Ghosts; bikes

[rebeccmeister]

A post by a friend on the tweet-machine reminded me that this mornin I woke up thinking about ghosts.

Can one person or animal turn into multiple ghosts, at multiple locations? Or are we all limited to just one ghost option? If so, I am not sure where I would want to haunt at this stage. Are we confined to haunting a place associated with where we die?

I could see Emma haunting this house, although I don’t think she would be a happy ghost cat here. I don’t think New York really agreed with her. I don’t think I’d want to haunt this house, either.

-

The rowing club leadership typically holds a set of two long planning meetings in the winter, one in December, one in January. I was kind of dreading trying to lead this morning’s meeting from the iPad. We have to access a bunch of files and I haven’t figured that out yet on this thing.

Then I realized I should just bike into work for the meeting. I had to go into work today anyway, to work on changing out the large saltwater flow through tank.

The thermometer on the back porch read -4 degrees F when I left this morning.

My thighs were cold but the rest of me was fine. I was wearing wool long underwear under some windbreaker pants. I am concluding that wool long underwear isn’t a great under layer for bike commuting, unfortunately. Not durable enough, and clearly not *quite* warm enough. I need to keep an eye out for more capris-style fuzzy tights. The long wool fuzzy tights from Smartwool are great, except they still suffer from the fundamental issue of being long tights. I was realizing what I hate about long tights is that they inevitably pull downward for me, so I always find myself constantly trying to hitch them up. Capris-length tights don’t have that issue, and I can always keep my ankles warm with knee-high wool socks and leg warmers (which I definitely wore today!).

By the time I got home from everything, including a quick grocery trip, the thermometer read +4 degrees F. Not so bad.

Good training for Winter Bike to Work Day in February.

Comments

[altamira16]

It appears that you have dropped well below the "nope" temperature.

[rebeccmeister]

This is by far the coldest I have seen here so far, and it appears most New Yorkers agree on this being “nope,” lol!

[mallorys_camera]

Zero degrees here, 90 miles closer to the equator. 😀

I think the whole deal with ghosts is that they are not happy. Hence, they haunt. 😀

And yes, the same ghost can haunt multiple locations. In multiple embodiments. But it can be the same ghost. 😀

[rebeccmeister]

Huh! Good to know ghosts aren’t limited in their haunting options!

Right now you have every excuse to absolutely, 100% stay indoors until this current nonsense blows over!!!!

[rainswolf]

I've never thought of the idea one ghost could be in multiple places at once. Interesting...

[bluepapercup]

So off into the esoteric weeds we go because I LOVE this stuff.

I've learned a number of different idea-frameworks for how ghosts work, and here's the one that makes the most sense to me. There are three basic kinds of presences that we widely experience as "ghosts".
1) Spirits - these are dead people or animals that have successfully crossed over the realm of the dead and come back on purpose to visit. They can appear anywhere at any time. They're usually happy.
2) Ghosts - these are dead people or animals that have not successfully crossed over and are stuck here in the realm of the living. They can also appear anywhere at any time. Usually they're unhappy.
3) Residual Hauntings - these are like an energetic echo of someone or something that's specific and tied to a place. An example would be seeing the figure of a woman walking up and down a hallway at night. She's always in that hallway, always doing the same thing.

The accompanying idea is that the more peaceful and intentional a death is for a person or animal, the more likely they are to successfully cross over. People and animals that die suddenly or horribly are more likely to get stuck here. Sometimes they don't even know they're dead. There are a variety of methods to help these stuck ghosts cross over and become spirits.

There are other things we experience that are not human or animal but those are something different and bigger and have their own framework. These are the sorts of presences you might need a binding or exorcism for.

If I had to hazard a guess I'd say Emma is a peaceful spirit, which means she can come and visit you any time she likes both in your waking hours and in your dreams. I expect you'll see her again.

If you want to get really weird, I am trained in a type of communication with the dead, and I can check on her, if you wish. <3

[twoeleven]

Oh, good, another ghost of overthinking present has already haunted our host. :)

[rebeccmeister]

Hee hee!

I see this as a creative, imaginative arena.

[twoeleven]

I suppose.

I think the choices are either the semi-empirical approach used by Spengler and Stantz in the early '80s, or pure model-building to develop falsifiable hypotheses. The former is more fun, despite the amount of fieldwork required, but the latter is probably more fruitful in the long run.

[rebeccmeister]

Thank you for all of this. For some reason, it makes me really happy.

<3

And also, thank you for offering to check on Emma for me. At this very moment my heart says I do not need to check, but I might ask sometime down the road!