Return to Undifferentiated Light

My boyfriends’ dog died on Labor Day.  He was old.  He had a pretty good life.  He was a happy dog and lived in good health up to the last day with yummy food, company with the cats, comfort in the house and yard, and walkabouts.  In his youth he took travels with his humans to forests, streams, and ocean.  He didn’t have to have long suffering nor did my boyfriend have to make hard and costly decisions.  Ollie even died on a holiday when John didn’t have to go to work.  It was just like that dog not to want to inconvenience anyone.

My mother used to say as she aged that she would never become a burden to her children.  She died 13 years ago from strangulated hernia operation complications and died true to her desire – she did not become a burden to any of her children by living as a disabled person with any of them.

There is still dog food in the fridge and pantry.  There is still a dog collar with poop bags in the closet.  His bed still hasn’t been put away.

My mother painted and I have some of her oil paintings.  One of my favorite hangs in a respected spot in the living room.  It is incomplete.  She had decided to add another tree to the forest and had blocked in a distant trunk behind the foreground trees. 

It is interesting that it seems that it wasn’t too long ago that she died.   Yet considering that Ollie lived a good long life, and that he was born after my mother died, and then lived out the span of his life; what is a “complete” life span anyway?  We are living longer than we used to.  We have longer life spans in this country than in third world countries.   When is a “life” ever “complete?” 

Mystics talk about the essence of our being having timelessness.  Stripped away from the “physical” form, we are the continuing force in the patterns that connect us all.  What I love about the tree in the background of my mother’s painting is that it is only a strip of blocked out light.  It is where a tree was going to be and could be, but it is not a tree.  It is suggestive of a tree.  It is a tree in potentia. 

All of us, stripped of our outwardness, have seeds connected to the universal life force and patterns that are in potentia.  The implicit order from our explicate selves that is deep in the core of our souls still exist there as undifferentiated light.

Addendum:  Later the day I wrote this I got word that a dear friend’s mother died.  She had Alzheimer’s and went peacefully in her sleep.