Inside Out in Current Events

I went for a walk with my nice today. I was trying to go by myself but I couldn’t say no when she asked to join me. There was a light rain and I just wanted to experience it. She turned the walk into a big hiking adventure which was precious. However, we ran into a dead deer and that was sad. My niece, who is four, was trying to understand what she saw on the rest of our walk. It was nerve-racking trying to explain life and death to a child. I don’t think I traumatized her. I can’t, however, unsee that deer laying there. I just saw her yesterday. She was standing on a tiny mound by herself waiting for me to pass. It was serene. Then again I saw her drinking from a pool of water that was near where I saw her today. She’s going back into the earth. I explained to my niece. She is going to turn into insects, grass & trees. She got excited about Harley being a big tree. Harley was our dog that we had put down last summer. We didn’t come to this earth, we came out of it. The way an apple tree grows apples the earth grows people. We’re not separate from nature. We breathe in what the trees breathe out. The trees breathe in what we breathe out and that transaction is ongoing whether we are aware of it or not. Half of our lungs are hanging in the trees. When animals die they grow back into the earth. We’re all earth.

I don’t know how to explain death just as much as I don’t know how to explain life. Is life and death just a human concept? We live in polarities, light and dark, masculine and feminine, left and right. We only know that we are okay at this moment because that awful thing in the back of our minds that mustn’t happen isn’t happening. Do we only know that we are alive only because we are not dead? There is more to life than this and I believe a spiritual process will help me get there. Help me exist outside of these polarities. This cage. The life work of spirituals guides across history and culture has been to just point out that this cage does not exist.

Our bodies are just an accumulation of what we ingest. Our minds are just an accumulation of impressions we got from our five senses. What you accumulate can be yours but it can never actually be you. We’re trying to live our lives through what we have gathered and not by who we really are. What we call the mind is just what we gathered through our five senses. That which is beyond that, which we have not gathered, is who we are. Being alive is being conscious. We can do things without awareness but we can also do things with awareness and that is the difference between ignorance and enlightenment. Enlightenment, transcendence is not an awakening but a homecoming. We never experience the outside we only experience the inside. This screen we’re looking at is just light reflecting off it into your brain and through your retina. You’re seeing this screen from inside yourself. Everything you experience is from inside yourself… I’m losing my train of thought and I’m just rambling here. I have so much to unlearn and learn. Seeing that deer and explaining it to my niece has me feeling some type of way.