soul has always in my lifetime meant home, and all I had to do to find my way back was listen for her soft voice whispering in the wind.
It is impossible to feel festive this Christmas season. She and I believe in the larger spiritual sense of creator, and not the crap that gets shoved down your throat every season anyway - so far away from what passes for spiritual here in this place. We both miss a faraway home, galaxies afar - eons ago. We have both sojourned long and far from our home fondly remembered from a past long ago, and I can almost hear it calling her, if I listen deeply enough. One day she will follow that call home and my world, quite selfishly will become a place that only can be born because she once lived here.
We stand at the threshold of a new time for this planet, one where we just might make it past the barrier of self-absorbed insanity. One where when a soul passes we will know they do not end, but simply migrate and transform and one where this transition does not cut us off from the lovely soul connections to those we have loved, still love. A time when, we will be able to look beyond who we think we are to a greater understanding of a much wider, more inclusive universe. I know this because some of the most gentle and wise people I know are not physical. We stand at this doorway fondly looking out over the landscape, unwilling to step outside this tiny confining physical house we currently occupy.
I know this not through faith, or belief, but through experience. The type of experience that we have all had in our lives, fleeting, sometimes uplifting and wondrous and other times frightful and dangerous. We live in this world as blind men walking in a world of sunshine, only ever feeling the heat of the sun on our skin to know that it is there, or the quiet cold of its absence.
When we decide to finally walk through that doorway, our eyes must be open and we must see and know, accept the responsibility and knowledge of that information and carry it like adults. We find it hard to accept the presence of our loved souls when they pass, so much so that we persist in the blind reality that they are not right beside us. How much more so when we look out the door and see so many other variations of life in this universe?
This passage into adulthood cannot be taught. it must be a learning process we either accept or not. A teacher once said to me, "I can tell you all about the taste of a hamburger, but until you actually eat one, you will not really know." He meant that you actually have be willing to take a bite and find out for yourself. Our fears of what might be out that door keep most of us inside where we think we are safe.
When we step through that door we must be willing to understand that there is NO great revelation, that there is no great wondrous easy answer to the next step, that it will be much like it has been with opportunities for greater good and greater bad.
Even if the 'D' word didn't happen to us yesterday, and we are still wrestling with taking responsibility for our own idiocy and ignorance, it doesn't mean that it will not happen, is not already happening. It just means that one of the steps you have to take before you get to go outside and play is that you must clean up your own room first. If we can't handle the idiots in our own world, we will never make it past the first step out the door: we have to understand how important it is handle our own problems - to decide what kind of people we will be when we emerge from this cocoon we call earth.
We stand at the door to a greater society and like going to college, we will probably mess up a bit, but most of us will get the jist of it pretty quickly and enter into an adult world we have been dreaming about with the same problems and responsibilities we have today, only in a much, much, wider sense. With that also come the perks of adulthood, like the ability to touch those that we love, where ever they are and know we are never, ever alone or separate.
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