ANSHAM FOR ME

Oncle Cacá est mort! Il est mort. Morreu. Uncle Cacá passed away.

I never met the man, but he made himself present in my life.

In a land far away, where a two-river system nourishes the soil and impregnates the landscape with the tantalizing nectar that make up the air molecules we breathe, death opened its overarching wings and glided, smoothly passing through the living with its remarkable touch that silences our souls. Loss is inevitable, and everything changes all the time, anyway.

Abby – a four-year-old girl who has been battling leukemia – marries her favorite, handsome nurse Matt, in Albany, New York. The ceremony celebrated life, the strength of the human spirit and unconditional love.

Life and death hold hands and dance around while projecting shadows on the walls of time through darkness and light. This ancestral dance speaks of our pain and suffering as we sing about our joys and loving kindness in most unexpected ways.

Oncle Cacá est mort. Ele morreu. Cacá – the uncle – passed away. The ground shook under their feet. We danced the night away at the Church of the Whirling Souls. We celebrated life. We breathed. We live.The innocent child with golden eyes seduced our hearts and sang the words of glorious poets. She married the one who loved her without conditions.

Oncle Cacá has died. WE die. We live. We go through life and we die every day in a succession of many seemingly impossible occurrences. Life is a surrealist game painted on a distorted canvas hung upside down by an artist who does not know the concepts of morality or comfortable beliefs. Nobody has answers to anything. The human experience is a world of madness covered in a veil of suspicions and flustered attempts at being right. How presumptuous of our species to even consider ourselves apt to this luxurious task.

Death makes us humble. Through the experience of death we are face-to-face with our basic fears of not being able to be remembered. We fear the false appearance of our existence. Who are we? What do we really want? How would we like to be remembered? Does it make any difference at all? How do we know? Why do we question? Why do we feel separate, distant, disconnected, aloof and indifferent?

I am following my own path of discovery, inquiring and self-love. For so long, I have been running away from myself, from who I am. The essence of who you are is the intrinsic part of the whole composition of your perception, reflection and life imprint of the universal creation, bestowed upon you, as an indispensable function of the role you play in every interaction in which you find yourself.

There is no map, no guidelines, no GPS. We find our way as we get lost in the fantastic landscape of our dreams and personal stories. We are the artists painting on the canvas of our lives. All experience comes to us as a form of seduction. The energy exorcise the fears within the abyss of who we are. We look transfigured, transubstantiated. It is a continuous dance of love infused by the obsession of passion and all-inclusive love.

We all fear loss and pain, and yet the essence of life flows through the pathways that are not always easy for us to accept. I want to be peaceful and true to the journey upon which I set myself off. Life is a shitty hole to the level that we do not accept it the way it is being revealed to us.

We can only hope to accomplish and perform the activities necessary to follow through with one’s mission and talents in every second of life, experiencing the physical reality of the body while tending to the needs of an inner calling that incites us into action and change.

When my mom died I felt liberated, in some strange way, from primeval fears. However, I also noticed a trail of uncertainty and doubt before me. Now death happens every day and I see the impact it leaves all around me through the stories of those I know, but also the faceless ones, with their own stories, that passed by me, and remind me that one day I will be gone as well.

Today we have the safe illusion of technology to create the distance from the philosophical questions that intrigued humankind for so long. It is, in my way of seeing things, through the contact with our inner emotions that we seem to get closer to an understanding of our ontological nature, and that understanding becomes materialized in our complete surrender and acceptance of what we do not know without creating devices, mental or otherwise, that mask the true nature of life. Only then are we able to rest in peace, while living.

* Featured image: Lyonel Feininger “Bird Cloud” – 1926