Not Nothing

The fear based religions are certainly not doing the planet any good anymore (if ever they did.) The problem is they lock generations in with fear. Searching and questioning are really not allowed. They say THIS is the book - Koran, Bible, Old Testament, and THESE are the laws, because people so much smarter than you have determined them. If you want the very most painful, awful, torturous fate imaginable for all eternity, then just go ahead and question. Oh, and by the way, we'll make this life miserable for you as well.   

 In South Carolina where I live, it's social suicide to admit you aren't Christian. (I'm socially dead, by the way.) I complained about meetings at my state job being opened with a prayer - always a Christian prayer. I was openly Pantheist. I asked, then told people to stop trying to save my soul. I was told by my boss in a meeting not to question what would become of my job because "Jesus, my Lord and savior is where I put my trust and I don't worry." I objected to that. I paid a big price for all of it. Of course, you can't be fired for that, but they can make it so miserable that you run screaming from the building. 

Many people will agree with me that they revere Nature, but they continue to feed and be fed by fear based religion. They say they just go for the ritual, for the comfort, for the community. They don't recycle or capture rain water. They continue to eat a meat-based diet and use toxic chemicals in their homes and farms that poison ground water. They water their unnatural lawns with drinkable water and mow them with fume and noise-belching machines. They fight with leaves in Autumn with noisy machines and then burn them in great piles until the other animals and I can't breathe. They fill their minds with junk and their bodies with junk carried home in plastic bags that they toss in the garbage.

And with smiling faces they tell me that I can't change the world. That my little amount of recycling, and my personal ban of toxins and my little garden watered with rainwater are nothing. They are embarrassed when I sift through their or public garbage sorting out what can be recycled. They are embarrassed by my second hand clothes and my reuse of things. They are embarrassed by my tears when I lose a tree or see an animal mistreated.

 

Well, I am NOT embarrassed.  I am proud to be Pantheist.  But I need encouragement from other Pantheists and open-minded thinkers.  I need to know I'm not alone and that the little ways I love Earth are not nothing.

Maybe when we all are a little more visible we will be a little more accepted.  Maybe people will follow our lead and do little things to love the Earth, too. 

Enough

May you have enough. 

It is a good blessing.  A good wish for all of us.  I wish for my children that they always have enough and that they realize it and appreciate it.  I do not wish for them to have too much.  I wish the same for me.

When the first immigrants came to America, perhaps they were welcomed by Native Americans, perhaps not.  Probably some of each.  The immigrants (the land was already inhabited and settled so no need to call them settlers or discoverers) who came here to this vast, rugged country to find religious freedom, believed that the Native Americans were less than they and that there religion was definitely less than theirs.  So they set about killing them and taking the land.

Note there was a lot of land.  America, though inhabited by Native Americans with complex cultures, was not overcrowded.  There was enough for everyone.  But that's just not the way we do it, is it?  We, as a species are not big on sharing outside of our immediate families.

When later immigrants came - the Irish micks and the Italian wops, the Chinese slanteyes - you know, the people who did all the hard labor, the people who were already here didn't welcome them.  Those who were already here didn't want to share.  Oh, there was still a lot of wide open spaces, still enough for everyone, but no one wanted to share.  And the latest immigrants wanted to be here badly enough that they often did the hard labor to build the country up.  They were treated poorly.  The people who were already here had forgotten that they were immigrants too. And it still goes on.  I needn't go into it.  The Mexican wetbacks are abused for their labor and not welcomed for it. 

But the people who were treated the worst are the Native American, injuns, red skinned devils.  Without going into the painful humiliations these people endured and endure, the killing of them by White immigrants was one of the most complete genocides ever.

And every wave of immigrants, every wave of "progress" has brought with it a raping of the Earth.  First the forest in the East go.  They were cut down and lumber sent back to England who had gone through her own trees.  They were cut down to make space in a land more spacious than could be imagined.  The Earth was ripped open for her coal which was overused causing Her air to become toxic.  She was ripped open for Her gold and Her iron and raped for Her oil, all of which provided too much for a bunch of greedy people.  Her animals were slaughtered to the point of extinction.  All of this causing insane imbalance.  But nobody noticed.  We wanted more than enough.

Well, I have had ENOUGH.  I do not want more.  I want balance.  I want peace and respect for all of Earth, including her people. 

We are a greedy lot.  Having too much has made us greedy, not having too little. 

There is something about having too much that makes us greedy.  It's not having too little. 

Holy Water

Our bodies are about 70% water.  Planet Earth is about 70% water.  It’s what makes us very special, if not unique in the Universe. 

We people can go without food for lots more days than most of us readers will ever know, but we can’t get by without water.  Yet we behave as if clean water is always going to be there for us, and that our bodies are going to work right, regardless of what we do.  

How much of the water we drink is intentionally polluted by us with sugar and chemical flavorings?  Guess what our bodies have to do when we do that?  Our bodies have to flush them out with. . . . . duh duh da daaaaaa – water. 

Those big four minerals our bodies use to balance our ticking and our tocking, our sleeping and our rocking,  and our incredibly complex electrical system - calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium - are carried around our bodies in water. The nutrients we ingest from the bounty Earth provides us are carried though our bodies with water and eventually are filtered by our livers and kidneys, lungs and skin. 

But just as we have kidneys and livers to filter the poisons out of our bodies, Earth has ways of filtering.  She has swamps and wetlands.  She has shellfish and silt, catfish and trees, but we tend to want to drain swamps and wetlands, overfish and cut down too many trees.  And the chemicals we create in plastics, such as dioxins – the most carcinogenic group of boogers in the world - are carried around Earth’s body through water.  We humans are not the only beings, by the way, who use Earth’s water, but we are the only ones who poison it to such a degree. And we are the only ones who intentionally destroy Earth’s organs. 

When our Western bodies get out of balance through what we give or don’t give them, we tend to put chemicals in the form of medicine into them to get back in synch.  I am probably guiltier of this than most.  But then our bodies have to figure out and incorporate and filter those chemicals. 

What I’m trying to say in this possibly convoluted fashion is that the Earth and we aren’t so different.  In fact we are the same.  Let’s make a promise to stop polluting us.  Let’s drink more water that doesn’t come from plastic bottles.  Let’s give our bodies what they/we crave. And let’s remember that we are the Earth and we are water.  And we are Holy.

Flabbergasting Flagella and Evolution

Have you given much thought to flagella?  Amazing little things they are, transporting little bacteria where they need to go.  I saw a video about the suspected motor that drives them.  Amazing!  And we think humans are evolved!  Actually bacteria spank us when it comes to evolution.  They can evolve on a dime when it takes us. . . . well, a gazillion years. 

And what have humans come up with?  Brains that allow us to create technology that can extinguish life on this planet in more than a couple of ways.  And yet, we can’t seem to get any permanent foothold over the teensy little no-brained bacteria with their funky flagella.  We can wipe them out for a while with ever stronger antibiotics, but then those little goobers outsmart us and evolve to resist our attempts to slaughter them.  And when we do attempt a bacteria massacre, we end up killing our friendly bacteria as well as the ones that make us sick.  We aren’t very efficient in our bactericide.

Those little germies are something!  They are models of efficiency.  When a bit of them no longer works, they lose it. Here we are still trying still trying to figure out what to do with tonsils and appendixes besides getting them infected and then removed. 

Humans didn’t get flagella.  We got legs.  But we don’t like to use them.  So with the big brains we also got we invented vehicles to transport us that run on fossil fuel, which by definition will run out.  And those vehicles get us around, but they poison all life as well.

We think, so we think we’re pretty special. It seems quite likely that if we were really smart, we’d evolve our big ol’ brains away and lose our technology and live more like . . . well the animals we keep destroying.

But I can’t say I really believe in flat out straight Darwin evolution.  It just doesn’t seem very realistic to me.  I think the Universe has some plan, a Grand Intelligent Design.  Something truly smart.  Something able to see the big picture that humans work so hard at covering with clutter. 

The Divine Universe that knows better than I, and better than you, why we didn’t evolve with flagella and smaller brains.  And my Pantheist soul trusts in that.

Losing my Ego or Saving my Religion?

Today, in a meeting of co-workers, I was told that something I thought I had been doing very well (cooking for clients) was not appreciated.  I also heard specific examples at which everyone (save me) laughed.  I was told  I need to "balance healthy with unhealthy food."  I was also told that a statement I made in the meeting "Was not the truth."  It was pointed out that because I have made a fuss over clients cleaning with and overabundance of chemical cleaning fluids and far more than necessary chlorine bleach, that the clinic was going to great trouble to try to find something less allergenic to me. 
I allowed these things to hurt me. 

And then I was told that I need to serve the very restricted lunch menu on "disposable," plastic plates.  That's when  I cried.

I work for the state of South Carolina, where we have been instructed by the Governor to answer the phone saying, "It's a Great Day in South Carolina."  I did not see this as a particularly good day.  In fact, I've been instructed to do something contrary to my religion.  I said that I didn't like the idea because it was not green.

Immediately after the meeting I didn't like me.  Why wasn't I able to just state, with no ugly ego involvement, that I think it's important to teach the same thing in nutrition classes as we do in the dining room.  Why wasn't I able to say, with no ugly ego involvement, "Yes, that is the truth."   Why didn't I say, with no fear and no ugly ego involvement, "Using disposable plastic plates to save some time is an abomination in the face of Nature, and teaching clients that is at least as important as saying a Christian prayer before each lunch."   Why couldn't I just calmly state that it's not just a question of me being "allergic" to chemical cleaning solutions being used improperly - it's the fact that they are toxic, not just to me but to everyone there, that causes me to implore they are not used.

Well, basically I couldn't state those things without ugly ego involvement because my ego is ugly.  It isn't about me and I was crying as if it were.  I know me enough to know that anything I would have said then wouldn't have been good.  And I know enough about communication to know that until I get control of my enormous, ugly ego, I'm not going to be able to make a difference in the way people think.

Or, perhaps the thing for me to do is to get ugly.  Maybe nothing will change until people are brave enough to lose their jobs for their religion, even if it isn't the religion of the masses.  It seems like I remember something about Freedom of Religion.  I truly believe that I've already lost one job that I loved due to Pantheism and I'm sure that this will be the end of this job, too, even if they give me a gazillion other reasons.  Maybe it's time to stop.

Let me get something clear.  I really care about the people with whom I work - staff and clients alike.  I don't think anyone can dispute that with a straight face.  If I didn't care about their opinions (far too much) it wouldn't have gotten to me the way it does. 

So I put it to Brothers and Sisters, what to do?

What does it take to bring out your best?

A lot of people on the news are talking about how the recent tornadoes have brought the best out in people.  People in small towns are helping strangers in other small towns clean up after twisters destroyed homes.  "Tough times have a way of bringing out the best in people." And people whose homes and lives were spared say things such as "There but for the grace of God. . . ." and "The only thing that saved us was Jesus."

Well, I have a couple of problems with all that.

First of all, why do we wait for disasters such as tornadoes to reach out to our neighbors?  What about all those individual, private disasters that we may never know about unless we are close enough to ask?  Secondly, how dare anyone say, "There but for the grace of God. . . " as if their neighbors who lost everything were not recipients of divine grace.  I reckon either we all are, or no one is.  Which do you think?

Does God like people whose houses remained intact more than he likes those whose homes were destroyed?  Do people who survive do so because they prayed to Jesus louder, more sincerely, or more correctly than those who didn't? 

God, who is the whole Universe, doesn't pick favorites in my humble opinion.  And that does not make it ok for us to abdicate our care of the planet, nor does it make it ok for us to forget our responsibility to each other, who are after all, part of the planet.

Of course, we need to reach out to each other in times of natural disasters.  And we need to reach out to each other daily - blue skies or black.   And if having everything we need to exist right now, right here is divine grace, then by my figuring we all have it.

Roots of Compassion

We've gotten ourselves very far from Nature and we work very hard at not knowing.

Our food comes from boxes or wrapped in plastic.  We never see that steak cut from a carcass of a steer.  We don't see chicken or pig factories in which animals are treated exactly like a piece of ceramic that goes from birth to death on a crowded assembly line.  We don't have to wash dirt off our carrots, and we have no thought to what chemicals are in them.

Electricity comes from an outlet on our wall.  We don't look at belching power plants or consider the inefficiency and ugliness of the grid of vulnerable wire that brings it to us. We don't think about blowing up mountains to scrape out coal or the men who kill themselves doing the scraping.
Clean water comes from the tap.  It's cheap.  We treat it as if it comes from a magical endless supply. And stuff that goes down the drain?  Well, that just disappears.

Every now and then we see people on television who have none of those things - food, clean water, electricity - and we think "Tsk, tsk.  There but for the grace of God go I," which means that God graces us most.  God wants us to have these things.  It is our right to waste and destroy as we want. We are special.

And I lie here on my comfortable bed, computer on my lap and look around at all my stuff.  I didn't think when I bought that lamp or those curtains that I might have *bought chickens for an impoverished family so they could have sustainable income and food.  I didn't think.

It can be painful to look at these things, but without looking - without knowing - we have no hope.  We are no more than inflamed boils on the face of Earth.  I know I can't solve all the problems, but maybe I can do one thing today. Maybe it all starts with looking, seeing, knowing.  Surely compassion will follow.


*www.heifer.org for information about how you can give chickens to a family who needs them - and much more.

Self Pity and Oaks

This am the temp was thirty degrees lower than yesterday. It is a bright blue, crisp Autumn-ish early spring day. Very slight breeze, just enough to tickle the oak leaves left on the trees. My neighbor continues to show off his pristine garage. I see bugs fly by my window. I notice how the tree that fell and was cut up last summer has settled in a bit, taking on his next stage of being.

 

I would like to be out sitting on some of those pieces of his trunk, but I'm here at my beloved purple desk looking out, a bit too shaky to take on much walking. I'm still sore from my last fall, which was dramatically at my doctor's office. His well-organized stainless steel cart with all his little doctor toys on it was a bit messed up, his magazines torn beyond more duty, my knees and arms bruised, but my pride required emergency surgery from which I am still recovering.

 

I have beans soaking ready to make an outrageous pot of bean soup to serve with spicy corn bread later. That should fix me right up. I've made a list for groceries, which I'd really rather get myself, but am having a lesson in asking for help. My husband will reluctantly disturb his day and go. (yes, that was written with a bit of venom) I'm taking a few minutes now to work on gratitude and stopping this time and energy-consuming self pity

Back to the oak trees. You know how their leaves hold on through the winter and then in spring look brown and wrinkled?  I just realized they are beautiful. The ones outside my window now are not so brown as they are topaz dancing against the very blue sky. They are smaller, more curled up than they were last summer when they were green. They hold together in clusters. I can't see the little twigs that hold them.

 

And just now a breeze perked up and they laugh softly - perhaps at me.  They don't care a bit about being old.  And now the breeze picks up and one leaf lets go, eager for her adventure.  The others applaud.

 

Here is my lesson.  Here is my grace.  Here is my gratitude.

Be Peace

A Middle-aged Leaf

I asked for a dream that would help me and I dreamed of a colorful maple leaf floating on a still lake.

 

My friend said the maple leaf has no ability to manipulate its path or change its destination. He said it's controlled by the flow of the lake and will eventually be washed onto shore and left, as the water continues on its path.

 

I'm glad it wasn't his dream.

 

I think the beautiful maple leaf was at the end of her season on the tree. Once a yellow-green bud, she'd grown into a large green leaf - one of hundreds of thousands. She worked hard with photosynthesis, providing shade for what was below, providing protection for bird, squirrel, and beings she didn't even know. She often provided a meal for a small worm or two. She turned her face to greet the sun each day. Then over the course of a few day she turned red and yellow and seemed to shimmer in the autumn sun.

One day she just let go. She floated gently down and landed on the silver lake beneath her branch. She enjoyed being held and gently rocked there. It was another season, though a shorter one. She became a raft for dragonfly faeries and a nursery for water insects and a model for a photographer. The water grew colder and it pulled her down where she lay on the sand and rocks under the water.

There she completed releasing her energy. She was no longer leaf. She became snail, fertile mud, insect, fish, oxygen, nitrogen and the cycle continued.

Different ways to know a star

I was laughing at myself today while I allowed myself to be in the middle of two other Panthesits discussing astrophysics.  I'd naively wondered aloud why the night sky isn't solid stars since there are so very many stars and the light travels so far.  Honestly, it was an innocent question. 

Well, my much more studious and scientific friends, Mark and Alain, flew into a debat about Obler's Paradox, how light diminishes at a rate of distance squared or something like that and all sorts of scientific yackety yack that honestly wasn't clicking on too many of my neurons.  You might assume I would have felt inferior.  Actually, I just got a bit tickled.  First of all, it's very rarely that I find myself in the presence of greater nerddom.  And secondly, I really wasn't looking for a scientific answer, I was just wondering at the awesome nature of stars.

It's pretty common for Pantheists to get into scientific discussions.  That's ok with me.  But I don't need to know how many gazillions of miles away the next nearest star is, I just am amazed that stars are. 

It reminded me of one of  my favorite poems by Robert Frost, Choose Something Like a Star.   Like Frost, my friends wanted to know something of the star, some facts that we can perhaps, "Learn by heart and when alone repeat."   And it's true, I think, that we need something to "Stay our minds on and be staid."

But some Pantheists, like me, are in such wicked awe of the Universe, just the idea that stars are, is more than enough for me to know that God is.  Nature is.  When I sit on my back steps for hours watching an endless single-file parade of ants march by, I am in a classroom and I am in a temple.  I learn, I worship, I wonder, I am.   

I love my friends, the scientists. I know they love just looking at the stars as well.  Perhaps it's just a factor of them being smarter than I am (though I doubt that).  Perhaps it's because they are men, and men seem to always want to find concrete answers when a question is presented.  Silly!  Or maybe the difference in our way of seeing stars is due to the fact that I'm just  more childlike in my awareness.

I can't say that my friends' way of thinking is more factual.  After all, what is a fact today is an antiquated idea tomorrow.   I doubt that I will ever know a star more for knowing more measurable facts about it, anyway.

When I was very young I could sneak out and lie on my back in the soft, green Midwestern grass and watch the sky's nightly show.  Some nights I was lucky enough to count falling stars, while chewing on clover, the background music provided by crickets and unseen treefrogs.  Sometimes if you're truely blessed, knowledge just sort of bypasses your head and goes straight to your soul.  That is what I need to know of stars.

A Little Girl and Reflections in a Pond

I saw a little girl, about my age carrying a basket by the house.  Inside the basket were several very large, round, brown onions.  I skipped along beside her for a while and she didn’t notice me.  I didn’t mind.  I ran barefoot back to the house through the new snow.  The frozen twigs on the trees on the sides of the house stung my cheeks.  I rounded the corner to the porch – the side of the house in the sun – and there was very little snow.

I climbed up the steps to the door.  The last step was missing and I studied the door, partially open.  The paint was peeling off in big flakes – yellow green on the outside and darker green on the underside.  Beneath the green layer was brown and grey.  It looked a bit like leaves on a tree in early autumn.  I climbed inside to the kitchen.

I said, “Mama, look!  I can see right through the floor in places.”

She said, “I don’t reckon you’ll fall through before Pa gets back,” but she didn’t look at me when she said it.  She was looking at her broom.

The house had been alone too long.  Not alone, exactly, but without people.  The animals liked the holes in the floor and walls.  Little Man was living there when we arrived and he adopted us.  A giant of a dog, fiercely protective of us, but afraid to drink from a water bowl. Mama said he was crazy.

Pa carved things out of fallen trees and branches and he had a hand cart that he filled with them and pushed away to somewhere.  If we were lucky when he came back, he had flour and salt, clothes, and stuff Mama needed.  Today we were hoping for a blanket.

“Don’t put good carvin’ wood in the stove,” said Mama as I was thinking  about doing just that.  Not that it made a lot of difference with all the holes in the house, but it sure would have been nice to warm my wet feet.

When Pa got back it was near dark.  He had lots of treasures including three blankets!  One was just for me.  As I was going to sleep I heard Mama say something about us maybe getting squatting rights, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. She was crying.  I wished she would just stop.

Time was funny then.  It seemed by morning the house was healed a bit.  There weren’t holes in the floor anymore, though it still sloped.  And the door was different.  The big leafy flakes had been smoothed off, but it was ok.  I could still see bits of all the colors. They were just blended smoothly now.

I figured out how to shimmy up the tall tree by the pond.  I’d sort of reach around it, like I was hugging it up as high as I could, pull myself up, then sort of grab with my feet up high as I could and kept pulling and pushing myself up that way until I reached the only fork in the tree.  I don’t know what sort of tree this was.  He was tall, only about eight inches across, and only the one fork and it was far up.  I guess it had to grow like that, sort of squeezing in among the shadows of bigger trees so as to get its share of sunlight.  Clever tree. 

I loved shimmying up that tree for three reasons.  One, I figured out how to do it all by myself, which is usually the way I figured things out, but this was the best one.  Two, when I was up there no one saw me.  It wasn’t because they couldn’t see me, it’s just that people – most people – forget to look up.  I reckon most people go around seeing only a little part of what’s there because they forget to look up and they forget to get right down on the ground and look down.  Little Man and I are the exceptions.  We both look up so often we trip over things and then we end up looking at the ground real close up. Ha!  I could hear all sorts of conversations that weren’t meant for me when I was up there.  Not just Mama and Pa, but birds and squirrels, too.  And three, I just loved the trust we had, that tree and me.  Once I got to the fork, I’d sort of weave myself with the two branches, and then I could just be still.  The wind would move the tree slowly back and forth like I think most Mamas rock their babies.  The tree’s smooth bark covered such hard wood.  It was a strong, gentle tree and it held me quietly and safely and Little Man took naps at his base.  I was so safe.

Oh, and there’s a number four, too.  From up the tree I could see very far away.  I could see houses that weren’t there when I was on the ground.  Sometimes I could see people that went with the houses, not that far from us, I could hear them sometimes, too, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.  Just pieces of voices the wind brought.  And I wondered about why I couldn’t see them or hear them when I was on the ground.  But somehow, when I got back to the ground I clean forgot about that.

I loved the trees.  Especially that one.  But I loved the smooth rocks, too.  There was one by the pond and even when it was still cold, it would let the sun warm it up and I could feel the sunshine if I put my cheek against it. 

Like I said, time was funny there once when I was soaking up bits of winter sunshine from the rock, I opened my eyes and relized that it was spring and it was warm.  I could see right down into the pond.  Lily pads floated on the top and reflected down and up again and when I just let my eyes go and do what they wanted I couldn’t tell how many lily pads I was looking at.   And way down, down in the water was something shiny. Like metal.  I couldn’t tell how deep the pond was because of all the reflecting going on.

The tree became two trees, maybe more.  One growing out of the ground I stood on and a sort of wavy one growing out of the ground on the bottom of the pond.  The sky was upside down in the pond.  I even checked that out from way up the tree, and I could see another me way down, down the pond.  Down in the upside down wavy tree. 

I wanted to go check that out.  It was fine just playing with the trees and the rocks and Little Man, but what fun it would be to have another me to play with.  And there was nothing but I was going to find out what that shiny thing was.  So I just shimmied down the tree.  I took off my clothes and my shoes and I left them right at the base of my tree and I told Little Man not to go running off with them, but I reckon he did. 

I went down, down into the water.  I had to remind myself to open my eyes because I wanted to see this other wavy world.  I kept going down and I was holding my breath, so I reminded myself to breathe.  I gasped in a huge breath of wavy world air. At first it was hard to breathe it, but then got the hang of it, just like shimmying up the tree. And I sort of broke through something like the very thinnest plate of ice, so thin I hardly noticed it, but I knew I’d broken through because things were no longer wavy.  I looked up and saw the wavy world was now where I’d just come from.  Funny, huh?

I say, I reckon Little Man took my dress up to the house and gave it to Mama, cause I saw her up there holding my dress and crying hard.  And Little Man was all wet and barking and splashing in and out of the water.  But he wasn’t barking loud.  I could barely hear him.  I really wish she’d stop crying.

And then time seemed to skip around again like it does there.  I’d shimmied all the way to the fork in the tree and watched them.  The blanket that was just for me was all wrapped around the wavy me in the world that used to be the not wavy place.  But I didn’t mind.  And Little Man was sort of crying, too, the way crazy ol’ hound dogs cry, and Pa had dug a big hole right at the base of the wavy tree.

I really do wish they’d stop crying.  They need to remember to look up and look down.  Then they’d know it’s all perfect.  Then maybe they’d see the shiny thing, too.

I'm Already Here

My death becomes my marriage with the Earth,

My lover and provider since my birth.

See me in my wedding gown of dewy spring green leaves,

And a million stars will dance with me above the summer breeze.

Celebrate my wedding with me, friends

With every grand beginning something ends.

See me learning how to fly when Autumn twirls the dry leaves by,

And winter writes my poems on glass again. 

If a crow descends,  calls something out to you,

You will know forever if it’s true.

I will be that message or if the mountains want to share

A secret with you, you’ll know I am there 

In the river ever changing and the same

Across the meadow you may hear your name.

The silver liquid moonlight and the buttery warm sun,

Will breathe for me when my breath is done.

So you see, no mourning is required,

A new adventure takes me ever higher.

There is no such thing as death,

Nothing left to fear.

I won’t return to Earth, my friends,

I’m already here.