notes: …. for some of us though, it’s not so much a fear as it is the truest value of dread, and not of the Great Nothing that might wait beyond. It’s because we are excruciatingly in love with this world, this existence. It is something that never becomes ordinary, where a constant awareness is in play toward an endless array of miracles going on around us, always. For so, so many, miracles we take for granted have become ordinary. Except for some of us, each day brings new things, if no more than a different way of seeing old things again. It could be the blue in the sky, but also knowing it’s a false canopy, and that we are completely exposed and vulnerable to the universe as much as we are in the darkest of nights, but we feel enclosed in something finite and protective, a ceiling above our heads. It could be the clouds withing the canopy. Not just their shape-shifting, color saturated, complex simplicity, but that we get to be in this place that would have clouds at all. That we get to be alive, a part of this mystery. And if it has never confounded you, stopped you dead in your tracks at the mystery it is, then it is you to whom I’m speaking most.

So, for many of us, it’s not the dread of non-existence. What is to dread of non-existence? Would we waste this time worrying about being sent into a place where we won’t remember wasting this time worrying about being sent to a place where we won’t remember wasting this time… logically, no, though we still sometimes do, illogical creatures that we are. It’s not the dread of that. It’s the dread of having this beauty, this miracle, continue to exist here and us not being able to be a part of it. We will no longer be a part of the miracle. It is the foreknowledge that all of this was going on before a place opened here to accommodate us, and will go on as effortlessly after we’ve gone, rendering the whole of our existence unnecessary to it all.

What will we have ourselves be?  Or, what are we, whether we like it or not?