REUNION
I wonder what the reunion will be like.

I recently learned of the death of one of my childhood friends. I say childhood, though our direct connection lasted into our early twenties. We attended the same church, high school, and for one year, college. We were what I considered quite close. And then life moved on and we lost connection.

And now she is gone.

I felt waves of deep sadness that she had passed. I experienced a rush of memories of what we had shared. I could hear her unique laugh as if she were right here with me. It led me to move more closely into the sadness. I pondered the fact that in actuality my day to day experience will be no different now that she has left the planet. I had not seen her in forty years and would likely not see her again. Yet in the sadness I found that having that possibility removed created a fathomless void.

The slightest chance of a reunion had been taken away.

I have this unprovable theory that when we pass from this worldly experience, we have a reunion with everyone we have encountered during our lifetime.

Stay with me.

I do not mean only those who have preceded us in death. I mean everyone we have encountered. I sense some sort of a vast cosmic event hall where each and every person we have ever engaged with is there for a reunion. This reunion is a glorious celebration, regardless of what the qualitative engagement was when we were together on earth. The purpose of this reuniting is to thank each individual for what they contributed to our life experience. Some of these interactions were pleasurable. Some of them seemed downright miserable. Some were of decades long duration. Some of them were momentary. All of them were in some way significant. All of them added to our experience and our evolution. It is at that level that the reunion is of a celebratory nature.

Now, I am aware that for many of you this will be farfetched. And again, I certainly cannot prove it to be so. It does feel right to me, for me. I see it as a resolution for unfinished relationship business. It balances the scales somehow, the karma. We will be able to see the bigger picture that we could not perceive while in this time-space reality. We will discern the lessons we were to learn from each engagement of human interaction. We will feel a deep gratitude for each encounter, a thankfulness we well may have missed here on earth.

As I consciously sat with the sadness at the loss of my long-ago friend, I felt a preview of what our reunion will be like. I heard her laughter, and I felt her tears. I could sense a rightness to the end of our earthly enrollment, long before she left her body. At a level I could feel how without time the reunion was happening then and is always happening now. With each memory of her we were reuniting. It was slightly skewed by the fact that she still appeared at the age we last met, interacting with me at my current stage of aging. This brought a real giggle into the images and into the sadness.

These contemplations led me to what the reunion will be like on the other side of this pandemic. I have not physically seen most of the people in my direct sphere for months. Many of them are now viewable in two dimensions on a screen. They are a voice coming through an electronic device. They are photos on social media.

And some are no longer here at all.

I have changed significantly as a result of Covid-19. Things have been reordered within me. Some radically so. I have a vastly different take on relationships. A quite different feel for what is most important to me. I suspect in some ways the post-distancing reunion will be awkward. There will be those that I will not choose to reunite with, at least in this lifetime. I already have a sense of appreciation for that decision. I am already grateful for what people have brought into my life. For what they have taught me. There is no charge behind the ending of an engagement. There is only thankfulness. I well may not articulate that to them in this realm. I will await the reunion when it is my turn to step through the veil into the great cosmic mystery. Then we will celebrate the fullness of our beginning and of our ending.

That will not be the case for the vast majority of those peopling my life. There will be a reunion physically. There will be a time when we can hug fearlessly. When we can speak, sing, breathe unmasked and unrestrained. I believe it will be an astounding experience! We will perhaps never take for granted our direct connections again.We will hug as never before. We will relish touch, laughter, tears, every level of connection.

I pray it will be soon.

I wonder what the reunion will be like.

My heart is a great cosmic event hall. I am seeing you now. I am feeling, hearing you now. I am deeply appreciating you now. I do not care to wait. The reunion is now.

The reunion is now.