09/01/2026
Fiveyears ago, I watched my mother ascend. In the days that followed I actively sought out to connect with her spirit and it was and still is the deepest and most transformative medative experience of my life.
I remember it so vividly that i can retell the story whilst feeling it within the surface of my skin.
The day she died, I was knee deep in sleepy rest, the kind I hadn't felt in years - so much so I fell asleep thumbing the pages of a book about pilgrimages.
I don't know if spirit was prepping my body to be delivered such news, but I know now had I been not me at that moment I would have disintegrated beyond reconnection.
The days that followed were the initiation gateway, and I landed, dropped within these darkened paths, into spaces, I have never trod. So unlike my father's passing I was told to find her.
I sat on my bed that I had been incubating and drifted into a land of the sea.
In the sea, I saw my mother, a water Goddess, enchanted. As I came towards her, we were pulled under by the tentacles of the Octopus. Down, down, down we went till it was ebony from corner to eternity. Down, down down, we went in the black till all sound was muted.
Then a sack. A fertile sack. Translucent in colour. Feet pushing against the membrane. As limbs out grew the the confines of this stretchy skin all dissolved.
And up, up, up, she rose and I facing her. Up, up, up until she burst through the choppy waves into the night.
The stars, the bright stars, millions in the vastness of space. The above hits the below. And my mum rose up with in it. And I saw her fly till she became the goddess of the sky and surrendered into dust and stardom. A star, an eternal star, made from the deep, the sea, the dark, and now shining.
Every day without her and her presence is perfectly felt in this memory, this vision, and I am blessed to know she is at peace.
Image 1: Mother at Bayham Abbey on a warm day.
Image 2: Mother in her youth.
Image 3: Quote from somewhere in the internet.
Image 4: Spirit of the Sea, by Wataru Takahashi, 1938