This Ecstatic Life...

Lessons from the Ancestors, Revealed Through a Mother’s Release

This Ecstatic Life - 54" x 54" original by Pamela Sukhum

The day we spread Mom’s ashes at the ocean near Hua Hin, Thailand — her favorite place in the world — was filled with beauty, ritual, and a touch of the extraordinary. She had come here since childhood, returning countless times throughout her life. Even after her fall, when she needed a wheelchair and later became bedridden, we brought her to the beach at Hua Hin because she loved it so deeply.

Three weeks after her cremation in Bangkok, we made the three-hour drive to Hua Hin and carried her ashes on a small boat to a quiet spot near the tiny uninhabited island of Ko Sai. The boat left the harbor at 9 a.m., and by 9:30 we had arrived to begin the ceremony — called Loy in Thai Buddhist tradition.

We began with a monk blessing the ashes, and then my brother and I gently lowered a krathong — a floating basket of banana leaves and flowers — into the water. This gesture honors release, renewal, and the journey of the spirit. We followed with flower garlands before spreading Mom’s ashes. As I let go of the cloth, a wave of grief and joy surged through me — sorrow-filled yet full of love. We then scattered seven colors of flowers, chosen for the seven realms, the seven days of the week, and the completeness of life’s cycle. The flowers drifted across the water, mingling with her ashes.

Next, I poured nam mon (blessed water) into the ocean. As it trickled into the sea, it felt like a mirror of her own journey — the drop now merging effortlessly with the ocean it had always been. It was a privilege to return Mom’s essence to its source, letting her spirit flow on through the boundless interplay of the elements.

My brother and me in the elements with Mom

Immersion in Water

After the Thai ceremony, I felt called to enter the sea — to be immersed with her in the elements. So much of the past few years, leading up to and through her passing, had felt like a baptism by fire. I longed for the cool and cleansing embrace of water.

It was unexpected — even unorthodox — and the captain hesitated, but eventually agreed. My brother spontaneously joined me. We jumped in, feeling like children again, splashing about, surrounded by flowers, sky, and sea.

A return to primordial innocence.

The white salt of the water baked on our caramel skin as we rode back to the pier. We remembered how Mom had enrolled us in swimming lessons at a young age in the USA, despite never learning to swim herself. A Thai fish out of water in Minnesota, she nonetheless steadfastly prepared her children for a life she herself would never fully inhabit. We gave thanks for how much she had risked and sacrificed for us all our lives.

Synchronicities Across the World

Burning sage at the river in Minnesota

While we were in the water in Hua Hin from 9:30-10:00 a.m., something remarkable was happening half a world away in Minnesota at 9:30 -10:00 p.m. My husband Ben was holding his own ceremony on the banks of the Mississippi River at the house my mother had built 40 years ago — the same home Ben and I now live in.

As he burned ceremonial sage at the water’s edge, the wind grew, and though there was no rain, the sky began to flash with an electrical storm. He spoke of how the red embers glowed against the deep blue sky, pulsating with light, drawing him into a world beyond — where he felt Mom’s presence making herself known.

Self-illumination of "This Ecstatic Life"

And then, 30 yards away, inside the now dark home, without anyone touching it, This Ecstatic Life — a large painting I had created in the aftermath of the Lahaina fires, alive with the movement of water, fire, wind, and earth — turned itself on.

This was a special painting, surrounded by a frame of embedded LED lights Ben and I had built together. It had been off for weeks, controlled only by a stubborn remote. Yet, at the exact moment we were scattering her ashes in Hua Hin (10:00 a.m. Thailand / 10:00 p.m. Minnesota), the lights came on to illuminate This Ecstatic Life.

My mother made herself known — unraveling across the sky, the waters, and through the heart in one simultaneity. The veils lifted, and what was revealed was the electric nature of our lives — the spark within that illumines and animates everything. The storm’s lightning outside, mirrored by the painting’s sudden glow within the house, showed us the true nature of illumination: exterior and interior are one. What flashes in the heavens is the same light that arises in the heart. We were reminded of what the ancients knew: that which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above…as above, so below; as within, so without.

The Yellow Butterfly

A winged visitation in Bangkok

And the unfoldment continued. The next morning, as I returned to my condo in Bangkok, the sealed stillness inside was stirred by sudden movement. From the area of Mom’s altar — where I keep a small vase of her ashes and her photograph — a yellow butterfly lifted into the air.

It danced in the morning light. After giving thanks, I opened the window and let it go, trusting her to travel where she needed to.

This soul-winged visitation took me back to 1998, to my grandmother’s cremation in Thailand, when my mother — who had been inconsolable — suddenly looked up and gasped, “Oh my goodness, a butterfly!”. It was yellow, and her feet nearly lifted from the earth as she chased it, smiling like a wondrous girl again through her tears, knowing it was her mother.

The Full Circle

Following my grandmother’s funeral in 1998, I had painted an eight-foot canvas in luminous yellow — a figure ascending with butterfly wings. Without knowing why, I inscribed it with lines from Marianne Williamson’s Our Deepest Fear, which speaks to the divine light within us all: that our deepest fear is not inadequacy, but the vastness of our own light; that by allowing ourselves to shine, we give others permission to shine; and that in releasing fear, we liberate not only ourselves but those around us.

Only now, thirty years later, do I see the full arc revealed: how that quote, my mother, my grandmother, the Great Elements, and This Ecstatic Life would converge. The synchronicities and the illumination of that painting became a living embodiment of those words.

Closing Reflections

It is humbling to realize my mother was not only my mother, but a being from the great beyond — as are all our ancestors — incarnations of forces moving through the cycles of life and death. We are nature itself, journeying in human form, carrying the spark of the infinite.

Her passing was not an ending but a release — a liberation of her light that rippled outward. The ancestors speak through wind and water, fire and earth, the flight of a butterfly, the sudden illumination of a work of art. With their guidance and presence, I feel — for the first time — the courage and permission not only to shine, but to live more fully embodied, to let the true voice within rise, and to walk in the fullness of my inheritance, in honor of all who came before. It is my prayer that this light, in coming to know its own power, might kindle that same flame in others — a flame that is our inheritance, our birthright.

That light is not separate from the forces that move through the world, but comprises them: the shimmer of water, the warmth of fire, the breath of wind, the grounding of earth. It is the same subtle pulse that moves the stars across the sky and stirs the tides, that quickens the breath in our lungs and sparks awareness in our hearts. To carry her spark forward is to remember that this radiance is both within us and beyond us — it is us: this very light, these very elements, the very cosmos. May we reclaim that which we have forgotten — that we are that very spark, that ecstatic rhythm that animates all things, weaving the life of a single body with the vastness of the universe.

With love and remembrance,

Electrical Storm in Minnesota - Sartell, Minnesota, 9:30 PM Minnesota time

Self Illumination of "This Ecstatic Life" - Sartell, Minnesota, 10:00 PM Minnesota time

Returning Mom to the Ocean - Hua Hin, Thailand, 9:30 AM Thailand time

Immersed with Mom - Hua Hin, Thailand, 10:00 AM Thailand time