I’ve just entered my seventieth year, that is to say, just celebrated my sixty-ninth birthday. I have, I understand, already out-lived most of the people, men anyway, that have ever walked on this planet. Earlier this year my mother passed away at the age of eighty-eight or eighty- nine (no-one was really sure) and just last month my youngest brother died days before his sixty-first birthday to be followed just last Monday by his lifelong friend, Mark, who I’d last seen laughing and smoking just two weeks ago at Preston’s wake. He was also just shy of sixty-one. Preston died after a long illness and Mark of a massive heart attack while on the job. Both men had done a lot of damage to their bodies over the years with cigarettes and booze and one has to wonder at what point in their lives, if ever, did they truly become aware of the slow suicide they were committing. 

I knew them both and feel that they were,in fact, well aware of the likely consequences of their ways but neither chose to make any alterations, they didn’t choose life, or at least not a long life. And yet they had great loves, great talents, they were social, they liked being with people, they loved a party. But, like so many of us now, I think, they both suffered from bouts of broken-hearted sadness, they were gentle people but the world was not…so they partied, drank, smoked, and in Mark’s case inhaled a small warehouse of reefer. 

Now, I have spent my life pondering the mystery of being; it seems something I was born to. Even as a child I remember being so curious about the drowning of a playmate…where did she go? It made no sense that she wasn’t anywhere. She’s in Heaven they said, and by the way they said it, it seemed like a good place to be, and everyone was in agreement that all children went directly to Heaven…so I was safe for awhile. But I was bound to grow up… then what? Apparently all adults did NOT go to Heaven, directly or otherwise, rather, they were more apt to wind their way, via their natural yearnings, to the pits of Hell from which there was no escape…ever…no parole, no good behaviour and no possibility of dying to another realm. 

Yikes!…So Heaven was full of children with nobody to look after them?? 

And it just got more confusing from there. 

Over the years I’ve read and studied a raft of philosophies and religions, I read the books of the mystics, the clairvoyants, and the channellers, practiced meditation for years and spent countless hours alone in the woods… listening. I even tried, during a period of great guilt, returning to the Catholic church, the same church that had so alienated me as a young boy with it’s demons and sermons of fire and brimstone and it’s admonitions to grovel at the feet of an apparently ruthless deity if I wished to avoid damnation. Yes indeed… the same Catholic church that I had gleefully dumped as a runaway musician in my late teens. That move didn’t work out either, nothing much had changed in the attitude of the church since my youth. The light that Jesus had lit had been totally covered in dogma shit. Nevertheless, religious indoctrination is powerful programming and it is not easy to dump years of it. I don’t think I would have been able to had I not stumbled across other thinkers and other philosophies, ways of considering the unknowable, that which is, so far anyway, beyond science, beyond proof. 

So anyway, here I am in my seventieth year, the vast majority of my scenes for this particular movie have been shot. And I admit that I too have had many hours and even days of feeling that same broken-hearted sadness, despairing of the future, not just for myself but for everything and everyone. 

But when someone dies, someone close, someone loved, as odd as it sounds, a reverence for living returns. I feel oneness with these people, these brothers/sisters, as it were, who have just disappeared. I feel vigorous and joyful and fully alive. I can be here now…for awhile anyway. 

For all my walking in the woods and pondering, I admit I am no closer now to knowledge or to proof than I was on the day I was born, but for reasons I can’t explain, my fear of dying has, for the most part, buried itself at the bottom of my drawer of old T-shirts; out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Perhaps one day I’ll need to dig down and exhume it for one final perusal…or not. 

I have no ‘knowledge’ or proof of any kind of post Earth-life existence. What I do have is a ‘knowing’ that all is well…no matter what. That the dazzling energy that is consciousness, cannot not be. It will appear and disappear in accordance with the limits of perception. 

Just like Las Vegas…What happens in the world…Stays in the world.