Here is my recommended song for this post.

So, Recently in PLP we have been reading through a play called the Crucible. Now I’m personally not a big fan of plays but it’s school so I have to get through it. The play also has a relation to the Cold War and what we are studying by way of that, somehow. (We don’t know the connection yet) One thing we are doing alone with reading the play is three different blog posts answering one question off of a list of questions, with some relation to what is being discussed in the play. So, for this first post I will be talking about “Describe your concept of heaven or describe your concept of hell.”

Now this is a topic that everyone would answer differently, based on their beliefs and values. For me personally I am non-religious. So I don’t nessescarily have a perfect vision of what heaven or hell would be and no one has ever told me that it is a certain way. Whenever I have asked my parents or other people I always got varied responses.

So of course being the young adult I am I have had the oppritunity to formulate my own opinions on the matter.

A couple years ago I volunteering at a summer camp and one of my friends and I were lying in a field under the stars and she asked me a question. “What do you think happens when you die?” A couple years ago I have the same answer I have today. I really don’t know and I won’t know until I cross that bridge. I speculated with my friend that maybe there is just a blackness and all you see is darkness for eternity. You may be reborn but have no memory of your past life. You may become embedded in nature in some spiritual way. Or even go and just be present at your favourite place or a beautiful view somewhere in the world. All I do know is that no one knows what really happens when you die. Some people feel, based on religion or spirituality, that there is a heaven and/or hell. I personally don’t.

Nonetheless based on the media of our time I do have a vision of what both could look like.

I’m sure when you hear the word heaven you think a place wear god or some entity greets you and it’s a place in the sky with marble columns and everything is a bright shade and it’s like the perfect place, or something alone those lines.

Now when you think of hell what comes to mind? A dark fiery abyss? A giant dark castle with a moat of fire with bodies burning for eternity? Now because I was such an avid reader when I was little I got enthralled with the Percy Jackson series.

So, I was emersed into the realm of Greek mythology. This helped me structure that vision of the underworld or hell. In my mind it is just as I listed above. A place of fire and dark obsidian with pain, suffering and torture to punish the condemned for their misdeeds in their life. Now although that seems pretty harsh if someone had done misdeeds. Certainly there are people out there who I believe would deserve those punishments but also I think of hell as a very drastically dark and scary place where no one deserves to end up, if that’s where we go.

Now because it’s PLP we also had to create a piece of media or a creative way to elevate our post and ideas to answer these questions. So I decided to create a collage of photos I have taken and edited of places I have been, all of it being nature shots, as kind of what one of my ideas of the afterlife is. Going to and/or experiencing a favourite place or being an aspect of the nature surrounding that place, forever.

Over the years I have been slightly interested in photography and going to various places as allowed me to do fuel that interest because I try to take photos of views and interesting pieces of nature I see. That has also fueled my belief in that one possibility after death is that we become apart of nature.

Now I’m sure people would disagree with me and say there is a heaven and a hell. The good people of this world go to heaven and are able to enjoy what they love forever, and hell is a place where all the “bad” people go for their misdeeds to be punished. Now like I stated earlier I don’t know what happens when you pass on. I do know that you leave the world you lived in behind.

When I was contemplating my beliefs on this subject, in the process of brainstorming for this post, I felt waves of fear in not knowing what would happen. Will I be in a deep sleep forever? When will that forever end? Will I return to this beautiful world? Where will I go? What will I do? It makes me truly want to spend each and every day cherishing where I am, who I know and what I’m able to do, because I don’t know where I will go after this.