Bling

There are a mil­lion myths for death. Here is one for the egghead in me that does not aban­don the hope of mystery.

Water to ice and then what. Steam. Sub­li­ma­tion in physics is the trans­for­ma­tion (poof!) of a solid to a gas with­out pass­ing through the liq­uid phase. (Freud then made up a whole dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of sub­li­ma­tion, which I find odd – not the def­i­n­i­tion he has for it, but that he seri­ously mud­died the waters on wondrous word.)

New souls flow­ing over the falls into the world, new lives on the run and all about action. Make room. Old souls find­ing their dia­mond selves in rest. For me there are few things more beau­ti­ful than a young human on the run in a life, and yet wis­dom is the jewel the old human leaves as her gift to life. And then steam. Death isn‘t cold, I guess? It is the odd trans­for­ma­tion of this solid self to a vapor and it requires heat. Even as our bod­ies vibrate more slowly and then stop vibrat­ing alto­gether and the quan­tum ques­tion of where the atoms find them­selves becomes mean­ing­less, the soul slips out the back door, a shadow with­out its solid self to get in the way of light. We die, we sublimate.

Am I mak­ing this up? Yes.