January 27th Marks Five Years

Consciousness to Consciousness

January 27th marks five years since Sam died.

Five years on the calendar—and yet in the deeper register, the one I’ve come to trust more than dates, he is still thirty-two. So young. That age has become a kind of living image in me: undimmed, unweathered, held in the clear light of remembrance.

But what I want to say today is not simply that I remember him.

It’s that our connection does not begin in biology, and it does not end in death.

Our connection begins and remains in consciousness.

That is the root. That is the cord. That is the place where “father and son” is not merely a role, but a meeting—an agreement of love that takes on form for a while, and then returns to its source.

In the visible world, Sam does not age. He does not get to stumble forward into adulthood the way the rest of us do—making mistakes, making better decisions, learning by bruising. He does not get to have children of his own, to discover that strange, sacred ache of loving someone more than you love yourself. He does not get to witness humanity’s full spectrum—the brutal and the beautiful, the holy and the ugly—and learn how to keep his heart intact.

And yet, in the world of consciousness, none of that is erased.

Because consciousness is not a photograph. It is not a frozen moment. It is living. It is moving. It is present.

This is what grief forced me to learn: that the veil between worlds is not a wall—it’s a thickness. And thickness can change. Thickness can be thinned.

Sam’s death did not give me a new philosophy. It initiated a practice.

A practice of attention.

A practice of listening.

A practice of refining my inner life until it becomes subtle enough to sense what I could not sense before—until the noise falls away, and the signal returns.

I’m not speaking about fantasy. I’m speaking about the felt reality of consciousness: the way love can be perceived as presence. The way a bond can remain intact without physical reinforcement. The way you can suddenly know—quietly, unmistakably—that the one you love is not “gone,” but simply no longer localized in the same place.

We remain bound this way.

Consciousness to consciousness.

And the more I work to thin the veil—through remembrance, through writing, through stillness, through the disciplined refusal to let sorrow harden into cynicism—the more I experience that our connection is not a relic. It is not a memory I hold in my hands like an old photograph.

It is a living relationship, held in a different medium.

Sometimes I feel him in the simplest ways: a sudden brightness that has no external cause. A tenderness that arrives like weather. A moment when the world goes quiet, and something in me recognizes something beyond me. Not a voice in the ordinary sense—something deeper than language. A recognition.

And here is the strange gift: as I continue this practice, the pain changes shape. It becomes less like an open wound and more like a sacred doorway. The loss remains real—but it is no longer the only reality. Because consciousness is larger than absence.

I believe Sam and I are soul mates.

This time, we met as father and son. Next time will depend on what we need when we are born again—the lessons we’ve chosen, the healing we’ve agreed to, the loves we are meant to carry forward. The roles will shift. The names will shift. The story will shift.

But the root will not.

Because the root is consciousness.

And I believe there will be a moment—whether in the spaces between lives, or in that realm where we are fully awake again—when we will rejoice.

Not as a consolation. Not as a wish. As an inevitability of a bond that was never merely physical.

When we reunite in the afterlife—awake again in that fuller, truer consciousness—we won’t have to figure each other out. Recognition will be immediate, effortless, like sight returning. We’ll laugh at how dense and heavy the earthly world felt, how easily love got muffled by fear, exhaustion, and time. We’ll marvel that love kept its vow even when we couldn’t always feel it. And we’ll rejoice—not because suffering was “worth it,” but because love outlasts the conditions that try to contain it, and proves itself real on the far side of the veil.

And when our consciousness seeks human form once more, we will love each other once more.

We will find our way back into proximity—into eyes and hands and time and voice. We will step into new roles, but the same essence will be there, humming beneath the surface like a familiar song.

So today, I remember Sam at thirty-two.

I celebrate him—not only as the son I lost in the visible world, but as the consciousness I remain bound to in the invisible one.

Sam is not a chapter that ended.

He is a presence that continues.

And I am still learning—day by day, breath by breath—how to live in a way that makes room for what is true:

That consciousness is the root of love.

That the veil can be thinned.

That reunion is real.

And that the bond between us is not finished.

It is simply waiting—awake, faithful, and shining—on the other side of the thickness.

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