Last night, we (my husband, niece and I) went to listen to Martin Prechtel talk and read from his new book, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic. He was talking about another aspect of the huge subject that usually talks about—keeping what is living alive. This morning, it struck me how this attitude extends to the world of the Dead.

We often think about the Dead as beings who don’t belong here and therefore must be moved on, but instead of thinking about them in the negative (about where they don’t belong) it’s more helpful to think about how we are helping revivify them into the life that they’re now meant to live.

When we depossess a being or help a deceased person move on to the Destiny of Human Souls, what we are bringing them out of their limbo and bringing them back into life—back onto the course of their own destiny. Not life on this world, of course, but the life that their natures (as nonphysical beings) are calling for. Just as the living are charged with making life live in this world, they have their own part to play in the after-life—either becoming Compassionate Ancestors who help their descendants live well or in another capacity where their consciousness suits the force of their natures in the larger Cosmos of the Seen or Unseen Worlds.

In a manner of speaking, we are all seeds for one another. The living are the seeds germinating in physical reality, being cooked by our experiences so we can grow into Spiritual Sprouts for the next world. The Ancestors cultivate us in this way—exposing us to whatever conditions—whatever extremes of heat and cold, abundance or lack—we need in order to finally crack open and activate the most precious part of ourselves. The deceased are the seeds of Ancestors-to-be, and the Ancestors are the seeds of future generations as they inject our lineages with the accumulated experience and wisdom (the true blessings of the Ancestors) which sprout into life-giving attitudes and understandings that feed our wild blossoming hearts (often unvalued in the modern world).

Destiny is not a divine edict imposed upon us by a fierce and fearsome outside deity, but the dictates of our own true natures…when we unleash our True Selves (the Truth of Ourselves) into its wriggling, warm, untutored movement in this or another world. It’s Life feeling itself in the myriad forms.

When we release the Dead into THEIR lives, not only are we cultivating the field of life in this world (becoming being true gardeners and caretakers of this world), but we finally release the nutrients that our world has to offer to the next…for the Dead are the rich humus of experience and humanity that enriches the world of Spirit, which in turn feeds us back. The better we live, the more alive we come to this world, the richer the gift we become when we return to the Other World and therefore the more blessings we bestow on our descendants.