What on Earth Am I Here For?

This question has been my touchstone since Dean died.  Harsh and demanding, a desperate plea at first; why am I still here?  Within 18 months, everyone in my immediate family died.  First Mr Luigi, then Tulku, then Freya, then Dean, followed by Izzy one week later.  But Tulku rebirthed himself as Bodhi and worked tirelessly, relentlessly, to keep me moving.  He will not allow me to fall into despair, especially if it gives him a reason to steal my socks, boots, towel, knives or tools.  He is a lightning-fast pickpocket and a ruthless taskmaster who will not tolerate anything less than total awareness.  In his own grief, he was waking me up three times a night to make sure I was still alive.

My old life, the life Dean and I made together, ended when he left his body. I knew that immediately and I felt it viscerally, repeatedly, in wave upon wave of heart-break.  Sometimes, it hit like a punch in the guts, that winded me and made me cry out in pain.  In the first few weeks I found myself wandering around the house, sniffing his old clothes and crying over shopping lists in his hand-writing. I also found the washing-up in the fridge and lost chunks of my own life, when I don’t know where I went or what I did. The only constant, apart from Bodhi, was the haunting, taunting question; why am I still here?

This stage of grief and loss must be endured, as any caterpillar, or dragonfly, will tell you.

The day before the solar eclipse, I was shaken out of the trance by a telephone scammer who caught me at the moment I was totally spent and scammed me out of all the money in our bank account. It was one of the most disturbing experiences of my life, worse than any physical attack. I knew what was happening but could not stop myself from providing all the personal details.  I felt mind-controlled, while my body fought with coughing fits and nausea, my vision was so blurred that I couldn’t even see the phone in my hand.  Finally, I managed to hang up and rush to the bathroom to throw up. I sat on the bathroom floor feeling as though I’d been in an earthquake.  I got up and called the bank straightaway, but by then the money was all gone and the account blocked for suspected money-laundering.

I had little appetite for going through the process of proving ‘my identity’ to the AI bots so I can sort this out and claim Dean’s pension.  It is complicated by the fact that I don’t have any bills in my name, our house has three different addresses and all his papers got burned in the barn fire in December 2020. I have no doubt that what is rightfully mine will be returned to me in perfect timing and meanwhile, I had other priorities. In truth, I had little appetite for anything and ate nothing but hard boiled eggs for the first month.  

I thought I was doing reasonably well, but according to the local grapevine, I was ‘vulnerable’ and ‘not taking care of myself’.  I accept my vulnerability, yet I felt supported and cared for.  A friend was doing some shopping for me, and driving me to the bank and police station, as I hadn’t driven in years. Our nearest neighbour, a farmer, who just sat and cried into his beer the entire time he was here to pay his respects, was looking out for me.  However, I noticed the gaps in my awareness, missing chunks of my life, when I did not see what I was looking for, or thought I’d done something and hadn’t, or done something in a completely haphazard way.  There was a lot to do.  The batteries weren’t charging properly again, the internet was mostly off and I’d had to learn how to run the generator and use the chainsaw.  It bothered me that my journal notes and my memory told different stories.

Had I gone back to sleep?  One day, just two months shy of Dean’s departure, I went to get the eggs and the gate to the chicken pen wouldn’t close.  I bent down to clear soil out from around the gate and Bodhi jumped right over me and grabbed one of the hens.  In the turmoil, I twisted my left knee and injured my right hand. By then the hen was outside the pen and it took me over an hour to persuade her to let me pick her up and put her back over the fence, she was the most skittish, of course. She made it, only losing a few feathers.  The weird thing about this was that exactly the same thing had happened to Dean about two months before he died, just with a different hen.

This was the pivot point.  I had €200 to my name and couldn’t walk or hold a spoon.  What was going on with this repeating pattern?  Whatever had moved through Dean was now unravelling through me – clearly, there were other forces involved. So I did the only thing that made sense to me, which was to sit in the woods and do nothing at all and allow myself to be reassembled.

My mind was a complete blank, as my body began to move.  First twitching, then rippling, sinuous and rolling, fascia clicking.  After a couple of hours or days, a scene appeared in my inner vision.  A younger version of Dean and I were sitting in a clearing in front of a big, smooth rock, with Izzy and Freya laying calmly on the grass beside us. Then I became aware of myself as the great sheltering tree that stood to the side of the clearing, then I was a bird in the tree, then a butterfly that landed on the rock.  I knew that my soul family saw my expressions in Spirit World, as a way of reading what is happening with my physical self here in the Sensory World.  I real-eyesed that my physical body is just a small part of who I am.

I learned that Thom is the ‘mainframe database’ of all his incarnations, the Soul-Server.  In this sense, Dean was a file downloaded to be worked on in the Sensory World; his experience is still accessible via the Soul-Server, but he is no longer being worked on.  Many of Dean’s qualities carry over into Spirit World and he is still ‘looking after the money’, as he always did. I needed to detach from the lower frequencies of loss and grief, so that he can communicate with me and guide me now.  He wanted me to be in ‘the spirit of adventure’, a new beginning.  I saw that our bodies are only ever on loan and that the cycle would be complete when I returned Dean’s elemental vessel to the Earth.

On the 17th October, I carried Dean’s ashes to their resting place around Mother Pine in the woods here, where my parents also lie.My brother and his wife and a small group of close friends, followed me on the walk through the woods.  It had rained heavily the night before and the raindrops glistened in the trees.  People were talking and I wanted them to shut-up.  The walk was just the right length to allow people to come back to themselves.

In the clearing, I greeted Mother Pine and offered her some rice.  I welcomed the Spirits of the cardinal directions, Snake Lady and the Spirits of the Earth, the Celestial Beings who watch over us and the forest dwellers.  I thanked family and friends for being here, to witness the return of Dean’s elemental vessel to the Earth and invited them to remember themselves in fullness and that our bodies are only ever on loan.  People spoke movingly of their memories of Dean and their gratitude for having known him and I read the poem, The Loved Ones, by Wendell Berry.

I struggled with the lid of the urn and my brother stepped forward to help me and I cried a little. I asked Mother Pine to take Dean’s final remains, purified by our Love and the cremation fires, to take them deep into her roots, to allow the microbes and elemental beings to do their work and finally, to draw his essence up from her roots to her crown and release this Great Love to the winds, to move through the world and fall where ever it is needed.  Marcus and I laid bouquets of wildflowers.  The Sun came out and we ended the cycle with a toast, “To Eternal Love and the Spirit of Adventure.”

I stayed with Mother Pine for a few minutes after everyone headed back to the house.  I felt the completion of the cycle, the turning of the wheel and a weight lifted from my heart. I could begin to look forward.

After people left, I had time to reflect and reconnect with my soul-self, to quietly observe where my attention was going.  The wren on the path one morning reminded me that small things can be significant.  I noticed that in Spirit World I wore my hair in a single braid, a plait and I had started wearing my hair like that in the Sensory World just after Dean died, yet the Spirit World me appeared much younger. I was also feeling sensations in my upper back, a prickle-itch, that moved outwards across my shoulder blades.

I remembered a passage I’d read, “In it’s original state, the soul was feathered all over.  So now it is all in a state of ferment and throbbing; in fact the soul of a man who is beginning to grow his feathers has the same sensations of pricking and irritation as children feel in their gums when they are just beginning to cut their teeth”. Plato, Phaedras

I certainly feel as though I am just beginning to cut my teeth in this new state of awareness.  Dean often communicates with me through birds.

The plait reminds me of the movie Avatar, the last film Dean and I ever watched together, way back when it first came out.  It feels like an extension of my assemblage point and the prickle-itch tells me when it is active, so I can tune in to see what is coming through. It brushes through Spider Grandmother’s Web like the arm of a fairground dodgem car, that sticks up from the back and connects the car to the electrified power grid above, where sparks fly. I feel it activating my ‘dragon wings’, the beat of which are in sync with the twinflower/hippocampus. It directs my awareness through memory and patterning into one possibility over another.  I observe that what I see in my inner vision, what I speak of, shows up in my external reality within days  The ‘movie real’ prompt is familiar and helpful, allowing me to reframe my awareness of myself within my reality with a new level of detachment and curiosity.

In this way, it sheds new light on my question: what on Earth am I here for?  In the broadest sense, it is to participate in the co-creation of a future in which I can live simply, close to nature, without interference and over-reliance on technology.  From another perspective, I appear as the leading lady in an independent movie that is in a different league to the endless reruns of the mainstream ‘simulation movie’ whose cast can only project a controlled subset of possibilities into their reality. In my movie, all of Nature has speaking roles and a cast of  characters are busy behind the scenes, sometimes appearing in flash-backs/forwards, guiding me through the challenges of daily life in a world that has been pushed way off kilter. 

On the 28th October, Dean’s birthday, Marcus returned from visiting a friend in Portugal loaded with goodies.  Chestnuts from his friends farm, goat’s cheese, smoked chorizos and the most delicious hand-pressed olive oil from a neighbour.  We went out to Mother Pine to celebrate with Dean. It had rained again and the Sun came out just as we arrived.  We drank a bottle of cava between us and talked.  I can’t remember what we talked about, but it didn’t matter; I felt a sense of discovery bubbling up and a new kind of excitement, enchanted.  Was this happiness moving through me?  In that moment, I fell in love all over again.  It didn’t matter to me whether Dean had a body or not.  My leading man is now the director of my movie.

When we got back the lawnmower was delivered.  It had been in the shop for repairs for over two months and they didn’t charge for the repairs.  Then another friend showed up with grapes and pomegranates from her garden, and her dog Apollo, Bodhi’s friend.  She told me that my rubbish dumpster had been delivered at the end of the track – it’s only taken 10 years to get one.  On Dean’s birthday, I was showered with gifts.

In this world of time and space, we experience the pain and joy of endings and beginnings.  I real-eyesed that Dean had to take me through the portal of grief, as it was the only way to reunite me with my Dragon.  As I slow down and look around, I find myself living in a fairy tale.

The Loved Ones,

By Wendell Berry

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

November 17 2025