This Is Life

Remember friend, as you pass by ~ As you are now, so once was I ~ As I am now, you soon shall be ~ So prepare for Death and follow me.

This is an epitaph from a relative’s tombstone. Words that I grew up with. My grandmother, mother and aunt, use to take us to the cemetery, after Mass. It seemed appropriate to visit the dead, on Sunday.

To walk with head bowed, looking at the dirt and envisioning the emptiness. The nothingness of the after-life. It looked like a weird neighborhood. The tombstones had addresses that were years; one – to the other. The personalities living on in quirky sayings, that haunted me in the week.

I took those words to heart. How was I to prepare for death?

Was I suppose to get right with Jesus. To walk and talk like him. Did I need to travel to the desert? It was difficult to be like Jesus in the sixties and seventies. I desperately looked for him in churches, and found people, no Jesus, just people.

I took this photo ~ seconds after death. I probably only caught a reflection from the light bulb. Or is it?

When I first saw the image, I knew it was the illumination of a soul, lifting, and rising out of the body.

Our souls never die. They can’t. They are energy and energy cannot die.

We are our consciousness and that is what creates our lives.

And then we die to live.

Everything that I was looking for was in me. But I had to walk my path, like the Buddha, searching for the bull. I walked and ran and fell down sometimes, when all along, the bull was behind me, following, in my shadow.

I’ve witnessed death, and come to believe ~ it’s bigger than our earthly birth.

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” C.S. Lewis