A Picture of Grace

Never a picture of grace, despite that being the hopeful meaning of my middle name, Ann, I don’t suppose I have become nothing more than littered rubble yet. That time is somewhere in the future. Maybe not far though. You never know. I do find it helpful to keep a raven on my shoulder, to remind me of my death. That’s an improvement over Jiminy Cricket. I will allow myself to to go with my stream of consciousness. Stating that I am so allowing myself is an exercise of my yoga practice, the essence of which is to allow the witness to become established in itself. The witness is the truest version of the self. The witness is the one who calmly observes the activities, and even the great dramas, that every little self has to experience. So back to the blackest of black ravens on my shoulder, reminding me of my death. Death reminds me that the toil of life, the fog of memory, will not endure forever. Even if my soul is one of those who get to reincarnate, allowing a new effort to share hints of how to get by in the human condition, I think that the major portion of the dark, clinging fog of bad deeds will be left behind. Birth is a new start. By fact and rightly by human tradition. We might hold that parents, grandparents, and even more distant relatives cause pain to their descendants, but humans have never been punished by the law for something done by an ancestor who died before their birth. For better and for worse.

Subject to curse, subject to social reality, subject to group karma, but not punished by the law.

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Shona

Engineering consultant by day, science fiction writer in off hours.

One thought on “A Picture of Grace”

  1. Many things to think about here, the awareness of mortality as a function of living each day as completely as possible to the best of my abilities first and foremost. Lacking a raven, I cannot be lulled into the complacency of days following days because none of us know the appointed time of our passing. The concept of being reborn, a new life where the dinge and soil of past mistakes can be sloughed off with the hope of being a better, wiser soul is tantalizing. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, provoking my own!

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