Thank you Mom and Dad for being Spectacular. Belgium
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Thank you, Mom and Dad, for who you were: spectacular!
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On his deathbed, just shy of three years after my mother passed, my father refused to see me. My sister said he did not want me to come over. She said he was screaming in pain, given morphine to ease his suffering. How could my presence possibly make it worse? Was I such a monstrous figure in his eyes? Despite years of yoga, plant medicine, and Dieta, was I still that monster? I guess I was… somehow. Some dark part of me.
I respected his wishes. He didn't consent to my presence, and I didn’t want to force it. So I waited in the Sacred Valley in Peru for him to pass, organizing a dispacho on the flank of Apu Linli mountain with a Q’ero priest to guide his spirit out of this realm. It was the best I could offer at that point.
And so, I sat with my feelings. How does it actually feel that my father is dying? How does it feel that he doesn’t want to see me one last time? When the final chance to reconcile slips away? How does it feel to be orphaned, to be the last man in my lineage? How does it feel to stand on the precipice of generational closure ? How does all this really deeply feel?
That same night my sister called to tell me he had passed. October 20th 2023.
And Oh It feels lots, it is raw and open and deep and excruciating yet alive and living and moving and intelligent and all I can deduce is that what I feel, the universe feels. What I learn, the universe learns. All those many intricacies of the human experience, the universe also experiences. Of course, there is no separation—there never has been. The universe is a living, breathing entity, a big wise toddler eternally learning and we are one of its senses, part of its consciousness. That is why… at least, that is how it feels to me.
Over the past seven months - in Belgium from november 2023 till may 2024 - my sister and I navigated a perfect storm. We had no choice then to play the game with this miserable hand of cards we had been dealt. Everything was complicated—the succession process, all legal aspects, my father’s debts, the sale of the family property, the bitter cold without heating, my sister’s chemo brain from her first cancer treatment, my repressed demons, my sister’s trauma response, family and financial skeletons jumping out of closets everywhere, obstructed water canals, unexpressed ancestral trauma—it was a chaotic generational mess.
Clogged channels, misaligned lineages, all crying out for care, harmony, peace, and healing. My sister and I paddled and paddled, purged and prayed relentlessly, until the skies cleared and the heavy momentum came to calm.
We inherited the castle and then owned the castle, put it in proper order, and then we sold the castle, … our castle, our home. We harmonised all festering slimy obstructions; financial, energetic, physical, mental, generational and ancestral.
We paid our debts, paid our parents’ debts, without hesitation, without argument, without bargaining. We paid and paid and paid, spending millions in Karma-coins… but it felt liberating but also lots of grief about the loss. These things run deep when family, ancestry, land and the connection with land are involved.
Then came the gift—the gift of love, the reunification of brother and sister, the restoration of our family, our childhood, our lineage, our heritage. What I once fled from became my sanctuary, my center, my core. What I had rejected was reassembled; what I feared, I now admired. I finally saw my parents for who they were, felt the depth of their love, and recognized how much I had missed out on them due to my own childhood interpretations and misconceptions. At times I had resented them, feared them, even hated them. But why? Why are we so bound by our subconscious pathways, so blinded by ignorance? Why do we make the most important decisions and declarations in our lives when we are too young to understand the context in which we make them? We scream and shout instead of loving, caring, and simply being. It is both fascinating and frightening.
How could I fear the only two people who truly loved me unconditionally? How could I fabricate excuses to avoid family gatherings, overwhelmed by the prospect of connection? Why did I resort to heroin at sixteen? So many missed opportunities of joy, so many ruined dinners and birthdays, so many arguments in place of deep relating. Time seemed eternal, and now it is over in a blip. Gone forever. Mom and now dad, both are gone. Our home gone.
The answer, I deeply believe, is that this ignorance is inevitable. It persists until we grow out of it through death. Death brings growth, and pain is simply growing pain. This pain is inevitable, necessary, and ultimately liberating when we surrender to it, when “I” die. Death brings life. Death is Life.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for being spectacular!
Thank you for your love, my childhood, for the life you facilitated, the gifts, the light of our home, thank you for the ignorance you helped me see now you are gone.
I miss you dearly, and will miss you for a long time despite the undeniable and undescribable freedom that comes with being untethered from parents and any family ties. It is funny, as much I craved this freedom when I was a teenager; to be fully independent, responsible and accountable, I now have to learn how to use it in its full capacity and to allow myself to expand into ever more fully formed individuation and expression of who I freely am, always already, always evolving until also I inevitably fade and recycle.
This is where I feel that my ancestors have now landed within me more than ever and trust me to include and transcend these waves. Include and transcend. Include and transcend. All levels all quadrants, all the way up, all the way down, all seven stages of life. Include and transcend.
Honouring all my relations through me and within me and beyond me.
What I feel, the universe feels; what I see, the universe sees.
As I grow, the universe grows. As you grow, the universe grows. It is inevitable.
Ignorance is a gesture we do, until we stop doing it, until we die.
It is inevitable.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for being spectacular!
❤️
