"Safely Home"

There is a verse entitled "Safely Home" that attempts to console the grieving person. It embodies that portion of sadness that we struggle with and truly gives reward to that despair. I received a bit of "compensation" today in that I was able to bring Dancer's ashes "safely home" tonight. While it was an overwhelming and immense slap in the face that the death process is still very much real, it gave me something tangible and I could at least "hold" him again. I've been reading a fascinating book, "The Divine Life of Animals" by Ptolemy Tompkins in which he outlays his attempt to discover whether the souls of animals live on. It's been somewhat therapeutic for me, sort of a validation of an already confirmed belief that I have. By accepting Dancer's ashes, it was a confirmation that while his "physical" body is not here, his presence or spirit is still with me. This is something that Tompkins speaks of in his book when he researches that primitive humanity believed that beyond the mere physical form of blood, shape, muscle, bone, their lived another form of spirit,and soul. And when the physical form was no longer navigating the material world, it returns to it's spiritual world and it's unity. "In the primitive world, the true or essential animal is a spiritual entity, ans all its external bodily trappings are just that: external and nothing more" While all of this sounds plausible, the cold hard fact is that Dancer's not with me in his physical form but at least I now have something I can "hold" onto.