My Mother passes away on Mother's Day

My mother, Hilda Tellechea, passed away, peacefully in her sleep, at approximately 2AM EDST this morning. My Father spoke with her last night and she seemed to him to be in good spirits, in his impression the best she's been in days of illness.

I belive her heart just gave out from the strain of her poor capacity to breath as a result of her severe scoleosis and its effects on her lung capacity; that, coupled with her exhaustion from caring for my father as he recovered from surgery to remove a portion of his Liver that had developed some slow growing cancers. She had been in the hospital for almost a week and had been moved to a Recovery Center where we hoped that she would recover enough to go home after another week or so. Her death was unexpected, but not altogether unanticipated.

Her passing on Mother's day, upon reflection, seems rather auspicious to me. Hilda was a wonderful human being. Kind, generous, and loving. She was possessed of a discriminating wisdom and an abiding compassionate nature; never vindictful, never holding a grudge, always fair and just in her actions, in her relationships with friends, family, co-workers during her professional life--with everyone that she met.

I am sure that her journey through the Bardos will be a reflection of how she lived; full of kindness, compassion, and love.

I feel so very fortunate to have an understanding of the nature of this manifest realm of form, and sufficient experience of the unmanifest, boundless, luminous emptiness from which form arises, such that my pain and grief is limited to the portion of myself that still holds to an illusion of permanence. I am not imobilized with the intensity of hopeless grief that besets the poor unfortunate masses of human beings that are clueless to our true nature and whose grief reflects the crushing weight of finality and oblivion; or which take refuge in a mythological belief, and a mere faith, in some idealized afterlife.

I know as surely as the simple feeling of IAMNESS that pervades our experience can instruct, that I AM and my Mother's I AM are not two; that the realm of subtle energies in which the portion of consciousness that continues 'as' my Mother will deliver experience that is commensurate with the high quality of consciousness that my Mother held in life; therefore I am at peace that she will not suffer; but rather is released from the confines of a broken-down suit of flesh that no longer deserved the brilliance of her spirit's presence.

I will tell you all that her passing is a wake up call. Every passing instance of time that flows past the pointy end of our spear of volitionality is precious. What did we do with that instance of time? It is time to set aside the remnants of self indulgence and neurosis that allows these precious instances to be squandered unconsciously. I must intensify my commitment to use this precious human life, and the capacities of intellect, creativity, and grace with which I am endowed to make a difference in the world for the sake of all.

Yesterday, and the day before, I attended two events hosted by Andrew Cohen, in Washington DC, where he taught on evolutionary enlightenment and in his refreshingly direct, and compassionately brutal manner, exhorted us to wake up, and to give rise to the impulse to evolve at the level of consciousness itself and, moreover, to act upon it. We must dis-identify with the seperate self sense--the limited egoic contraction--and increasingly identify with, and as, the Authentic Self which abides between the ground of being and the limited egoic self.

With my mother's passing, in a very visceral way, my own impending death comes to the forefront of awareness as a call to action...

What did you do with *this* instance of time, Human?

.... What about this one?
And this one?
And this one? ....

--
"I'm not one who make believes
I know that leaves are green
They only turn to brown when autumn comes around
I know just what I say
Today's not yesterday
And all things have an ending"
--- Stevie Wonder from Visions (1973 Innervisions)

--Dragpa Gyaltsen