Yesterday, six years ago, I looked up at the sky as the sun was just about to set.  There was an oddity about the way it looked.  It appeared as a white circle enclosed by a dark circle.  It really didn’t look like the sun at all.  It was more like a hole punched in the sky wherein a strange brightness from somewhere else bled through.  There seemed to be almost no frame of reference for what I was witnessing.  It was strange, not completely uncomfortable, but there was subtle curiosity in this enigma.

It’s funny how we take for granted that which we think we know.  I have so many preconceived ideas about how things are, how life is ‘meant’ to be, how things should be, how people should act, even about what I am supposed to do.  It often takes quite a sober and jolting experience to begin to see something new, something even inconceivable. Many times it takes the destruction of what was once thought or believed to be true, to really begin to see reality as it is.  This is suffering and indeed grief.  It can be a knock-your-breath-out kind of experience, it can be a full body blow, it can seem like the end.  It can BE the present!

The following day, six years ago, I was able to frame that hole in the sky as it apparently became the passageway through which the lovely one who brought me into the world would travel.  After years of knowing that this day would come, this time would ripen, the inevitable would occur, there was still a shock.  And, why should it be any other way?

Yes, the grief and sorrow was there and still is, but there was that also the immediacy that arrived in this ‘passing’ that conferred (perhaps ‘birthed’ would be better here) a profound sense of vibrancy and utter importance of the NOW – this moment – not as something that comes and goes, as ‘time’ ticks away, but as the irrevocable access that we have to avail that which is right before us, within us and all about us RIGHT NOW!  Is this gratitude, joy, suffering, sorrow?  I choose not to categorize it.

There is a GIFT in every death, every kind of death, that opens a gate that we can walk through or more assuredly BECOME.  There’s always a rainbow above that shines, whose source is nowhere but our own recognition and participation.

There is a strange opening in every moment that we have the opportunity to participate in, to actually co-create within, to humble accept as the truth as it is, which simultaneously begets the very means or origin of transformation.  This could be utter shock, bliss, grief, trust, uncertainty, or maybe a strange unfolding – albeit a beautiful one – of all these in concert.  Perhaps a strange sky with a hole in it that attracts and repels both at the same time.

This is the gift of Life as it meets its eternal source!  The gift of all that we need to navigate and co-create each Present moment.  And what of ‘death?’   Well, that is not anything really different.

This is the gift of motherhood!  This is the gift of personhood!  I thank you now as you are HERE!