Legacy Matters

A Cloud of Souls

Have you ever taken a photograph and had a mysterious orb appear when you printed it?

Catherine and Jerome King, artists in Phoenix, have had that unnerving experience many times. Catherine has begun creating art from her "Ghost Photo Reality Gallery". If you visit her blog The Tears of Things you can see the photographs she took that show orbs and read how it all started. As she began taking more orb photos, she had a metaphysical crisis that she writes about. Were they ghosts? Spirits? They appeared to have personality -like behavior being attracted to creative works - art on the walls, projects on the table, her computer keyboard.

Suddenly I was confronting a profound terror inside myself. I felt an alienating fear of my most familiar and intimate surroundings. I scared myself when I was alone at home, picturing spectral spheres all around me. I didn’t want to walk through a spot where an orb had been, even though I’d captured them pretty much all over our apartment. I couldn’t function if I was afraid to move about my own home. I had to come to terms with this new reality.

Truly, the unknown is all around us, all the time. This is reality. For days I struggled with my new realization. I looked back at myself, before I knew about the orbs, almost as if I had been another person. Pragmatically and reverently, I came to accept that we the living are surrounded by those who are not. Again I picked up the camera, empowered by having overcome my fears and accepting the mystery that has always been. Now I was ready to document this cosmic phenomenon. ... It appears we are living elbow to elbow with spherical spirits. By extension then, could it be that THE ENTIRE PLANET IS COVERED WITH A CLOUD OF SOULS?

Wouldn't it be delicious if those old ghost and haunting stories had some basis in reality? There are those who say these orbs are nothing but pictures of dust motes. But what if they ARE something more? After all, we are surrounded by the cloud of the Internet and television shows. Until we link on a site or choose a channel, we don't manifest in physical reality that which exists in some form of possibility and potential all around us. Where does "Law and Order" exist before we switch it on and hook to a certain beam of electrons?

If there are, as the quantum physicists tell us, parallel universes all around us, some of which may not be bounded by time as we understand it, could there be a cloud of souls out there? Or over here? I am one who does not discount stories of the spirit world that exist in every culture I can think of, as "superstitious." I believe many of them are imperfect descriptions of a reality we no longer know how to describe without sounding like a nut of some sort. For many, even the thought of such a reality is terrifying. Others find it comforting.

Ronnie Bennett describes Yahrzeit, a Jewish tradition of burning a candle for 24 hours on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. Her post is Remembrance of Those Past

Through some quirk of mind for which I have no explanation, thinking about someone dead is, for me, like being with them. They aren’t really gone; we just haven’t visited for awhile. I recall times spent together and the feelings of those moments return as strongly as when the party, dinner or conversation took place. Sometimes I shuffle through old letters and postcards they sent and in their written words, their voices come back to me as true as when they lived. We are together again.....

The yahrzeit is supposed to be a solemn anniversary, but I repeat this ritual for each loved one each year with cheerfulness and joy in our renewed closeness that day.

It is for us, the living, to bear witness for the dead, that they lived as we still do and walked among us until called to the unknowable, as we too shall one day be called.

Posted by Jill Fallon at December 16, 2004 6:12 PM | Permalink