CONTINUED AS THE GUEST BLOGGER AT
aspergineering.comI was incapable of breathing now. One moment conscious, the next a vast black void. I found myself floating in the vacuum of space, a deep, dark space with just two pinpoints of light. I kept thinking: I'm dead! I'm really dead!
It was then that the strangest thing happened. I was floating above the pool, looking down at the cover, knowing that my body was beneath it in the water. I felt remarkably okay with the fact. I felt detached, calm, and wondered what would happen next.
I looked to my right and saw my fellow lifeguard. He was calling me, looking worried, eyes darting this way and that. He knew something was wrong, that I was missing, but he hadn't figured out that I was literally less than ten feet away from him. He paced away from my body, shaking his head.
A voice called from behind me. I turned, to see my grandfather, who had died many years earlier. He was standing beside a vast, vast ocean, mists swirling and eddying above the gently lapping surface. Beyond the mist, out there beyond the ocean, an all-encompassing force/energy called not in words but in massive waves of unconditional love and kindness.
"Am I dead?" I asked my grandfather.
"Not quite," he said. He beckoned me.
I walked over to him and watched in amazement as he showed me a "living" letter, a kind of birthday card with a three-dimensional view of the cottage he now lived in. Inside the card/letter he showed me his garden. It was beautiful, a miniature three-dimensional reality of shimmering, glittering light and shade.
"You live beyond the ocean, don't you?" I said, nodding toward the calling force.
"Yes. But if you come with me now, you cannot return."
"But I feel it calling me. It's wonderful, I wish I could just float away, so peaceful and calm and-"
I was standing in the eye of a hurricane, sliding down a mountain in the pouring rain, jumping through the window of a crashing plane, rising higher and higher into the sky, into space, into the vastness of... I had no idea what. All in the space of milliseconds. Time had no meaning. Space was everything. I knew instinctively that I'd ceased to exist in time, but was now in ONE dimension of space. I saw time from three points of view - past, present and future. I heard millions of tunes from the past, present, and future. In the darkness of this limitless space I heard so many beautiful songs, seeing only two pinpoints of light, far away.
The songs didn't enter my head, but were part of me, part of who I was/am/will be. But they were also part of the space, too. Part of everything, of everyone. The songs encompassed all genres and styles, as if I were the channel and receiver of billions of soundwave broadcasts, all simultaneously starting and finishing at once.
So much information! So much sound! A gigantic wall of sound! Not static, but melody and soulful music, music from passionate hearts and mind, music that could uplift and create tidalwaves of emotion.
Tears of joy, tears of sadness, of loss, of birth, of life, of death. So many possibilities. I heard choirs of angels, big bands, acoustic bands, solo singers wailing in obscurity, mega-rock bands bound for world wide fame, small pub bands rocking, pumping, pulsating techno beats, soulful singers of blues, jazz-scat-reggaeltro-synths-pop- - so many sounds in such a small time, like a sigh of deep contentment.
The twin lights expanded in the dark space of sound. I had no choice. I was drawn to the lights. They engulfed me. I found myself standing beside the pool. I looked behind me at the ocean. My granddad said one word, then vanished into the mists of the ocean.
I saw the lifeguard pulling the cover off the pool, diving into haul me out. Before I blacked out, my grandfather's single word echoed in my head. It has echoed ever since. Everyday I hear his one word and I rejoice.
"Sing."
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