Comments | greygirlbeast: Moving on.

greygirlbeast

Moving on.

Jun 14, 2006 11:54

I made myself promise I'd do a LJ/Blog entry this morning, if only to thank the many, many people who've taken a moment to express their sympathy over Sophie's death. You have all helped, every single one of you. It's times like this that I find it particularly hard to hold to those things I believe are true. Like I was saying the other day, before ( Read more... )

the cosmos, la peau verte, belief, myths, sophie

Comments 10

tactileson June 14 2006, 17:13:01 UTC

Wow. What a wonderful post. I'm not quite sure why it feels so beautiful to me, perhaps it's the candor with which you speak of Sophie, and moreover, of your own beliefs, but, I think I needed to read something like that right now, as my mind has felt utterly cluttered and depressed for days. Thank you.

cucumberseed June 14 2006, 17:27:57 UTC

Sometimes atoms do the wonderful and foolish thing of becoming something we love. Atoms are silly things like that.

robyn_ma June 14 2006, 17:28:00 UTC

When my cat Alex died in 2004 after being with me for 17 years, we buried him out in the back yard. I like to think his decomposing remains have fed the flowers in the yard, and that he lives again through them. Then again, it could be said that it works that way for us all; unless matter is completely disintegrated, some bit of it will hang around.

ladygwyn June 14 2006, 18:03:23 UTC

Some few of those things, some living things, experience the phenomenon of consciousness and self-awareness, and then the body ends, ending the consciousness, which is one of the functions of the body. The body ceases, so the consciousness ceases. It's that cessation that makes death hard for me to face.

I've been reading your journal for a long time, before you even came over to LJ, and this is the first time I've been compelled to comment. That passage so succinctly conveyed an idea I've had in my head for ages, but was never able to quite put into words. It's the ceasing of consciousness that scares the crap out of me...everything else, not so much. I can't bear the thought of not being aware anymore.

My deepest condoleneces on the loss of Sophie. I lost a cat earlier this year, and still miss him terribly.

the_urban_monk June 14 2006, 18:06:25 UTC

"And here, for me, the Tibetan bardo ("intermediate state") does not have to mean the time between two lives. Rather, for me, it means simply the brief space between the incarnation I knew as Sophie and all the countless transformations and reassemblies of that constituent matter into other no less valid and no less lovely forms. The matter that became Sophie and which produced her consciuosness, existed for billions of years before her birth. It came from the nuclear furnaces of stars. It drifted across interstellar distances on cosmic winds and comet tails. It was here during the days of the first cyanobacteria and then the trilobites and then the dinosaurs and then the woolly frelling mammoths. Because a particular and transient form may pass away, but the Cosmos endures. The atoms that were Sophie, and were trillions of things before Sophie, will become soil and stone, trees and grass, atmospheric molecules and the dust about which great rain clouds form. They will live again, and they will not live again. For me, this is ( ... )