clocks stopping at time of death, page-8

Wow, I just had a moment. Mrs 9 just walked into the room lamenting that yesterday was the 11th anniversary of her mother's death. I had no idea, in fact I had tried to compose the same post that starts this thread (quite a lengthy post) the night before but was called away. What are the chances of unknowingly retelling the clock story on the anniversary of her death. There is a bitof an irony even within that...the unwitting retelling of a story about time on an anniversary....which in itself is a time marker....

Something similar happened to me 12 years ago. I was doing some songwriting with another musician. I was not as enthusiastic for the project as I could have been. I was doing 5 gigs a week back then and had kids in school who needed to go here there and everywhere. At that time, after doing 5 gigs a week I needed to come home and do music as an unpaid project like I needed a hole in the head. The other fellow was very keen though and was pushing me. He wrote some very nice tunes and asked me to have crack at writing some lyrics. He had one slow haunting tune and my first thought was to make it an emotional lamenting love song but after hours scribbling moon, spoon and June and wasting about 20 pieces of foolscape I had nothing. Then I had a flash of inspiration. I was going to make this an ANZAC song. My grandfather's brother was killed at Gallipolli at age 23. In 1978 someone had put out a book of our family history with the account of his last battle. I knew I had the book and tore the house apart and found it. I read the story of the botched operation. The lads were supposed to cross a Daisy Patch at night to take the Turks by surprise but things got mixed up and they got their at daybreak. They were ordered to run a cross the open paddock regardless straight into Turkish machine gun fire and were mowed down. There were few survivors. The perspective of the song I wrote was of my great uncle writing a letter of calm resignation to his fate noting the irony of the horror of war against a beautiful field of daisies. In the letter he urges his sweetheart not to think of his terrible fate but to just think of this beautiful daisy field......

The lyrics practically poured out of me and the thing was written in 10 minutes flat. Very satisfied (actually quite euphoric) with my effort I went up the road to pick up a trailer that I had put in for repair. As I wrote the cheque I asked "what's the date". It was the 8th of May. "Why is this date sounding so familiar??" I asked myself...then I realized. I rushed home to find that I had been inspired to write and in fact had written this story on the anniversary of this event fro 1915. What are the chances??.....well they are exactly 365.25 to 1.

skeptics will say I subconsciously made an association with the date and the story and on some level was already aware of date...... and I have no problem with that. Moments like this give us a tiny insight into vastness of our own being that may extend well beyond the mere conscious rational mind that modern day scientific types are so obsessed with. Even for believers in a god I think there is a tendency to get caught up too much in the illusions of time and space. There is a tendency to speak of a god external to ourselves and to refer to god who is "up in heaven" and that when we die we will "go to heaven" .....as if heaven was a place that occupies what we call space.....but I would say to he conventional Christian believer wasn't it Jesus that said "The kingdom of heaven is within you". Perhaps a good place to start the whole discussion on whether there is or isn't a god would be to look inwards and and to become more aware of the vastness of our own being beyond that of which we are consciously aware.