dean says

(Andree here: Got this from Dean a couple days back, and it goes to show if enough people are sensing the same thing, it's hardly our imagination. Here you go.)

The other day I was driving around, thinking to myself. I had been listening to the Coast to Coast am radio show, a popular 4-hour nightly talk show about things other-than-else. Subject matter includes all paranormal news on Bigfoot, UFOs, psi activity, gov't coverups, the pyramids, etc. Erik and I used to love listening to this show while working on projects late into the night.

The guest they had on this night had just written a book about near-death experiences, and as a Ph.D, he was blown away by the descriptions of 'the other side' that folks brought back with them. Not very many had 'traditional' recollections of pearly gates, streets of gold, that kinda stuff... he said in over 10,000 cases he investigated, most had visions of other worldly landscapes, non-traditional architechture and cities, indescribable colors, incredible outdoor views of huge mountain ranges, canyons, and even different colored oceans and one guy was in an area with 2 suns.

This got me thinking again about what several of us have seen/heard/felt from E since last year, he's definitely making him presence known to us still stuck here... but I was trying to imagine the places he's able to explore and all the sights and sounds. Traveling with no limitations or time constraints. A few days later I read Andree's latest post on the Erik blog, with similar ideas and the journey thing... other folks thinking the same things too, out there?

Anyway, I felt the need to write this long-winded set-up today after looking to my left and seeing the Erik Rising printed tribute, hanging on my wall. Inside are Erik's rules of awesomeness:

Value of Time
Success of Perserverance
Dignity of Simplicity
Worth of Character
Power of Kindness
Influence of Example
Obligation of Duty
Wisdom of Economy
Virtue of Practice
Improvement of Talent

As I was thinking of all the cool in the universe stuff Erik is viewing, I saw that if you take the first letters of all these phrases, you can spell:

Wow! V.I.P. Vids!

I'm sure he's getting the grand tour!

Prom 1984

E and Julie von Holt!

Hans had an interesting observation to make, and I think you would enjoy:

Look at Erik's hands and feet....His hands are beat up looking from working
on stuff and picking at them. Right foot askew. Either nervously supinated
or that typical hard on the the outsides of his shoes Erik stance.

new year's day 2010

Hi everyone. Andree here.

It's become increasingly difficult for me to do this blog, you've no doubt figured. But today is - I use present tense on purpose - Erik's birthday.

E isn't here where we can handily see him, but he IS present. When we think of him and laugh, or see something excellently cool and weird he would love, or any time at all we think "Oh man, Erik would dig that" -- Erik is digging that.

The other day, weirdest thing, I was by myself on the internet again looking up some arcane thingy or other as I do, and somebody whapped me on the left shoulder in a most familiar way: I am talking to you, heyheyhey, over here.

Just think, where he is now, wherever that is, he understands all kinds of things he always wanted to wrap his head around. As human beings, we have our limitations as we scoot about on the terrestrial plane. To lose those, we lose our limited understanding and the limited machine that housed it. And of course we don't know from different down here, so we are scared; we don't have the tools to read loss as freedom. Not yet. Imagine how much E might like to tell us if we were able to process the information.

I'm not saying "don't be sad." Damn, I'd be the last person to tell you that -- I'm saying, it's like saying bon voyage and being sad you couldn't go on the trip, and then understanding you could so.

If you hadn't known sorrow, you couldn't recognize joy. Expect joy in 2010, my friends. Think of it as practice for jamming with E again.