death and dying

If your uncomfortable with the topic of death... I suggest you just look at the pictures and skip my rambling at the end...

When we told my mother that we weren't going to have the kids baptised she freaked out a bit... Terrified that in the event of their death... they would spend eternity in limbo or hell or wherever it is that unbaptised people go. I reassured her that Dave also hadn't been baptised... so where ever it was they were going... he'd be there with them. This offered her little comfort.

Not being a religious person leaves the death question wide open. What happens when we die. I have my theories... as I'm sure everyone does... but who knows if we ever find out for sure what happens when all of our physical systems cease operating. I like thinking of a continuous consciousness but really think that it's a romantic notion. The only thing that I know is that at the time of death a huge surge of energy will leave my physical body... whether it will stay in tact as a single consciousness or be scattered into a bazillion particles and absorbed into the universe I'm not so sure of.

I like thinking in terms of light and energy when ponder the great thereafter... it comforts me to know that whether I know it or not... my energy is as eternal as the universe.

I want to be cremated after I die.

I am undecided on whether or not I want to be conscious when I die... I used to think that the best way to die would be in my sleep... but now I'm not so sure. The transition may be smoother... but going from an alive state to a death state might be an interesting sensation... A once in a lifetime kind of event :)

Aldous Huxley had his wife inject pure LSD into his IV while he was on his death bed. That would be soooommme trip!

The worst way to die would probably being buried alive. Though anything involving plunging (from an elevator... a bridge... an airplane) would suck just as badly. Those minutes that you were falling would be awful. Actually any kind of slow death would suck...

Anyway... don't worry about me... I'm not dying... or thinking about dying... well I am thinking about dying... but not anytime in the near future. But if you'd like to share... I'd be interested in hearing your theories on death... and what are those ways of dying that make you have nightmares. If your Christian... and believe in heaven... what do you think heaven is like? If you believe in reincarnation.... what/who do you think you were/will be in other lives?

brought to you by a cosmic coincidence

Originally posted January 8 2007

So I went to the beach across the street from my house yesterday to grab a few snaps of the ocean... It was a very lovely day... just windy enough to make some whitecaps...

It's not exactly a beach... rather a stretch of shore composed of sand and rocks. The seawall is steep and you can only actually walk on this "beach" when the tide is out... or on its way out as the case was yesterday.

The sunset was as lovely as it usually is... nothing spectacular... but nice

So right before I head in to help Dave get the kids supper... there's a plane on the horizon. It was a fairly big plane... I suspect from on of the military installments in the neighborhood... Anyway I still get edgy when I see planes flying so low. Living in one of those gateway-to-the-continent cities you'd think I'd get use to it by now... but alas... Memories of SwissAir always flood into my mind when I see low flying planes over the ocean. Anyhow... a plane that low is a good photo op... so I'm trying to get a shot of it.

And then something spectacular happened that involved my eyes my brain my finger and perfect timing... this happened...

My heart pumped blood through my arteries so hard I felt it in my throat. I had only caught a momentary glimpse through the lens and from my perspective... it looked like a giant fireball had come out of plane. Funnily enough... the first thing I did... before I looked up at the plane to see if there were flaming parachutes being ejected from the beast... was refer to the digital file to make sure I had got the shot.

As I raised my arms to get the images that my brain had been congering in those brief miliseconds, I realized, there was no smoke... no flames... no flailing bodies falling into the cold Atlantic below (thank god) but the cargo door of the plane was closing.

So... what I figured happened was that at that exact moment, from that exact position, correcting for height and shoulder width and trajctory of the camera... the cosmos alligned the sun, that plane, the operation that was being performed by the crew, and my brain for me to bring you that picture.