Weird shit-o-meter

Last week my mother came to stay with us, which was kinda weird, because she has been dead for five years.

i have had the unique privilege of standing by the gate as each of my parents passed through it to the next world and whatever it may hold. i don't think that wherever we go we retain our personalities or our preoccupations. The stories about contact with the dead and how they are just as interested in the minutiae of our lives as they were when they were with us, don't ring true fo me. Loss of consciousness or illness can affect our personalities, sometimes permanently. i suspect much of who we thinks we are is done with smoke and mirrors. Personality is malleable at the very least, and at most it is not who we are. The Buddhists are right. So, in 2007 both my parents died. A few days after the death of my father i felt like i was being watched, and not in a kindly way, more as if i was being monitored, and found wanting. I figured that was simply a sign  of how i felt about my father, and it went away soon. My mother had wanted to die and strongly believed she would be with my father in death, so i had no reason to think she would hang around.

Many many years passed. Well actually, five years passed. But it was long enough for my daughter to grow and leave, and for thousands of other people to be born and die, and  even long enough for the land around us to rise, and fall, and change for ever. And now the very beautiful spoonbills return to the estuary, bringing with them the souls of the avian dead, those who died in the sudden uplift and the drowning of the food, and the resulting disease, and the displacement of the birds.

And so my daughter has received an inheritance from my mother, and as we were all discussing it at dinner last week, the merits of bullion versus bonus bonds*, my mother gently moved in.

Why then? We were talking in a fairly hard headed way, about money and the means of production. We certainly were not calling to the world of spirit that evening.

Ah, but as i keep saying, reality is analogue not digital. It is a wave and a particle! All manner of things  can happen at the same time! i have a fairly high tolerance of weird shit. My weird shit-o-meter is set permanently on high. Reality is like tundra, it seems frozen and static but all you need to do is put pressure on it, or heat in one degree higher, and all sorts of things start to emerge, things you thought were dead, things that are just beginning to live, old things. Weird shit.

'April is the cruellest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land'

And thus TS Eliot evokes his Chaucer.

An inheritance is a major thing. In our times it means less, because our society is more atomised and there is less sense of anything passing from generation to generation. Moreover, our financial structure is making it harder even for us to pass material assets and money to our children. But an inheritance is never just about the money.

In Abrahamic Judaism, the inheritance was everything. The son favoured by his father and by God inherited not just the flocks and land, but the mana, and the future of the tribe, embodied in him.  Think of later times, when kingdoms rose and fell over inheritance. Think how inheritance laws, especially primogeniture, has affected women especially. And the fairy tales where an inheritance sent a youth into the world to become an adult person. An inheritance binds us to our families, and frees us to become independent, at the same time. i suppose the moment of receiving an inheritance is a liminal time. It is in this state of liminality that the boundaries between worlds weaken and spirit enters the daily world whether or not we seek it.

My mother is not lingering long, and she has sat with us quite lightly and never outstayed herself. i have no idea what to think about it.

We are waves and particles and tundra thawing and icing, and we are our ancestors.



* We get our financial advice from Walter Kaiser, on RT television channel. Kaiser is an ex Wall Stret broker who is now violently anti capitalist. His wonderfully vitriolic rants are a bit like listening to my husband. Walter Kaiser says buy bullion.