dissemination

About a month ago I had a vision during a meditation that I want to share with you. Here are words to attempt to describe the images. I hope the words spark your imagination:

The wisdom of the forest to leave the elders standing. 

Snags and hoodoos.

Joy is disintegration into the world when you die.

The succulent plant leaves releasing their moisture and nutrients for others to absorb 

When I go, Please share with others any ways that I moved you.

When a public figure dies their work is released and consumed more voraciously for a period of time. Their life work becomes societal medicine (or poison.) David Bowie, Prince, bell hooks, and countless others. 

This week my aunt, my fathers sister passed away. She was kind, funny, silly and curious. Everyone who met her felt her delight, felt seen. She liked people and parties. There are stories being swapped, pictures emerging. For her community of family and friends her spirit has disseminated into us. Perhaps to feel her presence in a more core way, we can drink her in without the edges of her body. 

And this is not to take away from the real longing for someone's embodied presence, especially for her kids, grandkids, her husband and my father. There is deep grief, love, and gratitude in its complex matrix of arrangement.

Meditating on the  plants and trees, I see how in death they dissolve into what is around them releasing nourishment, mineral, resource into the collective.

What do we share? Emotions and creations: Joy, pain, bitterness, love, hope, resentment, a recipe, home, painting, dance or music.

What we create in this world is experienced differently when we no longer have a physical body to anchor it, as if the currents become un-moored and float generously to whomever would like them.  We honor the dead when we allow ourselves to be affected, when we drink it in.

And we honor ourselves in life when we allow our gifts to be given.