<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />  

The Land of the Dead is Lively

    The first one who died, my father, I was numb. The second one who died, my first husband, I screamed. By the tenth big death before I was 29, I was pissed. Furious, not drunk.

    This heaven-and-hell folderol is a misleading way to talk about the Land of the Dead because though the heaven-mongering Christians, who began as a simple religion of the powerless, have had the power, the press, and the propaganda for a lot of centuries, the AfterLife Truth is much more complex, and, luckily, a ton more fun.

    I didn’t think when I was a child feeding the shiny newborn black-and-white Holstein calves their buckets of faintly pink milk that I would grow up to become an expert in death. It just happened. There’s no degree you can get in this one. The Major Universities don’t have Death 101 on the curriculum. The Major Religions Lie because they got detached from Mystery. The Other Side, the non-carnate, the less dense — of which the AfterLife is but a facet — is often too raunchy, sly, anarchic, boisterous, and fragmented to be a useful example for a solid, sequential existence. Thus the preachers and teachers, seldom lit from within, hid the truth, abridged it, sanitized it, pietized it, forgot it.

    When, to my shock, I met my disoriented father shortly after he’d died, his color was quite blue. He was swaddled in bandages, and was being cared for by bustling midwife-like beings who were tending his unreconciled passage from the solid carnate world to the non-carnate realms. They were kind. He had died too young at fifty-two. The hospital had killed him with misdiagnosis. The doctors said Whoops, shrugged, looked abashed, and then down at their brilliantly-shined shoes. When I first met my father in OtherLand, of course I just thought I was crazy.

    When I met my first husband, Michael, who had died too young at twenty-eight — his car slid off an icy Vermont road into a tree — When I met Michael in an other-density garret, cooking a hamburger, the fat sizzling loudly in the frying pan, I was just utterly glad to know that he hadn’t vaporized into some black hole of nothingness. The black hole of nothingness being the most cruelly unbearable. I still thought I was probably crazy.

    Depending on who you are hearing this, you either think I’m still crazy or are holding your hand to your mouth grateful that it happened to someone else too or you’re so used to this inter-realm stuff that it’s not exactly ho-hum, not really old hat, but it isn’t molecularly shocking nor bone-marrow creepy, throat-clutchingly terrifying anymore either.

    Father, husband, brother, stepbrother, stepfather, mother, mentor, headmistress, eighteen-year-old cat, all the eight grandparents of course. By now my horror has transmogrified to raw rage. Higher realms indeed. Our dear Earth realm is so high and glorious that non-carnates, responsible and derelict alike, shove and claw to get a ticket on this most intriguing of galactic roller coaster rides. I distinctly blame religions for grabbing power by devaluing this solid terrestrial experience.

    Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful for my non-carnate and semi-carnate experiences. Learning to fly, walking on water, floating through the ceiling. Giddy stuff. But I will not have us be a colony of heaven. We are the experts on relatively sequential time, on solid experience, on being able to actually eat a whole chocolate chip cookie, to drive where we’re going and not end up somewhere else.

    Our beloved realm is a masterpiece of reality engineering — there is no higher place to be. Different, just different. I sometimes think that if I could get that single point across, I could be at peace. Of course that single point would change the world. We would know that every daily thing is holy, radiant. Awe and delight would be our steady state, daily little explosions of radiance. We could then greet heaven with the strength of our own earth beauty and stand in the galactic councils not as slaves or puppets or children, but as tellers of our own tales, proud and various.

    I had never met my ex-husband's parents when they were alive. Mr. Martin was a high school principal in a medium-sized <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Iowa town. Mrs. Martin taught home economics and was a devout Christian. I was a vivid redheaded pagan. They would have disapproved of me mightily.

    When I met Mr. Martin in OtherLand, however, he was driving too fast in a bright-yellow open touring car, had on a loud black-and-white-checked sports jacket, a jaunty hat with a sprightly red feather, and a tiger lounging in the back seat with whom I sat. We got along famously to my huge and relieved surprise.

    Mrs. Martin when I met her was almost nun-like in her retreat and shyness of soul. I think Earth had been too rough and ready for her. But she loved her brilliant, vulnerable son, and could, freer of Earth's particular prejudices, honor that I loved him too.

    These pow-wows with the dead are not frequent; we don't hang out. My dead, anyway, do not hover. I think it is wicked that the veil is so impenetrable. When I get the chance to rail at heaven's haughty hierarchy, I shall.

…………….<^>……………..

………….<^>……………..

If you know an agent, editor, publisher person who would handle this kind of pogblogian material, please let me know at .. pogblog@yahoo.com

………….<^>……………..

It’s an honor to have you visit pogblog. Do comment.

…………….<^>……………..

Check pogblog’s Glossary for brave & nefarious words.

copyright pogblog 2005 all rights reserved

Please send pogblog’s link to your friends:

http://pogblog.myblogsite.com 

2 The Road . Eb . Grass . Rattlesnake Tooth . South . tzol 132  10.11.05 tues    

ffwofw 927§8941/24d17h28m25s31.98g5.1g/1098/3yrs & 2 days

..

the pro-peace world begins today with you

………….<^>……………..