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.
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.
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?
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.
Enough then. May Blessings Be to All. Goodnight.
Better Endings 