Mapping the body beautiful..essence .

kk, so I am not being intentionally MORBID here..or indulgently maudlin..but I have been musing.. For those of us who have seen death close up and terrifyingly intimate..not jus ol’ sweet aunt hettie in the coffin with the piped in musak of the stifling and packaged funeral parlors of our postmodern ironic world.. for those of us that have been witness to death itself, whether the gentle and awesome rebirthing it can be as when I watched my 98 year old grandmother take a day to die of congestive heart failure and leave her last breath as a butterfly.. as the room filled with her essence she had spent a lifetime in generously ,palpably gifting those in her little world with.. or the wretched nightmare of watching one who seemed too young to leave, and who fought the leavetaking violently..taking a part of my bloodied screaming heart over the veil.. It strikes me..or has struck me..that tho we cherish the particularities of the bodies of those we love.. it is their ESSENCE that emanates from this vessel that is truly unrepeatable.. are the essence and the body inextricably intertwined..or put another way.. could I be someone else in this body? could you be someone else in yours? I do not think so. Ultimately I believe that it is like the way an artist or photographer understands light and space..it is the space around us, and the vacuum we do not inhabit, that carves out who it is we are.. Bless the light, the spaces, the cracks and the fault lines that surround and pour thru you..dead, inert, the body still speaks, but as black star..no longer a play of light.. *********************** when you see another in this way.. as light, and space, and water ..the way an artist does.. you see past the body itself.. you kiss their core.. Kiss the core of someone you love today..a Benediction on their essence.. or receive such a kiss with grace.. pondering the imponderables, cat.