Life, Death + a Drive to Succeed

And just like that, a whole life had been lived.

My grandfather. My father. Myself. Business.

My grandfather.

And just like that, a whole life had been lived.

So this whole story is a essentially about my grandfather which gets into a lot of other weird deep shit so first the bumble through all of the stuff that I want to say before really good at the whole meat of why am I writing. What is the point after all?

I officially took a dive off the deep end and I am self-sustainable. There is absolutely nothing to fear. I absolutely have this. I feel more empowered and incredible than I have ever felt in my life and I'm 25 years old which is allegedly the age that your brain is fully developed and you become a true blue adult.

I am really excited about the possibilities. With my grandfather passing away and literally seeing him, lying there having my hand on his shoulder. He would shudder, twitching in a very deep sleep. He's always had a large button nose and his mouth was open and he was gasping for each strained breath. He had tumors in his lungs. He had emphysema. He had smoked many cigarettes in his lifetime.

It was shocking to see him in that state and for some reason he reminded me of one of the dwarves from Snow White and there was a blue book that said something along the lines of a "different type of energy will take over from this point, a spiritual energy" and it referenced that they were there with 1 foot in the door and 1 foot out of the door and they had to process something before they were comfortable entering that next world, and as I sat next to my grandfather who had lost his daughter at age 21 , who had cheated on my beautiful grandmother after leaving her with five children, who was a very successful business owner for most of his entire adult life, who built a cool amazing house and had a boat in Apple Valley and was a sharp and sexy businessman, a president of the Shriners club, a club that I don't know much about but I know that he picked up children that were sick and didn't have help and drove them to hospitals and that he made many, many trips throughout his life

Where is the fine line? Almost all of us have goodness and all of us have done evil things and at my grandfather's funeral it was a huge shocking realization that life is very short and that we will die and that everybody is getting older and it is inevitable.

My grandfather's funeral made me realize that I didn't want anybody to be sitting at my funeral someday thinking the opposite of what was being said about me. I didn't want to go down as a hypocrite. I wanted to be remembered for being--for being! (I think that there is no small coincidence that the first tattoo I got as a young 19-year-old who wanted to remember the importance of being in the present moment of really being there and being happy with what was in your life right there and now.)

Anyways all of these are tangents obviously but the beauty of this experiment is that I have to literally just talk and organize my thoughts and heart-- to organize my thoughts- this is literally free writing. This is absolutely amazing. I don't have to think about spelling, I don't have to think about literally anything. This is going to help me write my book so quickly it's insane because now I have all of the hard stuff to get that base work and have so much of it now that seems wasted in the voice memos. And nothing is a waste of effort but this is a good use of my time.

I have so many little stories that I want to tell and I think that I need to again just keep coming back to the reason why am I not telling them. A lot of it I think is focused energy and I've been thinking and reflecting on "you can do anything but not everything." And where I feel that I need to improve is that I am energy, I am power, I am a lot of amazing things, that I can't be so scattered.

I just bought these new earrings that are of arrows and I bought them for one pointed focus--one pointed direction, narrowing in hitting my target. The problem has been that I've had these big ideas based on euphoric feeling and dreams and warmth and beauty but I haven't had a concrete goal so there was nothing to reach. In many ways maybe this is the point of life--to have nothing to reach, to just be, being nobody going nowhere.

Using this as a tool for my disposal is going to absolutely change my life. I imagine Alan Watts and Martin Luther King Junior and Thich Nhat Hanh and people that have absolutely shaped my life and how I see it. These people have given me more peace than I previously had and these people have inspired me, slightly shifted my perspective so that I could truly see the world in a way that wasn't so cruel.

Again and again I must reflect on my dharma or my life's purpose. This is what is driving absolutely everything that I am doing and this is the fundamental reason of why I feel like I needed to help my parents-- to have a super small base so that I could launch into something huge. I have needed very strong roots and my roots have needed to be repotted into something larger-- perhaps just into nature, into the earth unloaded for as long as it can be. I am a strong plant or a tree or a flower racing my way to death ultimately, racing my way to be something meaningful and at the end of the day if this is what I have to remember I must keep coming back to death-- it creates an urgency, it creates purpose, it reminds us that we are going to die anyways so why not live the biggest life that we possibly can?

What the fuck are we here to do?

Recently losing my grandfather made me think about not apologizing, about making mistakes and never saying you're sorry. Being so stubborn that you would never say to your son: I love you, I am sorry for the pain that I've caused you-- that would have been enough. Isn't that all that needs said so many times, a true apology?

So as I sat next to my grandfather, one of the only people in the room that seemed to feel comfortable touching him for a long amount of time. Though I was not attuned in Reiki at the time I knew about Reiki and believe that my intentions were absolutely made the same thing whether I was technically attuned or not (maybe I'll think differently once I am attuned and understand the process) but I believe that what I was giving him and what I was receiving was energy and I hope, comfort.

And as I sat there as a yoga teacher, yoga meaning to fuse the life, the breath, knowing that the word breath and spirit are so inherently interconnected and the breath and this essence of being alive is all that there really is. When I sat next to him I couldn't help but to look at his flickering eyelids and it looked like he was dreaming. He would scrunch his face up like he was frowning or he would smile in his dreams and I wondered what he was dreaming. I left four hours before he died.

I wonder what the final things were that he experienced and I truly do wonder what happened to him, where he went. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. I wonder what my grandfather is in the world. And I'm also interested in the ways that people show love because he showed love with security and money and by supporting a large family, which is important. I wouldn't be where I'm at today or anywhere close without this man.

So even if you couldn't say it, I know that he felt love-- all of us do.

So this is also going to be a really great tool for copying pasting and putting things where they need to go but essentially this is what I need to do-- just get the compost and you know, just tell a story like I imagine that I am talking to either a group of people or one person or however it is that somebody would actually tell a story and that's how I will start to transcribe. I mean seriously this is already finished I just need to have a line breaks and punctuation and format this correctly and I have a whole page worth of material.

This is taking the grunt work and bullshit and literally the writing, the writer's block that holds me back. I am just speaking and telling my story and you know at the end of the day there has to be a purpose behind it, a felt sense that you leave behind. You're leaving people with emotions and you are challenging them to see something differently and that is what it means to be an author and got them down this path.

I know this is my purpose now, I must just get focused and again channel my energy into that one pointed focus. I have to choose the several things I want to do because I can do actually a lot of things but I really can't do everything, so pick the most important tasks to you and right now I'd say in life I'm really going for the big ones.

I'm getting in touch with my family and my roots and holding down the fort, helping my mother's mental health and helping my family, helping myself and my future family and giving this my all. Over and fucking out to this new tool, experiment successful!

I write an essay on the death of my Grandfather. On urgency. The cold of winter. Seeing my father cry for the first time, as a twenty-five year old woman at three in the morning on Valentine's Day. He had been taken off in a stretcher and with the help of heavy medication, never woke back up before passing.

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