Soul in Flight Amongst the Clouds

"The body has death, but not the soul. The body sleeps, the soul flies." ~ The Gita


You have been here with us in Thailand. 

I felt you on the floating cottages last week. A sudden, cool rain blew in and refreshed our sunburned bodies. I felt your spirit smile, knowing we were completely without electricity, running water, or technology with the ability to slip off alone to find a peaceful spot to meditate.


In the temple yesterday, I felt you in a monk that passed through the narrow iron gate. You carried a round brass pail ready to receive offerings of food.  

While sitting on the steps, I flipped back in my journal to what I wrote at the time of your memorial. "Life lived in moments. Brief snippets of time as if I were watching it from the outside in. Like a vivid, brilliant movie, these moments go fast, and then they are gone. How could we possibly know when our last moment will be with a friend? And if we could, what would we alter?"


Glancing up, you walked by again, another monk, orange robe spilling over your shoulder, sweeping. Your eyes caught mine and with a soft grin, you turned and continued to push the dirt and leaves to a pile just near the temple steps. 


After returning home from your memorial in May, I slept. This is significant since I generally do not sleep and if I do, never well. It was as though you gave me the rest my body craved and needed. 


And here in this beautiful city, I am reminded of you again and again, when I find myself rested or as I gaze into the trees that surround this city of smiles. Not just because you were going to take this trip with us at one point, but because I feel your spirit at rest in the blue and grey wispy clouds that periodically hide the massive beauty of Doi Sutep mountain.


You once said you were really happy in how you "turned out to be." How many of us can say that in this very moment? It looks as though you would not have altered any moments. Death, while hard for us here on earth, seemed to be on time. Thankfully, your soul is still in flight amongst the clouds.


Jeff Goodman's favorite quote:

“The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated.” ~Thoreau