Hi All, (July 31/09)

I've not gone fishing; my 95-year-old father, who lives on the other side of the country, has just been admitted to Hospice care.

My next column will appear here ASAP.
Regards,
Spinfo

continued...

Hello again; (August 6/09)

I did have another column ready to post here, but the personal events of these last few days' prompts me to share another discussion, in the moment.

The impending death of someone we love is an unbidden internal journey through the landscape of our memories, emotions and beliefs, across the inmost expanse of our experiences.

Ready or not, as we are faced with death as one life's unalterable truths, our life-is-learning lessons become something more than simply a mind-matter informed of ideative words. We are suddenly expected to call into real-life practice the compassionate ideals of enlightenment drawn from that vague grasp of our own self growth. The edges of our shared consciousness blur at the same time they focus as we are flung into the cosmic convergence of our self-and-Self with an others' self-and-Self. Such psychic-spiritual confluence pronounces life's undeniable connections of mind, heart and spirit. For our relationships, our connectedness, our shared experiences through time are what tell us the true measure of life's meaning.

We each cope with these critical events in the best ways we can manage. Some of us run away, emotionally hiding, psychologically distancing, and spiritually withdrawing from such difficult times. But it is at these moments that we can most clearly realize our learning and understanding of sharing. As the deepest value of living, forged only from the genuine, evolved from love, the theory and practice of sharing is central not only to our quality of life, but also to our quality of death as our final act of passage from this human focus of our consciousness, into another.

What we participate in, what we share in equal measure of give-and-take with those close to us throughout our lives, is not rendered valueless at our death - as if it were only a conscious choice to suddenly be dismissed as a reality to our consciousness. As we move across that invisible border between life and death, I do not believe that our consciousness is vacant of the knowledge that it has taken us a lifetime to understand. I do not believe our hearts become emptied of their truths, drained of their own kind of knowing. I believe that is the meaning of compassion, and ultimately love.

I am not there, at my father's bedside, yet I'm certain my psychic-spiritual presence is as real as my physical presence, and I am certain that in that blink-of-an-eye that moves us from this reality into another, there is a shared acknowledgment of all that life is, that gives support and ease. I believe there is a comfort and grace drawn from mutual caring that is as real a value to my father as it is to me, as we part in time to each travel our separate paths of the timeless evolvement of consciousness.

I believe there is a holiness to life, and to death, that opens our way forward - inward - Self-ward as we are bound to experience both.

I haven't gone fishing; but where I am (away from these pages) is as gracious a space-and-place as any mountain lake's serenity grants us.

Until I return,
Best Regards,
Spinfo