Happy Birthday: What you know by 40...

Today, November 29th, 2015, is my mother's 70th birthday and I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to celebrate it with her.  

I'd have only started noticing her aging from time to time, when she would forget something or show a slight hitch in her gait.

I'd have just begun to think about her mortality and what losing her might mean for my life one day while watching her struggle to keep up with the kids.

She would be proud of me as a father, telling me not to fuss so much and to give them time and space to grow.

She would tell me to use my law degree to make some money for those kids, so I can write without worrying about money.

She'd tell me to try church again, that I might be ready for it...

...if she were here.

On her birthday, when I would be visiting or flying her wherever I am, I often review what I believe about life and about death.  Here's the story as has come to me since the moment I heard my mother sing her last breath and begin to shed years with the pain she had released when she let go.  One is about the nature of life and one is about what happens when we die.

All life is born and sustained by the universe, which is expanding and contracting so slowly (or quickly) that we can't feel it.  The universe explodes and implodes sequentially, distributing energy in echoes that appear in the pulsing of the sun, the spin of planets, the beating of our hearts.  As a result every thing that has ever happened, or will happen, is happening at once in the smooth pulsing of the universe between nothingness and infinity.  When we are present to that energy, when meditating, when praying, when lost in dancing, when imagining, when in some sort of "zone", we are actually able to move from one time to another, one dimension to another, one life to another.

I believe I witnessed my mother travel back to a time when she was younger the moment after her last breath.  Not that she stayed there, but I saw her body go backward to a time before I had known her.  She looked younger than I'd ever seen her.

And this is what I think happens when we die.  We are freed from the powerful illusion of the present and able to move forward and backward in time, left or right through dimensions, free to take other life forms, to join with the sun or with the oceans or with dark matter itself.  I think what people call heaven is that experience of joining the allness of life.  Contrastingly, what people call hell is when fear, guilt, shame, or other powerfully destructive emotions drag a person into a feeling of horrible self-loathing.  We can do either and I personally believe that the we are ultimately the judge, jury, and executioner, the shepherd, protector, and savior.  We can actually punish ourselves, doom ourselves to hell.

This belief of mine is blasphemy to many Christians and many of those who believe in Islam.   I can live with that.  Ironically though, like Christians and Muslims believe, what my mother gifted me with the moment of her death was all the proof I needed that there is an afterlife and that how we live our lives determines what that afterlife is.  The difference is that the choices we make don't lead God to punish us, but lead us to punish ourselves.

Now 13 days before 40, I feel stronger than ever that I have to live as though I don't want to die with guilt, shame, regret, anger, resentment, or self-hate in my heart.  That is my work in this life, to live in a way so that when my moment comes, I can feel free to go on and choose some great joyful, fulfilling afterlife.  I am 100% certain this is what my mother wanted for me and what the universe (God) gave her the power to show me the moment she passed away.

Thank you mama for giving me life and for showing me the afterlife.  You showed me everything I need to know.