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5/18/12

The Spirit Never Dies

Even as the house burns down and is abandoned...

Physical disease and illness can lay waste to human body just as wind and fire can tear a house apart. A metaphor arises if you consider the physical being of a body as a house to the spirit and soul. One interpretation of the analogy is a house may be destroyed and vacated but the former inhabitants live on earth somewhere else. This can happen also in a very real sense to a person living with a chronic disorder that is disabling and usually fatal. The person you see, visit and talk with is visible in front of you but if you're discerning and know them for who they really are you're not seeing the shell left of their physique. They have in a very real sense moved their spirit into another anatomy although not visible to our myopic vision. For them their spirit, soul and personage inhabit a different place. One they have created with their internal strength and vision that allows them to be as mobile as they are able and keeps their mind from dwelling on physical limitations.


This happened to me once decades ago when for a long period I was in a physical state that confined me to a hospital bed and after that took time to restore my body to its previous condition. Others I've known are not able to do that since their physical condition is unchanging or deteriorating. I see in my sister who braves Scleroderma that as her body changes and becomes less functional and confining that she has already moved into another body that I recognize as being one similar to the one she once had but above all functional. Her spirit hasn't died and needs a house that it may dwell if only in the mind it resides. I recognize that to a skeptic and hard realists this is all specious and suspect and for them I am sorry since their coping mechanisms always seem to be at a minimum tinged with anger and bitterness. All I can vouch for is my personal experience where I inhabited a different being I imagined as like a tree, with roots, trunk, branches and twigs nourished by the warmth of the sun and feed by living water.

This is why I photograph a lot of trees and create visual art with them.