Perception, Life, Death

I saw this photo of a quote regarding perception and don’t know the author whose wisdom created it, but kudos to her (or him) for this insight.

Perception has been a hot topic for me in 2011-2012, the year of my grief. Though I, like everyone, have experienced many losses large and small none has affected me as much as the death of my infant granddaughter whose life passed from one realm to the next in a burst of energy in June 2011. We were blessed in being forewarned about her death and so had a few months to prepare. I foolishly thought that this preparation would guard me from the overwhelming emotions that followed her journey from the physical to the eternal; from the realm where I could touch her to the realm in which her spirit roams unshackled, free.

I have always been a person who believed in the afterlife but when Trinity died I suffered greatly wondering just WHERE she was. And though I had always had a deeply felt experience of the Divine, in the year of my grief I could no longer feel that Presence. I could hardly feel anything at all. I was so alone. At least that is what I perceived in the short-sightedness of my pain.

So perception. What is life exactly? Does true life reside in the body or is it actually centered in the soul? Is life here or there . . . in the realm where the totality of the electromagnetic and acoustic spectrum are perceived? Are we truly here in time and space or is that just an illusion of our inadequate minds that seek to justify our physical reality as truth rather than acknowledge the vastness of what we really don’t know, can’t know, won’t know until we too move on from this plane of existence.

I spent a great deal of time in the year of my grief thinking about and reading about energy, healing, suffering, and staying in the present moment as I struggled to make sense of the sadness of this baby’s ever-so-short life and tragic death. I can’t say that I came up with an adequate answer to that so common “why” that accompanies all tragedies but I did learn that it is how we perceive any event that is the basis for our suffering. I have recognized that there is so much mystery in our physical life, in illness, in healing, and in death. I appreciate in a new way that I cannot explain the energy that enlivens my body never mind the electromagnetic spectrum, cellular emptiness, DNA, or rainbows. And that doesn’t even begin to address the real mystery of our oneness with the Divine and our power to heal through that Oneness.

What we perceive is so limited not just by our belief that we already know, but by the vastness of what there is to know. So for the first time in a lifetime of faith, I truly know that mystery trumps all that I’ve learned so far.

I acknowledge that my life exists on a fragile mysterious thread between this realm and the next. When my connection to here is gone, I will be there – not in some egocentric continuation of my current existence but in an all-encompassing Oneness with all that I cannot yet perceive.