here's the main problem I have

life is too short and we aren't young enough long enough to enjoy it to its full extent. There are so many things I'd like to do in addition to what I'm currently doing. I can think of at least two, no three other professions I would've like to have explored and hundreds of places I'd like see but there just isn't enough time. I want to say it isn't fair except in the immortal words of Sylvia M. "fair is a weather term."

Which is why I think death is a ripoff.

Which is also why I hold onto this small hope that maybe it isn't. Maybe death isn't the end, maybe it's just a way station we come back to, like the bardu in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, which wonders "how might human history be different if 14th-century Europe was utterly wiped out by plague, and Islamic and Buddhist societies emerged as the world's dominant religious and political forces? The Years of Rice and Salt considers this question through the stories of individuals who experience and influence various crucial periods in the seven centuries that follow. The credible alternate history that Robinson constructs becomes the framework for a tapestry of ideas about philosophy, science, theology, and politics."

But the really interesting part in my mind was  the  "small cast of recurring characters who live through each episode of the book as soldiers, slaves, philosophers and kings. Dying, they spend time in the afterlife [the bardu], only to be reborn into the next era, generally with no knowledge of their past lives." Or their knowledge of one another within the bardu.

I wonder if that isn't true. That we are all connected somehow only don't know it except in death.

And yeah. This is the crazy shit I think about, can't sleep because of, drive myself crazy with.

the question

well, I'm still not sure what this will eventually evolve into but for now, for today, it's about the big question. You know, the one that asks, who the heck are we and where the heck are we going? Or is this a one way trip?

Yeah. That question.

Some people claim to know the answer. It's God, or Jesus or Mohammed or Mother or Buddha or whatever. Pick a name. And I'm not trying to be disrespectful of anyone with faith; only those who try to force it down other people's throats. What I am trying to do is discover the answer to the question for myself and I'm hoping this blog might offer up a means to discuss, converse, trade ideas back and forth. Because I know I'm not the only one who thinks death is a rip off.

So if you stumbled in here from my other blog(s) you may not want to stick around because this doesn't have much to do with writing fiction except in the broadest sense. But if you want to join in the conversation and tell me what you think the answer is, or what you hope the answer is, or anything to do with the question, then I'd love to read what you have to say.


A warning though, any disrespect to me and my beliefs or you and yours in the comments will result in deletion. We ain't havin' that, got it?

peace