The Road trip to my old homestead in northeastern Pennsylvania was a lifetime in the making. Touching into the deep recesses of my repository consciousness, the storehouse of all memories. Bittersweet memories intermixing with the present moment like clouds breaking up rays of sunshine. Real and unreal, laughing and crying at the same time. Emotions dragged out of the deep caverns of the forgotten. One flowing into the other.
My mother’s ashes placed next to my daughter Karen’s and my grandmother Lucy’s in the old mountainside graveyard. A beautiful place with graves going back to the early eighteen hundreds. Thirty years have passed since my daughter died. On Saturday my mother got her wish and her ashes were planted next to her mother and her granddaughter. Her contentment was palpable.
Everything changes, yet what is it that notices? Clearly, the persona changes too. I am not the same person, yet not different from that person that buried his daughter’s ashes. Who is it that notices all this? Who or what is it that experiences this bittersweet beginningless beingness?
It is said that “To know yourself is to resolve yourself”. Lifes lesson indeed.