Ergo, time to carpe the living diem outta EVERYTHING.

Putting my money where my mouth - and my fingertips - are, I do dare declare (partly to hold myself accountable), that I am at long last taking the advice of countless estimable allies who have told me to do the dang thing, to finally...wait for it...

WRITE THE BOOK.

I mean truly, it remains a testament to my...je ne sais quoi?...obstinance, slow-on-the-uptake-ness, and overall RECKLESS REBELLION that I have not yet done this.

Señor Victor Reyes, my beloved 2nd grade teacher (all my Isla Vista Seahawks, where you at?!): You made me promise to dedicate the first one to you. So here you are, amor. We doing it.

The title? While You Were Dying: Lessons from the Edge of Life ©.

Embedded within, and wedded to, a larger scholarly, artistic, and philanthropic initiative I am currently co-conspiring: Rite of Return®.

(Haters gonna hate, but please don’t be like certain unmentionable others who have already tried to pinch the latter. That encircled R ain’t for show. Merci).

So, is it an actual book? Maybe. Or is it just another Substack to (maybe, maybe not) read? For now, yes.

So, you ask, what’s up with the title? And who’s the “you” in “While you were dying...”?

Truth be told, I am dying.

In fact, if you are reading this, so are you. And so is the last person you spoke to. And, lest we forget, so is the planet.

This also means, by natural decree, that we are also all LIVING. L-I-V-I-N. (At the expense of ageing myself, doobie points - ahem - if you can name that film).

But (since my Mercury is indeed in Scorpio), back to the dying part!

Personally, I am not one to habitually disclose much of anything by way of autobiography, especially on the social meds these days. And although I do not expect to modify that tendency too terribly much, I am intending in this current cycle to come out of hiding on a thing or two.

Please don’t see this as a lamentation, any of it. Not my writing project, not this post.

Rather, know that it is, above all, a celebration.

THERE IS LOTS TO CELEBRATE THESE DAYS. Why?

Charmingly, I like answering questions with more questions.

I also like cliffhangers (love you, @Kieran Sikdar).

Did you know that someone can live with chronic pain practically all their life and still be high on it?

Did you know that someone can defy all the medical advice of all the experts of all the chronic catastrophes, mysterious genetic anomalies, and terminal maladies, and still live to tell the tale?

Did you also know that grief due to one’s impending extinction on the one hand, and jubilation about one’s current existence on the other, happen AT THE SAME TIME AND INDEED, ACTUALLY CONSTITUTE ONE ANOTHER?

Admittedly, I’ve often been accused of speaking in the impersonal to deflect attention from myself.

Yeah. Busted.

So I’ll say it: I am of course talking about yours truly.

But hey, there are SO many more exciting things to discuss than, say, cancer, CSF leaks, and T-cells. (Not to discredit these or any of you for whom these are headlines in your journal of late. I do see you, love you, and grock my own version of it).

Please don’t see me as a victim. That’s not why I am writing any of this.

Rather, I am writing this because I AM ALIVE. And wow, do I have the stories to prove it!

These battle wounds have been well earned, if I do say so myself. And the military history I have to revise and relay just might entertain you, if not also help some of you carpe your own diem.

Or, at a minimum, to make it through another one.

And for those privy to my situation, please don’t pity me. Instead, please know that my pain is a gift. It remains my first love and master teacher, actually, and as those who know me well shall attest: I am indeed a glutton for punishment.

Besides, in case it remains unclear to any of you, I NEED ALL THE TEACHING I CAN GET.

May it all become an offering to the Most High and of service to the Servant.

What’s more, may this humble hustle become a Ministry of Articulation, first and foremost - a play on, and prayer of, words that just may become a medicinal buoy to to anyone and everyone flailing to stay afloat in the riptide of incalculable loss befalling the planet.

So, hail to your grief.

Hail, as well, to the wellspring of joy that gives rise to that grief, even when invisible and impalpable.

All of you, including the disowned parts of you dying to be re-membered, shall find safe haven here.

Welcome home.

© Rite of Return®, Audra El Vilaly 2026

THE CODEX

Dedicated to my darling, dear Gran, a.k.a. Esther Fleury Imhoff - 4/29/1930 to 6/5/2026. Memory eternal, my fearless leader and relentless teacher of love without conditions.

Without a map to the treasure chest buried beneath the sea,

A chest that once held a key molten by the fire of creation itself,

A key to the Origin:

A promised place for you and me that holds the All of Life -

The Spring, the Chalice, The Tree.

Without this map, how do we find our way back home?

(If nothing else than to disorient you further amid your Odyssey through the Lost Lands, I will answer you with yet more questions):

Does a calf immediately abandon its mother upon emergence from her womb?

Does an ocean wave suddenly suspend its momentum and recede its crest, just before reversing the second half of its cycle?

Does a sown seed defy its DNA, willing its own death in lieu of growth?

Just as the wildflower knows to bloom following the first rains of spring, so, too, do you and I heed the Code .

Who am I, after all, to doubt the Design?

Didn’t you know that love is sacrifice? Not in the way they tell of it today, but in this way:

For something to live, something else must die.

This intractable truth, then, reveals another:

Whoever among you should offer at the altar your permission to let perish the very thing you love the most, becomes it.

That is, you become aware of yourself as love.

But allow me to please to take it back. I want to take it all back.

For we do not speak of Love this way, with definitions and delimitations,

For is it not, after all, the Unnamable? The Unknowable?

But I am dying, you see (and so are you).

So time is never and always on our side, at once.

And so, we carry time with prayer.

Once upon a time after praying, I asked myself:

What does it mean to offer myself upon the altar of love? To render myself a mere oblation?

With my heart and hair and skin ablaze, as a whole burnt offering, shall Love not be pleased?

And what do I know of her?

Nothing, it seems.

But of this I do, in fact, know:

The architect does not become herself until the structure is built.

The fisher does not know himself as such before the net drags to shore the catch.

Nor do you or I see ourselves before the Source of Light meets an object of its own reflection.

(May I seek to become an object of this reflection).

So, too, prevails the relation between creation and its creator,

Between your beloved and you as the lover.

In this way, and in the Mystery way,

What is manifest today shall be sacrificed tomorrow.

Think of it:

You do not love your favorite childhood friend

Or toy

Or animal companion

Because of what they meant to you at the time you actually beheld them.

You love them because of how they make you feel, right now, when you remember them,

So that even the memory of that which you once were

Reifies the very marrow in your bones and the blood in your valves, here and now.

The valves that pump the blood into

the eyes reading this,

the neurons interpreting it,

and the heart that beats in order to make sense of it.

If only we could make sense of It.

These very words, here and now.

Here and now -
Already the captive audience of your longing for what you thought you once held in your hand.

In grasping for It, ask yourself, who or what is doing the grasping?

And then,

Remember.

Remember the role of memory in love.

And now,

Remember the love.

© Rite of Return®, Audra El Vilaly 2026

Of reclamation,

Of revivification.

A memorialization of memory itself.

A commemoration of what is holy,

A resuscitation of what is right,

A sanctification of the light

(That is me, that is you, that is Thee).

A consecration of the sun

(As the Son),

Through this,

May we account for the casualties and

Rectify the robberies

Of Truth.

May we restore this truth.

The truth as your right,

Their right,

Our right

To the Rite of Return.

You are the genesis. The Origin Story. The Originator.

You are both the cycle and the chemistry sustaining it.

The wave. And the particle.

Just like a photon, the frequency of light - that is you, that is me, that is Thee - never dissipates.

The Cycle of Light:

Your right. Your rite.

The Rite of Return has no beginning, no end.

To arrive here:

Return.

Render that return a rite.

And then,

Begin again.

© Rite of Return®, Audra El Vilaly 2026