Christmas cake

Every year, my sister makes a Christmas cake. That’s our family tradition. This year my sister decided she couldn’t make a Christmas cake – the person who loved it the most is no longer with us.

That’s the thing about Christmas – the juxtaposition of joy and pain, family and lonely, bounty and empty, gain and loss. Honestly, until this year I was complacent – I’d never lost enough to be able to understand loss. Now I do.

How do I, how do any of us, balance celebration and desolation? How do we do what we did before when nothing is as it was before? What do those old family traditions mean when the family members who made those traditions are no longer there?

We need to remember that the loss is transitory, we will meet again. In this lifetime, we need to find a way to keep on loving, giving, laughing, inspiring, living – through Christmas (and because living is for life, not just for Christmas) into the new year and for the rest of our lives. Let’s make our lives the celebration.

Every year, I go through angst about the fact I love cake and I love Christmas but I don’t love Christmas cake. This year, I remembered that last year I made a huge vegan carrot cake with lemon frosting and everyone loved it. For now, that will be our new tradition.

The end result, featuring an unintentional ‘yellow snow’ effect due to the buttercream 🙂

The magnificent mash-up of life after death & Stevie J

So, I’m a born-again reincarnationist *laughs at own joke* Really, I’m sorry to do this to you after tempting you here with tea, cake and amphetamines – I’ve been saving this one to lull you into a false sense of security that I’m not a nut-job.

So, this was the real start of the journey, you know when you get that funny syncronicity of people and books and websites and stuff all saying the same thing over and over again? That. In the first few weeks after losing my father, I just got message after message about life after death. Heck, I couldn’t even concentrate on my usual calm activity of simultaneously making a pot of tea, answering the phone, umpiring the children baking a cake, updating my facebook status (and usually replying to a work email too but I wasn’t at work then) for hearing about soul groups, energy, auras and shiz. So yeah, I got the message.

And then in those first two awful weeks, I realised I could still feel my father’s energy, his love and even – twice, when I most needed it – the warmth and enclosure of a cuddle. There I said it *hears lunatic asylum alarms going off*

And because of feeling all that and knowing it – I knew there could well be something to all that stuff I was hearing about. So I did what I do, I started researching and reading. And reading and researching some more. I now have a whole new belief system and man, it’s beautiful.

It seems we’re all here to learn and get better. After we die, we usually hang around our loved ones for a while and then go to the spirit world where we chill a bit and review what we did well and where we f*cked up. Once we know how we need to improve then we chose our next life to help us to do that. We choose it, how cool is that?

Oh and the super-cool part? We have a soul group of fellow souls who think we ROCK and reincarnate with us as our friends and family.

I can’t feel my father’s energy around me any more, it stopped after those first two weeks – but it’s OK. I knew it was time for him to go and do his own stuff, time for him to chill. I’m pretty sure I’ll meet him again (and again) and that thought makes it all so much more bearable.

And you know what? If it’s all total crapola and when you die, that’s that, you’re gone – I’d prefer not to know. As the  man in the black turtle-neck said: “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of— maybe it’s ‘cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on….”

Oh and he also said “Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone…And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.” I don’t think there’s an off-switch, I think we go on (and on). It’s an exciting thought and I don’t even mind being reincarnated as a new version iPad next time.

Don’t worry, I’ll be back to cake and stuff next post (although it could be love reborn as cake) but there will probably be more of this life after death too shiz – I’ll make it clear in the title so you can avoid the nut-job ones if you like 😀

If you do want to know more, then I totally recommend this book, if you’re ready for it then it’ll blow your freakin’ mind (in a good way): Journey of Souls