“It is terrifying because the universe is so vast, our place so threatened, our time in this state so succinct. But it is our party and epiphany too because nothing really had to happen at all, ever, and certainly not us.

Take a chance. Deepen with everything here. With everyone. Everyone.

Explora the terror and wonder, to whatever degree you feel them, and at the same time, the sheer joy and beauty, the magnificence of this, in each other’s immaculate presences.

Allos this amazing situation to sink in. We will die, but are alive at this very moment.

We are each individual, unique, aware, on a planet, in a circumstance we didn’t create, at least not by anything we consciously recall, that has no context to explain it, or us. We are strangers met in a ceremony that transcends us, we are bound by ties that cannot sever. We made it, we got in, and we’re still here.

Then I am asking you to invite and include those who have passed. Allow them to be here too.

Don’t sabotage it. Don’t sabotage yourself. It is not impossible. It is our choice and their choice too. Because if existence is possible, a wolrd of the living and the dead is also possible. Not only possible but necessary.

Have this crazy belief in us. Believe it not with your mind but with your whole being.

Go into that place where no contrivance can help you, where a noviece gets bitten or killed, or comes away with the whisker of a jaguar and the jaguar’s loyalty and keepsake forever. In this life and after this life. Only it is not a jaguar. We all know this, at our core, beyond what we tell ourselves we believe or don’t believe. ”

Richard Grossinger