• Tag Archives hell
  • It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like…March?

    Samain                                 Moon of the Winter Solstice

    It’s beginning to look a lot like….March.  Geez.  Rain?  In mid-December?  47 degrees.  Come on guys.  We need that climate deal now.

    (this was the scene out my study window on December 11, last year)

    How would Robert Frost write “Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening” for the Winter Solstice?  Somehow the carriage sunk in mud while the rain beats down just doesn’t carry the same poetics.

    Annual physical finished.  Tom Davis, the internist whom I see, enters the State Fair art contest every year in photography and has never got admitted.  He has one of his pieces in his office and it’s pretty damn good.  A pensive work in Galena, Illinois.

    Each year after the physical, since fasting is required, I go to Hell and have breakfast.  Hell has its Minneapolis location in the basement of the building next to the Medical Arts parking ramp.  An all punk wait staff, classic movies projected on a big screen and broadcast over TV’s, and an imaginative menu make Hell a bigger draw than you might imagine.

     


  • After this life

    Summer                            Waning Summer Moon

    Life keeps coming at us until this one stops.  Gyatsho has been on my mind since his death.  As I indicated the day I discussed his death here, the Tibetan belief is that he is now in a possibly 49 day process of finding a home for his reincarnation.  As I’ve worked outside, I’ve looked up from time to time, imagined Gyatsho’s consciousness, his very subtle mind, making a transit through the invisible world, hunting for a new home, working toward enlightenment.

    As I’ve considered this, it comforts me.  The notion of a next life, especially a next life focused on learning left over lessons from this one, makes sense to me in a way.

    What has not made sense to me since early high school is the binary logic of Christianity:  heaven or hell.  One lifetime, then out to eternal punishment or eternal bliss.  Even when I worked as a minister, my theological system did not include such a cramped afterlife.   God is love.   If so, then love will rule a soul’s disposition in the afterlife and love forgives all things.  No need for hell.  This seems to collapse the present into amorality, but only so for persons devoid of gratitude or unaware of grace.

    My belief now runs more toward composting, but I’m open to the notion of survival.  If we do survive in some way, I like the Buddhist idea.  Even though I like it, I find it hard to believe because the evidence we have from returnees is nil.

    The metaphor that works best for me is the chrysalis.  This body I have now is a chrysalis, death triggers the next transformation, mutation.  Perhaps we pass into one of the multiverses and never even know it happened.  The next great mystery.