After a few weeks of not blogging, I’m feeling the urge to write again.

I’ve been working on a special project for the last few weeks. I emailed the following to the distribution list for my monthly ezine (if you are not on the list but would like to be, go to my home page and sign up in the left menu bar):

Hi,

It’s not often that I come across work that is not only satisfying but also sacred. I’ve started a new project which is just that.

I have a friend and colleague who is in the last stages of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She was diagnosed almost two and a half years ago. If you are not familiar with the disease, it attacks the motor neurons, so that the voluntary muscles of the body slowly stop working, while leaving the mind intact. There is no known cure.

When I visited my friend at her home last month, I was struck by her words of what she focuses on these days: ‘Consciously Being’ and ‘Consciously Leaving.’ One thing led to another and we decided to collaborate on a series of taped interviews around these topics.

What does it mean to consciously die? And how does this impact what we know about consciously being? What does it mean for those of us living ‘normal’ lives?

Our intention is to explore and capture this place of consciously being and consciously leaving for others to learn from. My friend is an incredibly generous woman who sees this as an opportunity for others to share in her experience as a way of understanding more about living and dying.

Here is where you come in.

What questions do you have for a dying woman that will help you live a better life? What are you curious about when you hear the topics of Consciously Being and Consciously Leaving?

Please send me your questions so that I can weave them into the interviews. We have already taped two interviews. Our third interview will take place on Friday, May 12. We are scheduling conversations week to week, with no expectation of how long she will be able to continue the physical activity of talking at length.

My friend has not yet decided the specifics of what to do with these taped conversations. And she is clear that she wants them shared with a broad audience.

Warmly,

Carol

If you’d like to provide some questions, feel free to post a comment. Later this week, I’ll blog about the responses to my email as well as plans for sharing more information about this project.  This has been a perfect example of great work (read: moves me in deep and mysterious ways) and I continue to be amazed at how this project is unfolding.