Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

     I was talking with my wife's father, a retired pastor, and he told me about an image he used in many of his sermons throughout the years.  It is a thing that every kid learns on the monkey bars on the playground at school.  It is simply this: when you are on the monkey bars, you can't move forward until you let the hand behind you let go of the last bar.      In this way, I am kind of stuck in my life.  The trailing monkey bar is my smoking cigarettes.  I just haven't been able to let go of that bar no matter how hard I try.  I believe that this bar gives me a lift.  You see, I suffer from a chronic depression.  When I go outside and have a smoke and a caffeinated beverage, I get a little boost to my mood.  Often this gets me back on track and I start doing things besides laying in bed.  I might do the dishes and I feel better about what I have accomplished.  I might, being awake ...

     It is two days before Christmas.  The first Christmas with my three month old daughter and my beautiful wife of three years.  I am sitting outside in the cold New Hampshire evening in a red metal chair.  It is one of those old chairs from decades ago with peeling red paint and a scallop on the back.  I am smoking my e-cigarette and drinking a giant glass of Pepsi.  The chair belonged to Mr. Smith, who I never knew.  He was a kind old man that lived until he was in his early nineties who lived next door to my wife and her family when she was not even a teenager.  I am sitting outside my wife's mom and dad's house in the cold New Hampshire dusk, watching the Christmas lights slowly turn on, one house at a time, down the suburban New Hampshire street.  And I am thinking about Mr. Smith.  He sat in this chair 8-12 times a day just like I do, and smoked his pipe.      Art was his first name....

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     I have a theory about the afterlife.  When your body begins shutting down, certain systems in the brain start going offline.  There are circuits that allow us to perceive the passage of time.  I believe that these circuits start going off line before major life-sustaining functions do.  If you think of it, our perception of time is a fragile system at best when we're conscious. We need clocks to tell us how much time has passed. Even "reality" has a fragile relationship with time.  If you take two clocks and put one on the earth and another on a plane travelling twice the speed of sound, the two clocks will show different times. Astronauts on the International Space station age slightly slower than people on Earth.  This fragile system falls apart when we are in the process of dying. So we, at the instant of death (or rather the very fast progression of the shutting down of systems in our body) lose t...