I talked existential last night in my support group. We talked about death and dying and the afterlife. I have been pondering spiritual existential questions for a while, with bouts of desperation and the sense of ‘what use is it to even wake up in the morning’, with all the gloomy thoughts that come with it…you know how people say they have found faith when confronted with cancer? I think for me it’s starting to be the opposite: I feel I am losing what little faith I had. And it’s not because I believed in a god that caused human suffering, I’ve never believed in that. I believed in a god that suffers with us, rather. But being confronted with my own mortality and touching it so closely through my friendship with people who are fighting cancer has put me closer to the ground, I don’t know how else to express this. Yet, life every day is a miracle, incredible, complicated, intertwined, mutually dependent. And we stay in this universe, if in different form, after we lose consciousness as we know it, don’t we? We end up fertilizing the ground and remain part of the circle of life. Is it the fear of suffering and transition that gives us this desperation, rather than the fear of death (ever read “The Fear of Transformation”, a brief essay by Danaan Parry; or that poem, “Without” by Elana Klugman…try Google them)?<\/p>\n
And through my friendships I do sometimes feel we are all connected: in a mysterious way we are part of the cosmic consciousness, linked by the love we feel for each other, through the discovery of our common fears, joys, sickness, achievements, failures….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I talked existential last night in my support group. We talked about death and dying and the afterlife. I have been pondering spiritual existential questions for a while, with bouts of desperation and the sense of ‘what use is it to even wake up in the morning’, with all the gloomy thoughts that come with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}