either or neither and both

At 3:10 a.m. I usually find that sleep does not come so easily. The pattern has been this way for quite some time now, since my uncle passed away, to be more exact. I don't necessarily attribute this newly acquired sleeping pattern to that fact, though lately it has been a steady measurement of time for it.

While my brother and I did begin certain practices involving the Law of Attraction prior to our uncle's passing and even during it, the key principle of gratitude tsunamied its way into my life the night before his funeral, the night I wrote his eulogy.

The saying goes that one doesn't really appreciate the things s/he may have until it's finally gone, but sometimes it takes a good Taoist approach to stumble upon appreciation, in that we find the truest form of something, its purest form, only when we discover its exact opposite -presence/absence, life/death, light/dark. While writing about an uncle who no longer was in physical form sharing solid ground with me, I found an overwhelming and immeasurable gratitude fueling the movements of my pen.

I can say that thanking him, internally, spiritually, for being such an important figure in my life, solidifies his presence in my mind despite the fact that he is physically gone. My thanks were affirmation, my own version of mourning that required no regrets, no guilt, and definitely no sorrow rooted in selfishness.

Sometimes I wonder where his consciousness went, where it is. It's a subtle thought that tends to creep into my never-ending internal dialogue, but I'm getting better in reminding myself that it never really left, nor did it ever come, but just always was. And that his physical manifestation -his face, his eyes that remind me of my own and of my mother's- was only a momentary entity of the larger consciousness that reached for a new and unique experience here on Earth.