In honor of my father, this Día de Muertos I wanted to share his writing. He was a poet and a mystic, and before he passed away he was walking the path of reconnecting with his ancestral wisdom. He has passed that baton on to me. I wanted to share his incredible words with you here. Please share your thoughts in the comments. 🕯️🌼 LIFE I am very thankful to the power who placed us all right at this particular place, at this particular time. Make no mistake, we aren't here by accident. We are here to experience something enlightening. We have been placed together on this earthly plane to love one another, to help out one another. We live our lives so haphazardly; most of the time we are so thankless. We take everything for granted. We think the visible is all there is and don't give the invisible a second thought. But Socrates said that "the visible is only the shadow of the invisible." Think about life from the macrocosm to the microcosm. Look at the universe: astronomers have mapped 100 billion galaxies in the seeable universe. Part of the universe can't be seen because it's so far. Each of these galaxies contains billions of stars. If you were to go to the beach and pick up a handful of sand, you'd have about ten thousand grains of sand in your hand. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches of the world. It is mind boggling! Not only that, but the suns, planets and anything else that you can see is called light matter, and that makes up only 1% of the universe. 99% of the universe is made up of stuff scientists can't even name because they don't know what it is — but they know it exists. They call it "dark matter." You, me, the planets, the stars; we are all made of the most uncommon "stuff" in the universe. And even in this vastness, planet Earth is the only one to exhibit intelligent life — but not always intelligence. Scientists still argue as to what makes us humans human. Some said that intelligence is what made us human, so then the question became, what exactly determines intelligence? Language, said some. But we know that humans don't have a monopoly on language. Whales communicate through high-pitched sounds that resemble beautiful music. Chimpanzees have a sort of gruntal language, and so do gorillas. Both gorillas and chimpanzees have been taught and learned American Sign Language. So then they said that the ability to use tools is what made humans unique, but we know that chimpanzees use tools as well, and they learn their use by observing the older members of their societies. They use blades of grass to stick into termite mounds in order to coax the termites into coming out so they can eat them. They use rocks to crack bones and sticks to fight. The otter uses rocks, which it places on its stomach to crack open clams. Other species also build places in which to live.