There really is no world or future “out there,” as we first experienced life as children. Remember when you were small and the grass was part of you? How you stepped on bumblebees and cried, but just for a little while? That is how my friend Peter came to experience life once his “me” fell away.

After his accident he returned to the natural world and discovered it to be a part of himself. That is how he could write to me so easily of cats and robins.

If we are doing our inner work, the world returns to where it belongs, inside of us! The self inside that knows is who we are and not the self that thinks. Thinking is so last week, right? Thinking just means you don’t know yet. Time has become as elastic as Silly Putty.

Once my little girl died, time became a bit of nonsense. She just died yesterday, on some level of my heart. And on another level, my world fell away, only to be replaced with the dark night of the soul.

Never think that death of children happens only to other people. Children die every day and no one ever has the right words of comfort to offer bereaved parents. In fact, anything said is wrong. The grass is wrong, the trees are wrong. And that first spring is devastatingly wrong. I remember watching flowers bloom and feeling it just wasn’t fair for me to still be here.

Now I am growing old and growing more and more aware that heaven is indeed within us, as is hell. For we are the whole shebang. The whole kit and caboodle. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And here is where descriptions get tricky.

I see deeply that my own company includes everyone. As introverted as I am, I take delight in that. I take pleasure in slowing life down to a crawl. I eat a bowl of oatmeal before dawn and then return to bed. I get up when I feel like it.

There are no lasting problems, just times when I forget that the world is always at my fingertips and that I don’t have to travel to see the world. Ramana Maharshi said that such and such a man visited such and such a place only in his mind. And that is how it is for us all. Wherever we are, there we go, to turn a figure of speech on its head.

Namaste.