A Wayfarer Tribute for Larry

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Larry is a kind, friendly man who has served as the director of mail services at my university. This past year several times he and I have chatted when he asked me to sign for some mail at my department. Larry was so excited to be retiring this summer. He and his wife have invested in real estate so that they would have a worry free retirement. He encouraged me in my plans to retire next summer, emphatic that sooner rather than later is the best course to take. He was so excited the last two times we talked, with his retirement date and the liberation it represents edging closer and closer.

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Around two weeks ago, though, Larry suffered a heart attack; my understanding is that he passed from this life the following morning. What a turn of events, I thought at first; how unfair his demise after all of his excellent planning.  How precious and fleeting is a lifetime!  As I will soon be 63 and am beginning to have some health concerns, I wonder about what is to come and want to do all I can NOW, in case Spirit calls me home unexpectedly.

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But then a few days ago while I was in a dentist chair trying not to pay too much attention to possibly painful probing in my mouth, I was blessed to see Larry.  Inwardly I had introduced him to my own Inner Guide, and I watched as he and this Master walked forward along a beautiful pathway into the Light ahead. He was happy and conveyed that to me. He was more excited and interested in discovering what was to come than in looking behind to see what he was leaving. He appeared younger and spry of step. I felt happy for him, the Soul of Larry.

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Now I get that Larry HAS achieved a very happy retirement to a beautiful new life, albeit sadly without his wife outwardly. I am sure where he is going will be where he has earned the right to go forward spiritually in all that Soul’s interests and love.

Life is fleeting from the short perspective of a single persona or lifetime. It is also of immense value to Soul, as each lifetime we have a golden, unique opportunity to express our love and gain insights from the specific conditions and relationships we cultivate in the current body state we occupy in that lifetime. I am a strong believer in reincarnation and in the continuation of Soul to higher and higher states of being and levels of service to the whole.

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Larry’s departure reaffirms, to me, that we learn life’s specific lessons and take those gems of wisdom with us ever more, wherever we go.  His joyful excitement and love that I observed in his moving along into the next phase of his own spiritual expression teaches me the value of fully embracing this Life for all of its treasures!

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images are from pixabay.com

What treasures would you take with you if you were called home today?

The Body-Life of Soul and Crossing Over

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It is so interesting and humbling to observe how blogging works within my life now. 10:45 Sunday PM, reflecting on the week’s topic and, again, how it relates to conditions in my  life as well as connects  with readers’ lives. This week, for example, is about utilizing the ARTISTarchetype to help Cross the Threshold of experience… Sunday (earlier tonight) I wrote of this in relation to Nanci Griffith’s rendition of “Across the Great Divide” and how this could relate to the divide between life and death with regards to the character played by Julianne Moore in Still Alice. Then my sister Lee called and  let me know that my mother, Betty Watts, is facing her own great divide even in this moment; she struggles at a nursing home with late stage Parkinson’s and now they are asking to insert a food tube because she is having too much difficulty swallowing even the pureed diet she has been restricted to for over a year already. We all know (five children, plus her extended in-laws and by now 6 grandchildren and several great grandchildren, and friends) that my mother’s time on this earth in her current body is limited and fragile. All her children have been planning to be with her July 4, but now it appears that may be optimistic; we must let her go as smoothly as we can so she suffers as little as possible.

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Life in an embodied state is such a gift of Love, especially near its close; what else? Think about it for a moment. We are Soul: magnificent, eternal Beingness with the divine gift of conscious awareness, channeling through these very limited body states in order to learn, but even more so in order to give and to receive love.  In the end, it is only Love that matters. All else is imagining and manipulating form and substance, exercising thoughts, struggling with emotional conditions tied to the body states. Only Love is real, in the beginning as well as at the time of Crossing Over, transitioning from Form back into Formlessness (or into another, less dense form), from limited, dense matter to pure spiritual energy again, as the cycles of Life continue to flow endlessly like the waves of the Sea.

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Which brings me to the next serendipitous connection: tonight before coming to bed I saw that showing on TV was THE LIFE OF PI. Also about Crossing troubled waters, this book and film are about spiritual awareness and specifically about using the power of IMAGINATION to survive nearly insurmountable, life threatening odds. Pi survives by his faith and the resourcefulness of his imaginative faculties. We never even really know for certain what the character Pi endures after he is cast adrift upon a lifeboat when an ocean going merchant vessel  with his family on board has sunk, so transformed is his outer experience by his creative perceptions. Does Pi really survive with a Bengal tiger on board the lifeboat, or in the end is that a metaphor for enduring a very rough passage with a murderous chef?

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Always at the most challenging moments, Pi calls out to God with GRATITUDE for his life, for the opportunity to have existed with awareness even unto what could be his imminent death. After every such outburst of faith and gratitude, though unsought, God or the universe itself provides gifts that allow Pi to endure yet another storm of turmoil.

So we can all learn from the Life of Pi to trust and to rely upon our innate powers of imagination to see us through the best as well as the “worst” of our times in bodies. Remember, for instance, to DREAM and to ENVISION what your next step shall be.

These bodies are themselves vessels; but we are Soul, not bodies; Soul on  a Great Journey of Love.

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Enough then. May Blessings Be to All. Goodnight.