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Published on Leave a comment on The Love of an Ancestor

The busy beaver 

Our ancestors are ghosts, right? Dead and gone. Can we be sure of that? Their bodies are energy stored in matter that comes to rest when they die. It reaches a state of inertia in those bodies. But the first law of thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So the energy that stops animating bodies doesn’t cease to exist. It still exists but it’s just moved on.

Back to Soul perhaps, its source, that holds everything together in one interconnected Reality. Or to another form where Mind directs it. For energy is doing. And if Mind doesn’t give it anything to do it comes to rest. If that were to happen nothing would exist, for energy activates. It’s what makes things happen. Mind has plenty for energy to do. Whether it's activating our material universe or another Reality entirely.

As if nothing happened

The life in our bodies is energy directed by Mind that many believe is distinct from our brain, like me and many neuroscientists. Energy that comes to inertia in bodies has no effect at all on energy itself or on Mind.

So when a body “dies” it may be the end of one form of energy but it can’t be the end of life. It can’t be the end of what makes things happen. Our ancestors’ personalities and stories, like ours, were time- and place-specific. Linked to their circumstances, their contexts, and when energy stopped animating their stories they were done. The succession of ancestors and contexts moved on and it will leave us with our contexts behind too. But the life in us can’t be left behind. It continues on as if nothing happened.

When a life comes back to life

Maybe I just memorialized Grandma Clara Jane’s story because she wanted me to. Because in some sense our ancestors are still with us and want to help us. Or there's unfinished business, like something we can do for them. Not necessarily their personalities and stories as we think of them but their souls. If we are one big Soul connected by energy; if she was a big help when she was alive; and if the energy that gave life to her body remains intact in her soul, why shouldn’t she be a big help now? Why shouldn't I be a help to her?

Clara Jane’s story intersected with mine while she and I both shared time and space on earth. We connected, though I might not have been aware of it. Her circumstances linked with mine when she performed an act that improved my prospects. When I was a vulnerable child in an unwelcoming family environment and needed protection. Maybe we’ve reconnected now because I can return the favor. Because there’s something that she needs from me and I can deliver.

What does she need? She had a tragic love life. And her crucial role in joining two families with pride of accomplishment -- the Clays of Kentucky and the Harrisons of Western Pennsylvania -- has never been given its due. The remarkable, larger-than-life way that she did it. I can be masculinity to her femininity that’s respectful and loyal. Not the bounder she married. And I can turn my passion for reflecting and writing to giving her role its due. She can somehow become whole through me in a way that was left undone when she was among us.

A friendly operator is waiting for your call

So what happens next?

There must be an ancestor you admire who wants to help. Maybe he or she is sitting by the phone waiting for you to call. Do you think?

Published on Leave a comment on The View from the Bluff

Necessity

You envisioned me getting intimate with the hardass lives of American pioneers, bringing personal aspirations and tragedies to life with storytelling skill. Yet all it really takes is getting old. What did they face that oldness – a state of mind – doesn’t force on us every minute?

Necessity. Their lives were bound by it like planets locked in by gravity. What escapes work for us anymore? I read about other lives and pay attention when they cross my paths, and what strikes me is how the sun rises to motion and sound and then sets and whatever it is is all gone. Nothing really happened and even if it did whatever it was disappeared. What’s left in its wake is a reality I sense is there but, for all my reflecting and philosophizing, I can't figure out what it is.

Companionship of another kind, loneliness of another kind

It’s not malign. It’s not hiding from us. It’s not demanding that we drop everything and pay attention. If it wants anything maybe it’s just to be noticed. Not recognized or known because that’s asking too much. Just so we’re aware. So whatever sensible or senseless business we’re about won’t make us forget. That it’s part of our business? I don’t know. I never paid much attention before but now I feel it. A kind of companionship that comes with a kind of loneliness I’ve never felt before.

I cling. Not to one relationship or to one place. Not to the memory of one event but to all of it. Everything. In a fury of sentiment and despair I cast about for a thing that can be embraced. It was all bodies and limbs, stuff that wound up in piles, so why not? If life slips through our fingers why can’t we retrieve it with fingers? Love and be thankful for it with an embrace, with a caress?

Ridiculous. I’m embarrassed. If it’s hard in this world to change mind what’s really hard is to be mind. The leash I brought to the dog park doesn’t have a dog on it anymore and I can’t adapt. I know I came to the dog park for a reason. Logic keeps telling me Carry on carry on! But something’s not the same, and it’s getting more and more not the same. Can there be motion and sound out of mind? Is this the companion that makes me cling to my life?

Something new under the sun

I complain and the answer I get back is Don’t worry, we’re all clinging. To what? To you. We need you. I guess that makes me feel better. But I want a dog on the end of my leash! A dog I can pet, you know? That loves me and plays with me. A dog I can see. What you’ll see will be much better than a dog. Your body is what’s keeping you from seeing it. From experiencing Life. Maybe what you sense is there when you walk along the bluff, when the sun breaks through the clouds over the ocean, is what’s waiting for you. It’s there. You’ll see it. Through different eyes, that’s all.

Life conditions us to think of ourselves and our surroundings in a certain way and then it fades away, structure and all. And when it does, the ocean comes back into view from the bluff, the sun breaking through the clouds. Pulling me back or forward? I don't know. For now, it's just there. A feeling. Hope and anticipation with moving on. Melancholy and grief with leaving behind. Sobering unfamiliarity, the necessity of the inevitable.

Something new under the sun. Another test, another chance, to adapt. Whatever it wants, whatever it means, it's got my attention.