The trailers looking appealing, so last night I saw Clint Eastwood’s new film, ‘Hereafter.’ I had read that it was a thinking person’s film. I left with the thought, ‘What was he thinking?’ Still, it did spark this post.

The writing and vision presented through words lacked coherence and I didn’t feel that resonant with the black and white visuals that were offered to give a sense of what is ‘beyond’ our everyday domain. The film does have well-crafted opening drama. The female lead, played by Cecile de France, is vacationing on an idyllic South Pacific island when a tsunami rips over the land engulfing everything in its wake. She nearly dies, but somehow returns from near drowning. Returning to daily life, she isn’t all there. She is rightly dazed and instead of being engaged in a busy swirl of success, she stares off wistfully, showing clear signs of having been awash in the after effects of an event that had effectively capsized her existing world view.

Even though I found the film lacking, the visual story line of aspects of this film provided an impulse to recall my own near death experience as a twenty something. The summer of the near death or more appropriately, life review experience that I had brought many moments to gaze into the distance. While at that time, I had no background to give me any context for what had happened, I knew that something profound had occurred while I was unconscious and the course of my life in this realm was now altered in some way that I was sensing how to fathom. When I finally shared with my mother Vella, who I was very close to, that I knew I’d had some kind of crossing the border experience, she admitted that she’d been told when I was just a little girl that I would die around this time. It was a great confirmation for what I was sensing, this was a pivotal turning point somehow.

This month is the fifth anniversary of another major turning point, my mother’s move to the hereafter, marking her metamorphosis from earthly form. Astonishingly, this year, I totally forgot the day–there were no tears of loss or abandonment, and instead, I was in a high flow state.

Death is so synonymous with ‘loss’ and heartbreak is such a major part of my life experience. Indeed, it is one of the most used words to describe my emotional pain body’s constellation of issues. The year following her death was one of the darkest times I’ve known. In the past years, all it took was a simple thought of her passage to bring tears welling up. This year though, was quite different.

I was engaged in enjoying being myself with a dear femme friend, Lanae. I felt light and fluid and free during our afternoon nosh, and then visiting a healing center where the Swilling family is deeply engaged in bringing the devotion of their minds and hearts to helping people find more options for healing and harmonizing in their lives at their Know Your Options healing center. The afternoon of this anniversary date was full of heart and enjoyment, and a sense of blessedness and heart resonant companionship.  It was a clear indication of the continuity of love, and for me, this was a living legacy of what Vella and I knew in this realm now being extended into my life in the here and now.

Shortly before I was reminded of the history of the day, as I was walking up the stairs to come home, I remembered Vella in a wave of gratitude and sent up a message to say thanks again to her in spirit. Something was registering on my antennae. As I sat down to check my e-mails as part of the daily return home, I had a quizzical moment gazing at the header simply named ‘Vella’ on a note from my love Rick, who was away traveling. I opened the message and was slightly stunned to realize that the pain of her passage had not registered on my inner screen. AT ALL. It felt odd, and I was first amazed, then amused to realize that this day of all the days could have included such wondrous unfolding enjoyment of life unmarked by my usual wash of emotional waves of pain during marker points such as this.

Through many long years of life full of emotional turbulence, Vella used to send me messages with these words, “Under the shadow of my wings, until the pain is over and gone.” I figured these lines came from somewhere in the Bible, and although most of traditional Christian religion is not resonant with me, these words struck a chord. I felt the sense of how the divine can provide continuity beyond the turbulence of the temporal world. I have walked close with the wisdom in this message, at times clinging to a sense of this possibility, even as life events catapulted and capsized my sense of inner equilibrium again and again. Without knowing it, this year I finally realized the truth of the words of wisdom, for I experienced what it was like for the pain of her passage to have washed out of me. There may be other times when I feel the poignancy of not having her human self to exchange with, but for now, I have found a place that knows what it is like to be at ease–beyond the cavernous sense of loss and pain that was a deep wound for a length of time after her departure from this plane of existence.

Vella used to tell me, ‘This too will pass.’ When she first said it while I was a teenager, I looked at her in complete wonder that this could even be a possibility as I was in the throes of my first teenage heartbreak. I trusted this woman, she knew a few things and I remember the blip it made on the screen of my consciousness that even a remote possibility existed that someday I would not feel such a pouring out of my heart center, as a draining sense of loss.

Now, many decades later, she has proven what wise words were spoken as I have found a place of abundance in the heart, where spirit has funneled a great wave of fullness to sustain my life, to amuse and inspire and bring an enjoyable awe to my consciousness of how there is continuity that weaves itself from hereafter into the here and now. I could feel Vella smiling with me when I realized how far my human understanding of the process of metamorphosis has come.

While I have had a conceptual understanding and belief in this possibility, this year I experienced the gift of emotional unity.  It came from having allowed the dark storm of feelings after she left in 2005 to move and shift through the years as I kept being with the pain of ‘loss’ and feelings of abandonment in missing her. I have moved forward with the waves of E~nergy~in~Motion that have exerted their own evolutionary processes to bring more spiritual integration into my life.   This energy is supposed to move, and the art of it is to allow it to arise and learn to work with it constructively, just as an artist dives into the depths and takes elements that are raw and potent from the unconscious and shapes them into something that informs through creative action. We don’t have to have it figured out or control the ride, yet it is important to learn how to be strong and become more adept in riding the waves of energy in motion that come.

Returning to my initial launch point for this piece on the subject of hereafter and the film by this name, I’d acknowledge that the black and white amorphous shapes pictured in the film are suited to a phase of loss that is stark and despairing. However, for me it was too confining in its perspective that stays within the status quo of what it is like in the human realm to feel the underworld disorientation of loss. I’m glad that when my world went dark and was full of festering feelings, I didn’t try to pretend or push the waves of emotion under. As in any composting process, eventually what is dark and rank and smelly metamorphoses into the elements of fertile life.

For now I can breathe and smile. The years spent working to carry the gift of love and honor the beauty we shared has born fruit. This anniversary of Vella’s leave-taking, the process has come full circle. It’s a spiritual paradox that I’m appreciating; how the alchemy of love is able to work its magic to transform the energy of pain into more of its own ‘kind.’ I am enjoying that this pivotal and painful turning point in my human life has now been transformed to a much higher plane of awareness. The proof?  My life has sprouted a surprise crop of heart’s abundance as satisfying as anything I’ve ever known.

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