# 148 A 'RAPTURE' - Devoid of Da Vinci's Code

This has not been a good year. Last week I lost another friend unexpectedly. Cancer took her so quickly, with little warning. But despite the shock, I am in amazingly good spirits. Comforted by those things that I know about her determinations of the meaning of life and death.

This friend was so unique. She was witty, clever, down-to-earth, funny, and yes, silly as well. But we loved her because of it or in spite of it. If you were pretentious, she would pick at you relentlessly until you were forced to be real. She absolutely refused, stubbornly, and willfully to play those games that the rest of us all play in our efforts to become more accepted and more respected. And no matter what the social conscious was in a stir about, she still gave priority to the inner dictates of her own heart and closed her ears to society’s latest roar.

Now I know it is odd to say, but if you had ever spoke with my friend, you would have known, as I did, in some mystical way from the dynamics of that discourse that here was a person who carved out her own path. You would have known here was someone who sought her own wisdom through experience and only ingested knowledge that would invariably be an asset to her sense of self. She was a ‘real’ person with a purity of character that is quite impossible for me to adequately define. Suffice it to say that my friend never got annoyed when other’s views were in opposition to her own. Because she expected that to be the case. After all, her wisdom was created in her soul. It was something that came out of a mix of past experience and primeval intuition. A mix devoid of social pressure, recorded history, or researched fact.

Now most of us would frown on that kind of bull-headedness. But we only think that way because we have adopted current society’s determination that life has only one mandate – to learn everything about everything that there is to know. We are so entrenched in this common thinking that none of us ever consider that we are being force-fed so much knowledge that the facts are killing the essence of our inner souls. Facts, like dragons, have a hot breath that dries up the fluids that lube the machinery of our conscience and spirituality.

So we live in a world where there are very few independent-minded individuals that have the ability to shed outside influences the way a well-oiled cloth sheds water. But my friend did that. She simply refused to tune in to social dictates. To her Society’s Chorus was a song of silence. And because of that she was unencumbered by the common held beliefs most of us have about life, death, and purpose. But that does not mean that she didn’t seek understanding. She did seek understanding and came to a very simple conclusion that left me rather awe-struck.

She concluded that what we observe in nature is how we are. That our lives mimic the life-cycle of ground-crawlers that climb trees and swath themselves in mummy-wraps where they dwell until they eventually morph into air-borne things of stunning beauty. My friend determined that our human-life ‘rapture’ (if you want to call it that), is simply a duplication of the ‘rapture’ of insects, like butterflies and dragonflies, that morph from earth creatures to creatures of the air. And so she described her body as only a cocoon – a temporary dwelling place. And her theory was that a ‘Day of Rapture’ would come when she would burst from that cocoon and take flight. With angel wings or butterfly wings? I really don’t know. Either way, it really doesn’t matter. I still think it was a wondrous thought.

And I can’t help but think that no matter if the creator is the traditional God of most Christian religions, or a less traditional God, there is still honor and reverence in her interpretation. In fact, I think he/she/it will probably find more worth in my friend’s interpretation than the interpretations of pious experts who study with such zeal every incomprehensible bit of writ they can glean from Bibles, ancient scrolls, inspired words, missing Biblical accounts, Opus Deys (sp?), or Da Vinci Codes.