Do ghosts exist?
I once lived long enough to know that they don’t.
I’ve now lived long enough to know that they do.
That odd, inexplicable events happen, and happen daily, is evident to anyone paying attention. The shame is that so few of us pay attention to the natural world, missing the rhythms and the mysteries that envelop our modern minds every moment.
Today is All Saints Day, to celebrate the sanctified among us, as though following some moral order could save us from the coming dark, a world in which wasp larvae eat hornworms from the inside out, and we die monstrous deaths lying in ICUs with multiple tubes piercing our bodies, hoping for St. Sebastian to save us.
The question of ghosts is not an idle one. We follow the spirits of our own making, the rules and rhythms of our daily lives, wrapping ourselves in a sad cocoon of hubris, wiling away our hours fulfilling nothing more than deadlines upon deadlines without a hint of irony.
The sunrise this morning is glorious, again. I ambled out barefoot to catch the deep red light, past the old maple with the scattered shells of clams raked and eaten. The early November light reminded me of those I have loved and who died anyway..
The clams are a reminder of two things worth being reminded of as : we are part of something larger than us, and we are mortal.
The dead are among us today. The dead are among us every day.THe