The Cascadian Wanderer

Ever since Lenore died I’ve made many attempts to describe the nature of the relationship we shared. It has proved impossible. It is beyond words.

Yesterday I sat outside, quietly regarding nature. When I’m feeling contemplative and connected I look over at Lenore, sitting near me, and we share the knowing smile and imperceptible nod to love and life we often shared at such times.  

Twin souls, twin flames, twin rays – there is a lot of strange and questionable information draped in spiritual jewelry, poesy and woo-woo about the nature of what we were, how we searched for and then found one another, what we grew into, what we became and experienced as two people who became one person – one full and complete and fully realized human being in two separate minds, spirits and bodies. I still try to describe it, and still fail.

What can I say? It’s real.

When I think about the early evolutions of my own spiritual growth through personal experiences and exposure to various denominations I realize that I retained the essence of the principles advanced in the churches and spiritual meetings I attended, while the expressions of denominational specialness or primacy tended to slough off as time went on.

I recall that there was a place on my path when I realized that, if I did not acknowledge the unknowable, unexplainable mysteries of spiritual connection which I had experienced, I was imposing limits on my experience here and living a limited life.

So I lived that way. I acknowledged my spiritual nature, thought about it, experienced it, grew into it, and realized it.

Now it all seems a dream, a thing conjured up in the pliable physics of an alternate reality, created by an observing mind weighing input on a personal scale of plus and minus values.

My reality beyond thought is the tree, the earth, the air and fire and water; it is the artifacts of history stored in my heart and woven into memory; and it is our love for one another, real forever and yet simultaneously slowly fading, like smoke in time’s wind.

Our science is a series of observations; a bundle of sticks tied together with a string. Our art is a collection of thoughts and feelings, tied together in the same way. It is all expressed in symbols like mathematics and pictures and words.

The mind, the heart – this is where our dreams come from. Sometimes they are good dreams.

Yet behind it all is the unfathomable substance, purer than any formula, clearer than any word, more poignant than any image. We live here. We die here.

Live here, and live and share the good dream with at least one other person.

This is the secret of a good and happy life.

This is the secret of a contented death.

Today I turn 71. I’m afraid it’s a hard 71, too – I have not done my longevity any favors in the past, and it is not kindly disposed toward my future.

One of the things I have noted fading in a landscape littered with the detritus of entropy and decay of aging is hope. It may not be so for others. It is that way for me.

Hope has faded as time has gone on. I have seen all the old lessons of humanity come round to every new generation, which learns them all over again the hard way rather than building on the lessons of the past. There is some of that as well, but it is not enough to sustain a hope in me that humanity will survive and even perhaps transcend its own nature.

Today I experienced a glimmer of hope in the rising darkness. I read Time Magazine’s article about Greta Thunberg, the youthful climate activist who has serendipitously become the figurehead of a new activism rising in the hearts and minds of young people all over the world.

My generation knows about activism. We’re also the generation that is bequeathing a horrible mess to our children and grandchildren. In the 1960’s we identified many ills present in our world and actively opposed them. First we “turned on and tuned in.” Then we “dropped out” of the existing status quo and did our best to both destroy and rebuild our world in a new image. Sadly, we proved no smarter than any other generation. Before long the Darwinian paradigm of survival reasserted itself and most of us capitulated to the systems we knew were not working in return for a paycheck. Our old rallying cry of “turn on, tune in, and drop out” became a cautionary tale when it had to be appended with “co-opt and sell out.”

Some of us didn’t do that. We were a rare minority, isolated from one another by a socially prevalent waning moral sensibility. We were no longer empowered by the rising consensus of social consciousness and conscience that marked our beginnings. Those few who held to the early values survived by carving out their own sensible and thoughtful niches in the great monolithic walls that remained standing, untouched by that heartfelt “Revolution.” (“Volunteers” by Jefferson Airplane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_0sg0XDfmg )

Upon reflection I would have to say that the most “lost” American generation of the 20th century was not the generation marked by Paris in the 1920’s. It was the generation that came of age between the years of 1965 and 1975, a generation so lost that it is ironically buried in history between the usual decade mileposts ending in zero.

Now comes Greta Thunberg. Some of the old hope flared in my heart as I read about the youthful activism afoot in the world, reflected in part by her sudden and astonishing appearance on the world stage. My generation is being protested against, and I for one am damn glad of it.

15 years ago I wrote an essay for an online contest prompted by the question, “Will the US still exist as a country in 100 years?” I remembered it today while thinking about Greta Thunberg and the ills her own generation faces. I remembered it because, at the end, I offered her generation what little I could in the way of advice from a member of the generation that failed her. Here it is. (And by the way, I didn’t win the contest. An affirmative answer did. It was very pleasant.)

Will the US still exist as a country in 100 years?

I’m an optimist. I prefer positive thinking and hope over negativity and despair. I also prefer honesty and fact-based thinking, and believe that the truth is most often seen when a fearless willingness to consider real conditions is not muddled by my personal hopes, desires or fears. I honestly have to answer this question No.

In a hundred years it won’t matter who our ruling political party is now. It won’t matter how we feel about the disappearance of our nation. A 100-year perspective calls for broad-spectrum considerations of major societal, geophysical, oceanic, climatic, and population changes and events which will in large part influence the future of every currently existing nation. Within each of these categories there are historically unprecedented conditions developing now.

The historical record does provide us with an understanding of the rise and fall of nation states and empires, but today there are multiple global stressors present for which there are no records available. Global climate change, global industrialization, and global population density are all unfolding at unprecedented rates, and will produce unprecedented changes over the next hundred years.

We understand the cyclical nature of empires and recognize the elements of their genesis, expansion and decline. There is a good basis there indicating that the United States is currently entering into the last phase. Economically and politically, America is passing from a resource-rich, economically productive and militarily powerful past. Once we occupied a unique pinnacle of wealth, resources and might on the planet. Now we’re moving toward a competitive, globalized future where the competition is formidable. Our natural resources are depleted, our productivity is in decline, our financial assets are rapidly being diluted as investors seek to invest in a burgeoning global economy.

American production is expensive, and our goods are produced at much higher cost in comparison to other countries. That fact in itself is a nation-killer. While America bounces against a financial “glass ceiling” of its own making, other economies can produce a loaf of bread and the crops and facilities to make it at a fraction of the cost. Cars, building materials, even traditionally local service industries are all rapidly going offshore. Investors are following because a country worth a dollar today, but earning more every day, increases in value more than a country worth a hundred dollars that only spends its dollars to buy bread from other countries. Follow the money and the trail of American wealth will lead you offshore. Fewer dollars are circulating within our country, the number of jobs is in decline, and in the throes of the current global economic crisis there is a strong probability that in America, when the crisis passes, it will be a “jobless recovery.” And a recovery of that kind is solid evidence that America is in a profound economic decline.

The two remaining assets of America – our form of democratic government and the stockpile of wealth amassed in more productive times and stored in our infrastructure – will not be enough to sustain us. The dollar will continue to fall in value as other currencies rise as a result of our waning productivity and the rising productivity of other countries. It is likely that, caught in the throes of a fatal addiction to our former quality of life, America and Americans will borrow against our remaining assets, incur debt, and weaken the dollar further. As a result it is probable that within 25 years America will follow in the footsteps of the British Empire, and find itself reconciled to being a lesser economic and political presence on the world stage, regardless of other developments.

But what about the other crises currently manifesting which will have even more profound effects on the destiny of the United States? Global climate change appears to be the largest gorilla in the room. While lesser minds argue about who caused it, the best minds could care less and are turned toward consideration of the fact of its presence and what it will cause in the future. Already it is manifestly certain that increased levels of water and heat energy in the atmosphere will create violent climatic disturbances and damage food crops and supplies. Transportation, communications and energy production will be intermittently interrupted, and more destructive storms will cause unprecedented damage to human habitation and infrastructure. Currently projected consequences in the short term include impactful crop failures in Europe by as soon as 2010. Later changes in the oceanic circulatory system as a result of global warming may cripple our planetary oxygen supply, much of which is produced by plankton.

The geo-political consequences of privation and famine historically include wars and societal upheavals as human beings compete for limited, critical resources. Under stress and in the quest for survival, national identities dissolve into monolithic tribal and religious allegiances. We’re seeing a precursor of that in the growing “culture wars” occuring in America. A diverse citizenry becomes a luxury, and only the brother-in-arms, the rigid adherent to the group ethic and goal is included in the struggle for survival. This possibility doesn’t bode well for the survival of any nation state in a hundred years. It is much more likely to produce a polyglot, nationless, techno-oligarchy welded together by mutual personal interest rather than a land-based national identity by then.

And then there’s the Malthusian exponent of global stressors: population growth. Our exploding planetary population may have already reached beyond the critical mass necessary for widespread human tragedy. At a time when our planetary natural resources are being gobbled and rapidly depleted to support and maintain the appetites of the world’s existing population, the earth itself is entering into an early stage of a condition which will reduce what has in the past been an overflowing bounty of provision. More people, fewer resources. Not exactly a hopeful scenario for the future, and yat another indicator of future geo-political upheaval and realignment.

I think the chances that America will be around in a hundred years are about a million to one. But for the generations ahead and the hope they will need to carry on in the presence of the turbulent and overwhelming conditions to come, I can tell them what I think that one chance in a million is:

If you can evolve and elucidate the Darwinian paradigm, survival of the fittest, to define the “fittest” as those individuals who are creative, thoughtful, unselfish and thrifty – and if you can be absolutely ruthless with those who are not – then you have a chance. Otherwise the wily, thoughtless, selfish gluttons who have risen to power consistently throughout human history will ride your backs down to extinction. Good luck.

The  Pratyeka’s Garden

 

Preface

Mining the Tropes of Our Lives

there we were again, inside,
drawn down the narrow shaft of perspective
past mind’s open maw
into the pit of coal and diamonds
where the empty ache of eons rests
above, below, and all around us
in the bones of the ages

there we were again, inside the mind,
mining the tropes of our lives
for archetypes

and blinking at each other
faces blackened with soot
our eyes startled out like headlights
when we remembered
what we left above
for this dark

the light
the breeze
the open field

the leaves of fall
the winter sleep
the green spring
the light summer dresses rippling in the breeze

Introduction

In the development of different Buddhist canons certain paths were recognized and Buddha consciousness was characterized according to the actions of the awakened one. Self-realized beings like Gautama Buddha are denoted by three things. They teach, bring enlightenment to others, and leave a legacy in the form of a canon, community or religion. They came to be characterized as samyaksambuddhas.

Other Buddhas give moral teaching reluctantly and do not bring others to enlightenment or leave a legacy. In some traditions these pratyekbuddhas are devalued or marginalized on the basis that their paths are unique, personal, eccentric and eclectic. They can be seen as exiles or outlanders. This seems to be thoughtless, considering that all great samyaksambuddhas are also pratyekbuddhas because their newly brought forth wisdom is gained on a personal, unique path.

Traditionalists rightfully see the unique path of the pratyekabuddha may offer more confusion and distraction to the seeker than the carefully blocked out orderly steps of the traditional path, which is reasonably homogeneous across varying schools sharing the particular root. The path of the canon, community and religion is embraced, assigned a favorable status, institutionalized. Ironically it becomes closed to that which it grew out of; the newly brought forth wisdom gained on the personal, unique path of the first message bearer, an unknown pratyekbuddha.

A pratyeka’s garden may not be combed and perfected to the simple elegance of the classic zen garden. It is unruly in its ways. It is a tree, a meadow, a river in four seasons, by turns riotous in spring and silently stark in winter. Perfection is there in a dynamic chaos which does not obscure that perfection.

Pratyeka is my path, not my status. I can’t confirm or deny my status, it eludes me. It defies measure, although many people think they can take my measure quite handily and assign me a status accordingly. I can’t deny my consciousness, it would be pointless to do that.

I can confirm my path. The expressions of my path have been and may continue to be indeed eccentric, personal and eclectic. I will nudge whoever is put in my way toward consciousness in my manner. I tender offers, I do not instruct. I rarely chatter idly, but it takes a certain discernment and willingness to consider what I say and how I say it to see there is more than prattle in my expressions. I can be contrapuntal to the point of offering what is wrong as being right, because people often learn more in the excitement of catching a mistake than they do when the clean and perfect truth stands before them.

I offer odd koans with tone, manner, content and whim. I have faith that all these expressions come when and where they do because they are meant to be there. I allow it without regard for propriety. Idle chatter is rare in what I offer. The eye of the beholder sees what it will. Light is missed when the eye looks only for the ray in its own neighborhood. Yet even so, the ray leads to light.

Everyone has a perspective. The pratyeka follows the rays seen locally to the source of all rays. It is perfectly acceptable to dance and sing and laugh and celebrate before the altar of known truth. The celebrant in the eye of the traditionalist is often perceived as an idle chatterer, or worse. The consciousness which does not locate the content in the pratyeka’s message in no way diminishes the message given. Often gold given turns into ash in the hands of the recipient.

The path which teaches there is nothing through meditation, and seeks and finds union in the practices of purification and singular attention and detachment, is the way.

The path which teaches there is everything through joining and finds union in the practice of simultaneously knowing One and More Than One, is the way.

The simultaneity of the two paths, reconciled, is the message here, and the message is the path. Spiritual bliss and existential woe are the two primary polarities of human essence. We are able to move toward either pole, and we are able to be balanced between the two.

On the Path of Parity the pilgrim comes to know the divine and the existential mutually comprise life simultaneously, and without conflict. The first is inexpressible, the latter inexhaustibly prone to perspective, relativity, and the wordy, rationalistic expressions thereof. It’s the paradox of being, this dualistic ability to simultaneously know the universal divine and yet see existence from only one perspective point. It’s a humorous predicament, laughably absurd and poignantly clear. The tears of each, of laughter and song and samsara and grieving, are the same perfect tear.

On my path, I experience both my natures. I chose this, and it chose me. The divine and the existential comprise my life. I am simultaneously untroubled knowing the first and troubled in my experience of the latter.

Aldous Huxley speaks of the difficulty encountered when we attempt to express this paradoxical knowledge in rational terms. To paraphrase, he said,

“To describe existence as a continuum, rather than as what it appears to be to common sense, expressions of syntax and vocabulary are quite inadequate. We must be patient, then, with the linguistic eccentricities, the frequency of paradox, the verbal extravagance, sometimes even of the seeming blasphemy of those who are compelled to describe this paradoxical knowledge in terms of a symbol system such as language.”

We humans are able to suspend belief easily. We do it nearly every time we are offered the chance by the well-crafted story, whether it be about super heroes, cartoon trolls, people in the farthest reaches of the past and future, animated furniture, mad rabbits with English accents, and so forth.

What is more difficult for us is to suspend our disbelief.

When one hears another say, “I awoke,” where is the hubris? Is it in the mouth of that which speaks its own truth? Is it in the ear of the listener who denies such a thing could be? Is it in the mind which does not know it, too, is awake? Is it in the mind which believes it is small, and separate?

When one hears the self say, “I awoke,” why does it condemn itself?

Sometimes encountering the awakened condition which speaks without false humility becomes an occasion for desire or envy or disbelief. It can inspire perspectives seeing only precious, egocentric specialness and give rise to condemnation and negative judgment.

Individual identity, either your own or that of others who say “I awoke,” is not important. Suspend your disbelief in every encounter, if only so far as to allow the beginning ground to be open to you, to clear of the fog of prejudgment. A spirit of mutual identity serves better than a belief in separation. Believe instead that we are all awake to that which seems to be lost.

If you are a seeker, you have awakened. If you had not, the thing which informs you something has been lost would not exist, and you would not seek it.

Many people think this thing informs them they do not have something, and so they go forth in life getting things, but their instructions have come from other people who believe the same thing, that getting material things will fulfill the feeling that something has been lost. Obviously, it does not.

I awoke. I learned, simply put, that we know that we know. This is a simple thing hidden behind much difficulty. If your path has brought you here, welcome. If your path carries you to other places, fare well upon your path. Go about your business, expressing and being and doing as you are.

We are all awake, sometimes thrashing in the unmanageable complexity of existence, at other times resting in the simplicity of the essence of life itself.

On the path of life waking comes when we awaken to knowing we are awake. You are awake. You are an awakened one. Waking can happen anywhere, at any time, and we have all had those moments. It can be overlooked when the sight of the world beyond that moment looms, and the self-mind begins to calculate its strategies and speculate upon possible hardships there. It can be forgotten or discounted by our own disbelief that we are awake and the moments we have had which told us to disbelieve.

I awoke.

Suspend your Disbelief

Suspend your disbelief and know that you know. If it is enlightenment that you want, go about your business, expressing and being and doing as you are. God does not deny you what you want. This is so. So be careful. You may not know what God wants. This is how we learn. This is how we are taught. Suspend your disbelief and know that you know.

Introduction 

There is a Hindu saying: “None but a god can worship a god.” You have to identify yourself.

My journey is the hero’s journey. The archetypical roots in the story of my life confirm that for me. I will share the story with you and speak of the wisdoms I gained there. The personal how and what and why of my particular life circumstances don’t always speak to another’s experience and perspective. Yet I have chosen to include autobiographical and personal, eccentric expressions here in the hope that the story of what I have encountered and learned on my path will be of use to you on yours.

The unique, eclectic expressions shared here from my perspective point are forms risen out of a local experience, nothing more, nothing less. The value offered is the object of the perspective point. Follow the rays you see there to the source of all rays. Follow the rays you see from your own perspective point as well. Forms will fade and the source of light appear in the triangulated perspective produced wherever two or more are gathered together. You will see your own path, you will know when you awakened there.

I speak about what I have learned which is universally real and known. I speak sharing my local view of social, cultural, and religious matrices of understanding. I speak of how to know and navigate and reconcile the seeming separation between our known essence and the local perspective seen by our existential self. I speak in bits of practical information gleaned from my own path about thought, feeling, and action.

If one were to tot up the sum of my life it would depend on what kind of a ledger was used. If one were to assign a value of success it would depend on what success meant.

I have characterized my life as being one that took the road less often traveled. I honestly would have to say I didn’t take it, it took me. It seems in retrospect to have been the only vector which could have possibly been plotted out of the calculus and chaos of my nature and my nurture.

The thing not spoken of about the less traveled road is how unruly it is. It’s unpaved and uncivilized, full of deep potholes. Wild things stalk the traveler there and savage the unwary wanderer mercilessly, teaching harsh lessons. There, when the pilgrim has an inspiration and decides to bang the rocks together, the advent of divine fire is no more likely than smashed fingers. At the end the reward of it all is the simple, surprising development that somehow you have managed to survive, for better and for worse, with a few graces, a bit of wisdom, and a large catalog of experience.

There are wisdoms found and good choices made on my road. There are revelations gained and the great, good, solid joy of love ever-present there, often overtaken by shadows, then shared in brilliant light.

There are also blinding winces and aching regrets. I used to say I have no regrets. Now I temper that by saying instead that, while I have regrets, they have informed me and made me stronger, and I see no possibility that things could have gone any differently than the way they have.

It is all unruly and perfect. It is the tree, the meadow, the river, all in four seasons. Perfection is there, moment to moment in the dynamic chaos and confused joy of living.

Perfection.

This story is a “tropeography” of my early life; a biography embedded with the archetypal tropes of my own experience.  It is the record of my passage from the palace of Siddhartha out onto the roadways of samsara and the suffering there. It is the story of my odyssey through the dark wood, my fall into the pit. It is my speaking of the places where I met the crone and angel and devil and god, and how I came home to Penelope and Ithaca, to the cross, the gods, to God. It is the story of the journey to the beginning of the second leg of the heroic journey which commences upon awakening to who we are, really.

It is, too, an invitation to you to discover your own moment of awakening, to own its presence in your life. To remember what delivered you to it. To recognize where and when and how it happened, and how it has delivered you here, to where you are now.

I will speak my story and pass it on, not as support for my own conclusions about what life is, or to glorify my unique particularity, but to pass down a story which any beholder who comes to it might use to identify their own path and conclusions. My experience is unique, as is the experience of every person. My conclusions have served me. My story, and the story every person tells, serves us all. Our conclusions may be different, yet still each story serves us all.

I suppose there are stages of aging just like there are stages of grieving. I am older now, and beyond the stage of justifying my life. I think more now about what I could pass on to others which might be of use to them in their own lives.

After the age of seven I was raised with much less nurture than most, and as a result I did not form a perspective largely guided and informed by family, church, community and society. I encountered life relatively unencumbered by the direction of people who would have taught me the ways and means of social value systems and the cultural institutions human beings are incorporated into as they grow up. I encountered life directly, and by my own means formed my own perspective. It left me often not submitted to the ways and means of the society I live in.

We are formed by our past and move within it until we don’t anymore. It’s as simple as that. Until then we move thrashing in chains of emotional memory, mindful of the point sources of past pain. We reside in small domiciles, walled off from the great world beyond. The remembered past sifts like a dark miasma inside those walls and comes to us in daylight memories and dark dreams.

Until it doesn’t matter anymore.

I am connected to the events of my youth. It is natural, I think, to want to speak of those events, to pass my history along to others. Consideration of those events has occupied a large part of my life as I strove to understand myself in the place where my nature, my essential identity, intersects with my nurture.

There is a certain cathartic detoxification available when we bring our past to light. Yet when we tell our stories with ruthless honesty and share our pains, relief is not the end sought. If relief alone is gained it will be a momentary gain and the old shades will come round again. We will walk the same old round with them. It is only when, speaking the story, the story is released into the world once and for all, that we transcend our past and engage the present.

This transcendence is not an abandonment of the contextual matrix of our lives, which is intrinsic to our being. It is more about knowing that the walls surrounding us do not need to be opaque. We can see beyond them and behold more. When we look, we see the universe we are part of, the creation we are joined with, the inseparable reality which suffuses us all and which is no respecter of walls.  

People have been passing their stories down through the generations ever since there was language, and for the same reasons – to leave a record of their passing here and, more importantly, to pass on the story as information about what is in play in the human experience; what causes proceed into what effects; where the ground is certain and where it is uncertain; where light shines and where darkness prevails; where planting produces the harvest and where it comes to naught; what acts produce peace and which lead to war; how victory is gained and loss endured; what random, powerful, uncontrollable events await the sojourner in life, and where they are encountered, and how they are received, and what effect they have.

And finally I need to say I am not a polished writer in the sense that I can produce a consistent style or tone. I have many voices ranging from coarse to overly refined and they speak as they will here, so this is not a coherent work in that sense. I pray you take the essence here and forgive the form.

The Common Clay, the Ephemeral Dust

            My name is the name of my father. In 1948 I was the first born child and grandchild of my family. I had a Siddartha-like childhood. I was the son of a prince of a small midwest farm town, shielded and loved and pampered by all, the first-born princeling of a generation. In my beginnings I was loved. I grew strong and confident and spirited and loving, and life sang in my veins like a hymn.

             We are all here, rising in consciousness. Here, where the eye turns the image of things seen upside down. It is a place of complexity where poles of light and dark pulse in majesty and the divided mind struggles with separation and illusion.

             We are here, where the Christ is in each, the Buddha. Here in a place beyond the divided mind where a whole and holy Universe includes and reconciles its every manifestation in its own supreme, absolute perfection.

             We are engulfed in a great mystery where joy and pain and fullness and emptiness all abide. It is a place where the solution to our sojourn is found in the answer to one small and simple question:

             What happened here?

My mother told me once that she remembers the first time she really looked at my father. They were fifteen. It was mid-summer in the dry and brilliant heat of July, at the town swimming pool. She said, “He was young, and strong, and handsome – as handsome as any movie star. He was tall, and lean, and in the water his muscles rippled under his skin and his skin glowed in the sun.  I was overcome with how beautiful he was.”

My father cared for me, took me places with him, proudly introduced me to his friends. He taught me to ride a bike, towed me through the snow on a sled tied behind his truck, helped me build a tree house. Once my father and I sat together on the roof of his car in the middle of a field of ripening wheat in the dry land farming country of eastern Colorado. He talked about the beauty that surrounded us, spoke to me of the wonder in a seed and the glory of harvest. He never talked down to me. It was understood between us that I would understand, and I did. He shared with me. He showed me what he had discovered here because he had come here before me.

Amid the unfathomable fullness of what it is to be here, alive and living this hard and wonderful life, the presence and the loss of my father is a profound, elemental part of my experience. I’ve lost, I’ve gained. I’ve failed absolutely, and succeeded to my own satisfaction. I’ve been broken, I’ve been healed. I’ve gained my dream, found true love. Many of the satisfactions present in my life today were borne in seeds planted by my father. The pains of my life began with his death.

Perhaps my way could have been easier. I have no doubt if my father had been here longer we would have shared a deep bond rooted in our personal struggles. If he had been here longer he would have passed to me much more of what he found here. But he wasn’t. The time I had with him was not enough, but what he gave me was. While we were together, before his own dark plunge, he loved me.

I was seven years old when my father died. It was 1956. My grandparents, my father’s parents, owned and operated a pharmacy in a small farming town in northeastern Colorado, the Haxtun Drug Store. In those days the pharmacists of small towns often didn’t have an assistant pharmacist. My grandparents did, and so from time to time they would go to another town for a week or two and serve the needs of that community while the local pharmacist went on vacation or responded to a personal emergency.

They were in Arriba, Colorado doing that when the call came. They had taken me with them. It was summertime and school was out, it was a vacation for us all, a working vacation for them but an opportunity for us to be together.

Arriba was a dusty, wind-blown plains town in southern Colorado. In the heat of that summer we went out to the edge of town one day to an ancient railroad depot. A canvas mailbag hung from a tall hook at the edge of the tracks. A train roaring past the town at fifty miles an hour snatched it from the hook. It was as though the mailbag had suddenly disappeared into thin air.

I was playing canasta one evening with my grandmother. When the phone rang I looked at it, I looked at her, and I knew. As she rose to answer it I said to her, “There’s been an accident. He’s gone.” It was one of those very few moments of my life when I have transcended the local and been connected with the great mystery we are all part of. She stared at me for a long moment as if I’d suddenly grown a second head, and then answered the phone.

I saw her falter as she listened, saw her as she stood there and took the blow. But she did not break and I wondered what kind of iron it was that could stand at all after such a blow, even if only as a husk with the heart cut out of it as she was for that single moment. Then I saw her gather herself, and straighten, and rise to meet the unspeakable loss.

By midnight I was at my mother’s childhood home, a farm in northeastern Colorado. My younger brothers were still up, playing with toys in the middle of the living room floor, arguing and laughing and loudly ignorant of what had happened. I watched them detached, felt a pain of sadness and anger at their unknowing. I said, “Don’t you know what has happened? Don’t you know what this means?” And looking into their eyes I suddenly knew that they didn’t. They didn’t know. Years later, after the death of my brother Tony, I would learn that he did know. It hit him the next day, when he saw the wreckage of the car our father had died in.

The next day we went home. In the early morning I climbed up on our garage roof and lay on my back, staring up into the sky. I had been taught that God was there. I needed to speak directly to Him, to the source and the power of the universe. I knew that light is the fastest thing in the universe. I thought if I could look unceasingly up into the sky and through it to the stars and beyond, eventually my line of sight would reach to God in his far-off place. In the slow numbness of deep shock I was able to stare for more than four hours, forcing my eyes to travel ever deeper and deeper into the universe.

Finally I began to waver, to suspect I was not going to reach God that way. But I felt my line of sight was like a long, thin, tenuous tunnel stretching through the universe to the vicinity of God, and it was as close as I had ever been, and I thought while this tunnel existed I could send a message, and it would be heard. So I sent this thought:

“I know it is in your power to do this, even though you haven’t done it often. I want my father back. I want him to be alive again. I want him to come home, and have his life again. And you can have anything of me. You can have everything of me. You can take my life in exchange for his, and I’ll give it to you. Just make my father be alive again. Even if I have to go with you the very same minute he comes back, I want to hug him one more time, I want him to hug me…”

But this was not to be.

My father was adopted in 1929. The love my grandparents had for him transcended every convention of those days and he became the heart of their heart, the flesh of their flesh. His father was a compassionate yet stern man, the son of a family of doctors and judges. His mother was firm, possessed of an ethical and righteously applied social mind, the daughter of an educated minister. Both were university educated.

My father and his brother were raised with the classics and encouraged to form their minds and manners from an early age. Both learned to play musical instruments, and my uncle was a noted child prodigy, described once as “a piano virtuoso before he could do long division.”  My fathered played strings, most notably the viola, and woodwinds and the flute as well.

Under the tutelage and unremitting urging of their parents the two brothers were taught to work hard, refine their instincts, absorb knowledge and art and music, and in all ways prepare themselves for their own ascendancy in the world of attainment and success, where intense preparation was the prelude to a life of intense industry pointed toward social elevation and material gain.

The dinner table conversations in their home were consistently divided between broad-ranging intellectual and artistic subjects, and cautionary tales about the depths to which the ill-educated, unrefined and lazy fall. There were many examples of the latter in the small, provincial town of dry land farmers they lived in, where the hardships of the Great American Prairie Desert were best met with a stolid stubbornness best not confused by rare, idle airs where ideas of justice could be casually considered in the light of history and philosophy and weighed upon the scales of intellect.

The land was not just, it was the land, and survival there required vigilance and perseverance and hard temper which did not afford time for high art, genteel music and sophisticated thought. Art in that hinterland was whittled, hand carved and rough; music was the fiddle and harmonica playing in the barn, thoughts were encapsulated in ancient, hard-won facts of survival methods and idle thoughts reserved for speculations about crops and weather. Mental acuity was tuned and vigilant for sudden, odd acts of neighbors, who might turn dangerous after a presaging appearance of nonconformity, or give the opportunity to celebrate one’s personal righteousness in light of another’s fall from the graces of the conformed herd.

My father was more physically robust than his fragile younger brother and was the explorer, guide and protector during their forays into the sunshine and open skies and vast plains beckoning them from the orderly walls of their childhood home. The land, the sky, the sun, the turn of the seasons caught my father and held him there to the end of his life.

My grandfather was a minister in pharmacist’s clothing. While my grandmother managed the accounts and the help in the Haxtun Drug Store and painted the seasons on the front windows in brilliant water colors, my grandfather quietly counted pills in the back with a spatula, and then came out to pour sodas and make sundaes for the afternoon trade at the soda fountain in front. He enjoyed people, and served them sodas with friendly humor. In his home he was fair but not so expansive. There was a flatland sternness in him that the polish of education had not completely moderated.

My grandmother was created in the image of that class of finer people defined by her time; a fine-boned, high-strung, intelligent and intense woman keen on the ascendancy of her family to success by the means of her own unflagging administration. She was firm and practical. She was a teacher, an artist. She manifested a strange mixture of love and devotion and artful sophistication and ruthless society in her relationships. She was a matriarch of convention and a champion of the better sorts of all kinds of things; education, the fine arts, music, the people one chooses to associate with.

She lived a large part of her life in that small farming community in northeastern Colorado among a population numbering less than a thousand souls. I wonder if she regretted at times the lack of better company. Yet she cleaved to her conventions and convictions with unfaltering constancy.

I knew she loved me, but her way was as foreign to me as if we had come from different worlds. Something deep within me rebelled against her forms. I could not understand her when she set about instructing me on how to succeed in her universe of conventional society. I was not part of that. I had come to a universe of sky and trees and grass green as fire, where I wheeled and danced and spun dizzily onward in untrammeled joy and celebration. It was in my father, and it was in me.

My father went to Duke University to study medicine and become a doctor according to the designs of his upbringing. He rejected that and eventually returned to that small farming town. He became a successful farmer, and at the age of 26 left his widow and children a large estate and a world of uncertain ground.

One night, speeding in a frenzy of driving rain, chased by his own demons, he lost control and drove into the end of a bridge at eighty miles an hour. Minutes later he left that body with a bridge timber rammed through it; left it laying in the arms of a friend who came upon the scene within a minute after it happened; left it in the rain of God’s tears.

In the small town mortuary less than an hour later they lifted the sheet for my mother and she saw the wooden splinter in his gut. She put her face against his neck, and he was still warm.

The heart cracks, the mind breaks, the fullness of life wells forth in aching, terrible fury.

Samsara

His father had lain on silk, its soft sheen pearled with living light. He had reached across the edge slowly and gently touched the back of his father’s hand, half-hoping that touch would spark some subtle, final sign of life, a tiny curling of fingertips or a tiny, secret smile at the corner of the mouth. The rock-still deadness which met his touch he had never had from his father before; it told him all of death he sought in the reaching, told him all the answer to his child’s question, which was all he knew to ask. Not even warmth of blood answered his touch, the hand could have been cut from granite, no vein pulsed. He had watched hard for that. A hand had touched his shoulder, a hand burning with warmth and thundering with coursing blood and animate flesh, had gently walked with him as he turned away. His eyes burned silently, silently misted.

When my father died my mother moved into the city, a place she was unprepared for. She was farm-born and raised, uninstructed in the ways of the world beyond the chicken yard and garden and prairie fields, fresh and ignorant and innocent of the ways of  the world beyond and the sly pitfalls awaiting her there. She milked cows, gathered eggs, rode a horse to a country school situated far from town, came home and wrapped a bandanna around her head and drove a tractor in the field, gathered produce from the garden and canned and cooked and cleaned up. At night she listened to ballroom music on the radio and gazed at the Milky Way from the barn roof and went to bed listening to night birds outside her window and dreamed of the boys in town.

She was highly intelligent, as were her parents, but like them she was not afforded the leisure time of the town merchants in which her innate gift could bloom with refinements. The farm life was demanding and all-consuming. In the days when she was growing up neither my grandparents nor my mother were able to occupy their keen intelligence with anything other than the ongoing struggle for life in a landscape savaged by the Great Depression and dust-bowl days of the 1930’s, where famine and drought and scarcity were mortal, ever-present enemies at the farm gate.

My grandfather once told me that he never owned land until 1942, when he was 42 years old. The Second World War was bringing prosperity back to the farmland with demands for greater supplies of dry land wheat and corn. The land, long locked up in the vaults of banks, was coming back into cultivation stimulated by suddenly available farm loans and government encouragement.

My grandfather told me once he allowed that the Great Depression was “maybe not as hard on us as it was for some folks, because we had nothing to lose.” Yet the stories of that time I heard as a child were not so charitable. My grandfather had a temper enraged by the times and he was a fighter. Once he cursed my mother so fiercely she never forgot the savagery in him, snarling “God damn you.” Another time he kicked her in anger. He was no saint. Time and success mellowed him and by the time I knew him he had developed a softer side as well, a side which bloomed late and took precedence in his later years – although there was always a hard strength in him which never disappeared.

My grandfather’s stories of the time during my mother’s childhood were stories of dresses made of grain sacks, worn out shoes soled with newspaper, harshly given charity, miles walked in search of a quarter to be earned with shovel and axe deployed from sunup to sundown under the gaze of merciless overseers. The banks, the railroads, the barons and the bosses road the backs of the people in that land in those days and ground them down without pity or remark, as cruel and pitiless as the powder-fine dust held at bay with rags, wetted many times a day, stuffed in the cracks around the farmhouse windows and beneath the door.

My mother’s father had a hard, adventurous youth. He left home in his mid-teens shortly after World War I broke out in Europe. He rode the rails with hoboes, worked in mines and logging camps and on railroads, learned to play “Red River Valley” on the harmonica. He picked up pocket money playing baseball on local town teams, and wrestling in Saturday night “circuses,” and shooting three-cushion billiards in small town taverns and public houses. He and a friend worked their way west ahead of the Post War Depression of 1920-21. The work dried up in 1923 while they were working in uranium mines in the Navajo nation near Shiprock, New Mexico, when cheaper uranium from the Belgian Congo became available.

My grandfather and his friend road the rails back to Colorado. At the top of the Rocky Mountain continental divide they parted ways, his partner saying he believed he’d try for California and go west. My grandfather decided he’d go east and see what lay out in the farm country on the plains. They shook hands there, bidding one another to fare well, and never saw each another again.

My grandfather told me that as the train rolled down out of the mountains and into the Great Plains he watched the land roll by him while he sat in the door of a boxcar, and when he saw the farmlands of northeastern Colorado he proclaimed to himself, “By gosh, this is the country for me!” He hopped off near Paoli, Colorado and walked to the nearby farm where my future grandmother lived, and got a job there working as a hired hand for her father.

My grandfather was highly intelligent and in his later years, when he had gained the leisure time of a successful farmer, he proved to be a voracious learner, reading about archaeology and philosophy and history. He read the dictionary. He read the Encyclopedia Britannica. He considered the Bible in depth and taught a humanistic, liberal Christ in Sunday School at the Methodist church, which inflamed the Calvinist roots there and drew the ire of less compassionate Christians.

Yet if my grandfather was intelligent, my grandmother was marked with genius. She was quiet, self-contained, kept her counsel and judgments close. Yet when she spoke it was with a depth and insight and wisdom which even my grandfather deferred to.

My mother remarried two years after my father died, when I was nine. She married a sensitive, diabetic, homosexual musician who lived with his parents. They maintained an open marriage and shared a love of music; my mother was a gifted pianist and that was the sole ground upon which they met. Shortly after their marriage my two brothers and I were adopted by our stepfather. At the hearing the judge asked me if I wanted to be adopted, and I said yes. What I meant was, I wanted my father back.

In a little over a year my first stepfather managed to spend a large part of my father’s estate on a concrete block building housing the largest stereo system in six states, a recording studio, and the largest pipe organ west of the Mississippi, which remained in storage in the stables of his childhood home where we lived. He installed a TV in his Desoto, played the organ in two churches every Sunday, and made vinyl records of local musical events. He attempted to be a father to me and failed so miserably it embarrassed both of us.

I was independent and out on my own a lot, and a lot of carnage was happening back at hearth and home. I don’t recall much of that time. I could have been ignoring it all. I do remember getting in trouble for the disconcerting habit of every once in awhile getting angry, carefully taking off my glasses and deliberately slamming both lenses into smithereens. I guess I got tired of what I was seeing.

Around two years after their marriage my mother had become pregnant by a music professor, my stepfather killed himself in the music studio with insulin, and my youngest brother was delivered and conveniently promoted as a tragic, posthumous child.

We had to leave town about a year later, for about seven or eight months. My sister, conceived outside the local city social limits, had to be born in Oregon. When we returned nobody was able to figure out where she came from. In those days this sort of thing somehow served to derail a big illegitimacy aversion that socially appropriate people enjoyed pounding short-sighted romantics over the head with.

It wasn’t all bad; most of the time I was on my own. I went fishing a lot, walked and ran and bicycled all over creation at all hours of the day and night, and had a lot of fun. I was the boy who raised himself.

When I was 11 years old, my mother remarried again. In the space of three days she met and married a sick and ignorant man. His right hand was gnarled and deformed. He was verbally and emotionally abusive, and in varying degrees physically abusive as well. The physical abuse came in the form of beatings with a belt, usually six or seven strokes, and were supposedly for “breaking the rules”, but were really just a form of anger that came out whenever my three brothers or myself were perceived to be uncontrollable by him.

His forbears had left Europe for the ends of the earth and found them in a hill-country backwater in Tennessee. His father was a dirt-poor redneck, a fundamentalist hell-biter preacher who taught Jesus to his children with a bloody, iron fist. Fear and self loathing made him imperious and hateful. He practiced and transmitted his spiritual deformity, mocked and made real in his son, to this creature born with a congenitally withered hand, the punishment of a wrathful God. This partially explains my stepfather but it does not excuse him. He always had a choice

According to the Wechsler scale my stepfather was a genius, so the warpage he inflicted was truly diabolical. Two and a half years into this marriage my mother was committed to a mental hospital for the insane and took a turn through electro-shock therapy. It was a testament to his ability to break a person’s spirit. She returned wan and frail, but over time developed a facade of functionality, a coat of varnish over her fractures.

We three oldest boys quickly learned to stay out of the way. If we had the misfortune of crossing his path we would do what he told us to, which usually involved a lot of work around the house and yard which kept us out of his way. He ran the family with a military metaphor. We were privates, he was the general, there were inspections and punishments.

He had never been in the military, disqualified by the congenitally gnarled and withered hand that had in many ways gnarled and withered his life. Strangely, I still see him in old broadcasts of Adolph Hitler, to whom he proudly claimed to be related. The resemblance in appearance, temperament and behavior is uncanny. It was a specious conceit on his part which, in his embrasure of the image, revealed his nature and his character. He lived in a hell of his own choice and making, and imposed it on weak and innocent people when he could.

My youngest brother didn’t know how to give the impression that he was under the control of this man. He was only two years old and could only be what he was—a child.

Toilet training my brother became a goal for this man who had no love, no patience, and a fanatical requirement to be obeyed. My brother was beaten frequently, to the point that black and blue stripes and welts covered him from the back of his knees to the middle of his back. I was the oldest, and took to sneaking in behind my stepfather’s back. My brothers and I worked with Pete on the toilet for hours each day.

In the mornings we would sneak into Pete’s room and take his sheets away if they were wet, change him, and put him back to bed dry. This set the tone for our life. Since Pete couldn’t keep himself out of the way, it was up to us. We did the best we could for him.

Mamie, our live-in maid, helped us until she told my stepfather he “shouldn’t treat the children the way he did,” and she was fired.

Then we had a day-maid, Rosie, a 6-foot tall black lady with a heart as big as God who took care of us until the day she found bruises on my brother. She went straight to our stepfather and confronted him about it. He said it was none of her business and if she wanted to keep her job she’d remember her place. She called him a bastard and told him to go to hell. He called her a nigger and that was that. I watched Rosie walk away for the last time from the highest place in that house, the attic window, so that I could see her as long as possible. I’ll always remember that wonderful, classy, loving lady walking down the street away from us in her cloth coat and scarf.

The house we lived in at the time was a 3-story Victorian mansion, built in the 1890’s by a gold miner who struck it rich in Colorado. It had belonged to a relative of Roy Chapman Andrews, author of “Born Under a Wandering Star”, who was responsible for bringing to America many of the skeletal and fossilized remains of dinosaurs he obtained on expeditions to China.  Our basement was full of his trunks and miscellaneous artifacts which he had left there, and never retrieved.  I remember using his photographic chemicals, and I found a tin of wonderful Chinese tea which I brewed up.

My stepfather bought the house with the money still remaining from my father’s estate after my first stepfather’s music studio adventure. In two years it would all be gone.

The previous owner of that house was a doctor and the house came with a marvelous library which included not only extensive medical references but an equally well-endowed collection of spiritual and metaphysical works. I was a reader and got quite an education in history, spirituality, and human sexuality while we were there.

A street ran down the north side of the house and the open field below us. Our neighbors were arranged down the hill on the opposite side of the street, and there was a low fence on our side.

When my brother was 34 years old he got a call from a person he had forgotten but who had not forgotten him. The caller, Shirley Mayfield, was a nurse and lived across the street on the north side. She told him she had become quite involved with him as a caretaker and always carried him in her heart. She wondered what happened to him and decided to find out. After thirty years she managed to connect with him again.

As the conversation unfolded the story became clear. When Shirley would come home from work at 3:00 in the afternoon, My brother was always waiting for her at the fence. She told him he was a wonderful little boy, gentle and loving, and she remembered us all as good kids, hard-working and kind. As time went on she began to take him home with her when she got home from work, and over a period of time began to care for him up until 9:00 at night, when she would bring him home. She had a bed set up for him there, and he had toys, and she cared for him. As my brother began to hear what was being said to him he realized that this person loved him very much.

I recalled after learning about the call from Shirley that Mamie the maid, my mother, my brothers and I were all involved in a collaborative effort to keep Pete out of the way of my stepfather, and Pete was kept somewhere a lot of the time. I’d forgotten all about where.

Shirley hesitantly told him that he had been an abused child, and while he had heard it from me before, it suddenly struck home when he heard it from Shirley. She also told him that because of his presence in her life she and her husband had later decided to adopt and raise two children.

My brother has always had a gentle and loving nature. I was always surprised that no overt angry behavior had ever manifested itself in his life. When telling me this story he told me that he had always felt a sort of “alien” well of anger present within himself, and had never known where it came from.

Now he does. Now he knows why he has managed to stay true to his gentle nature in spite of that experience. At that particularly critical stage in his social development, angels named Mamie and Rosie and Shirley were sent to help him and care for him and love him and protect him, and the rest of us, too.

When I was fifteen my stepfather broke my spirit. At the kitchen table one day my hatred of his meanness and arrogance overcame me. During one of his hateful harangues as he bullied each of us in turn during the noon meal, the deep anger in me finally erupted in uncontrollable rage and I took a swing at him and struck him in the side of his face. I weighed 130 pounds and he weighed two hundred and forty. I was 5’-4” tall. He was 6’-4”. I couldn’t believe what I had done, it was a reflexive act that stunned me, and I just stood there in shock at what had happened. He knocked me down, sat on top of me and beat me mercilessly.

It was the beginning of a dark age. During the beating my mother and my brothers did nothing. I went to school concussed, bruised and cut, my skull lumpy with knots and bruises, lip split – and my friends and teachers could do nothing. I wrote to my relatives, and they did nothing. I was too afraid to run away, and did nothing. The total, abject fear I felt as I snuck around the house slowly gave way to anger and despair.

The beating proved that I was alone in a brutal world where the people who truly loved you died and when you lost them they were gone, dead, and they couldn’t come back, not even to help you. A world where few cared and those few who did couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything anyway. A world where I couldn’t even save myself. It was a deep wound. It began at my father’s death and was completed in the beating.

The effect of the wound was odd and subtle. I moved on. I was young and strong and smart, quick and witty and wry and funny, caring and kind and helpful to others. I had joy and dreams and talents. I had an early childhood full of love and attention that told me I was worthy. I was capable. I had a strong spirit and a highly developed sense of justice, of right and wrong.

I fell in love and married. We loved and cared for each other. We had three beautiful children together. I pursued my dream of becoming a writer.

But there were strange places in my life. Soft, bruised places. Upwellings of fear and pain. Melancholy, self-loathing. The wound grew larger, spreading, festered by every echo of that first, ancient trauma. The assassination of John F. Kennedy a knife twisted in my heart. In 1968 the thundering forge of the world. A Viet Cong officer is executed, his brains photographed blowing away from his head. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy is shot dead. The 1968 Democratic National Convention turns bloody in the streets. The White Album is released by The Beatles. On it is the lyric “…blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly…”

I moved further and further toward the outside edge of human society. I was afraid of the world “out there.” I participated only in my writing and my marriage. And slowly I became estranged even there. I began drinking for recreational relief. Later it became anesthetic, and finally, punishment.

In 1979, after a painful divorce, I got up from the kitchen table at my brother’s apartment, loaded some hand tools and books into my car, found a wool blanket in the dumpster where I shed the remainder of my belongings, and drove to Coos Bay, Oregon. I parked the car on the beach. I entered a deep depression there, ultimately winding up derelict, my only possession that wool blanket. I wandered up and down the beach like a wild animal, eating out of the tidal pools, sleeping by driftwood fires, smelling like wood smoke, mad as a hatter.

I stumbled back into town near the end of myself, and after a suicide gesture found myself in a mental hospital for 3 days. The diagnosis was “acute depression, situational in nature”.

After that I tried to go back to my family, but my ex-wife was involved in a new relationship and that final stroke plunged me into total hopelessness. I felt at the time that I had lost my children to circumstances crueler than death. Truth had nothing to do with that feeling, but it was real, and absolute to me. My children were gone from me. We would never be together again. That is what I felt, what I believed. I grieved beyond my ability to describe. I was living mostly dead. The day came, finally, when suicide became more than a desire and a possibility. This time it was not a gesture. I killed myself.

I fired the electrical impulse which would end my life. I made the decision, I made the choice, I committed the act. And a voice said “No.”  It boomed through the air around me, and I actually saw iron gates slammed shut in front of me. I still hear that booming echo, still see those gates.

My decision had been made, the impulse fired. In slow and perfectly clarity I felt the spark leave my brain and fire through the nerves of my arm on an irretrievable mission to make real my will for me. The actual physical electricity in my nervous system simply disappeared, evaporated into nothingness somewhere in my forearm. Life ruled. My will was subject to it. It was a stunning revelation.

There was still a lot to go through. I had to die to my old self, to become a child again. That path became a freefall down the known world, through many losses. I passed through grief and madness and arrived at the holy ground stripped bare. Then began my actual awareness and participation and experience in the spiritual life; that transcendent, pivotal movement from thoughts of God and desire for God and the suspicion that there really is God, to real knowing.

It would be three years before I began to crawl from that pit. My recovery began after I crashed a motorcycle at high speed on a lonely country gravel road late at night. A woman from a nearby farmhouse, investigating the sound, found me with a flashlight. I lay in a field pinned under the wreck. Her screams for help and the light bobbing across my eyes were all I was aware of.

—–

The Pit: The Legend of The Fall

The only written record of the last three years of my “dark age” is the following poem. After the first four stanzas it has to be read backwards, i.e. from the end forward, for the actual chronology.

How long have I been here? I just woke up… I had dreams a hundred years long.

The crew’s all dead. The star-screen is empty… Something’s gone terribly wrong.

I remember…

Staging.

The walk to the time lock.

…lonely white

chambers-cold, so

very cold-

a blinding burn of arctic indifference… my heart ached… I

froze.

And dreamed. Those dreams.

…monochrome, red-washed rooms of images, each

suspended in stasis I roved with my eye—each

a perfectly hung holograph… no death… No life.

They are all. Cubicles from long ago… now

I wander the hall in a folded matrix,

a tunnel in a tesseract core.

…time turns each facet of that geometry

toward the axis of my face;

turns each vision through my eyes…

Time runs backward from here in place.

…i remembered the motorcycle slide the crashing the slam against the earth a screaming woman flashlight bobbing against my eyes…

…i remember the bar-fight smoldering rage shoved my attack slamming holes with that redneck’s head through the bathroom door…

…casey, lovely casey, you feel it and i feel it let’s go to nebraska and raise kids you leave the tough beery indians and the street and i’ll leave the rest…

…lonely drunk fourth of July midnight suicide in the mobile home park, turned off the gas as i fell and woke up after all…

…another try bitterangryproud lovely woman i will not see you again goodbye to my children in the rear-view mirror goodbyedaddy goodbye…

…cold winter commerce and heart-wash college B.B.King blues and YouCanChangeTheWayYouFeel Jacuzzi respectability at 8:30PM MWF in my urban hive cold thin light of winter mornings on my balcony over the tennis courts…

,,.death on the scope in ICU i felt the flutter sigh and saw her die several seconds before the flat line…

…the cerebral slow-kill four months dying i died too and cried on monday made the wine run to the coast and sped to Reno/called on thursday and you died empty i already knew and understood…

…mustang ranch michelle Scandinavian blonde and blue we drank creme de menthe and listened to the doobies you held me and we talked for you lazy puppies in the trick-bar after and dumfounded the bartender peace and calm in central babylon…

… a suicide in skamania county, a life so cruel it felt like murder the investigation revealed she was only brutalized, born in bangkok boiled in the cauldron fleeing with losers and walked on her own into the wind river and died…

…married a shadow four months of delirium the object still lived and the shadow faded my temporary two-year-old son stood beside me in the driveway leaned against the car with me wrapped his arm behind my leg and said it’s ok it’s sad and i love you i know you’re going and i went away…

…rockyhorrorpictureshow with her and a sixpack and of course that lovely mexican neighborhood tavern fixed the boys’ bicycles and square-danced in portland and damn we were good…

…grief so real it broke my knees and i soaked my shirt with tears i remember kneeling in the south pasture crying numb eyes to the impassive sky…

…i laid in the jail on the concrete floor for six hours never moved a muscle watched the distant cage-light come through a door/barred-window and run under the cup of my hand…

…broke down your door and stunned by your boyfriend if you wanted me gone you had to have me thrown out i spin-kicked the cop and terrified his partner you said take me that was the killing  i lost the fight…

…finally exhausted i rest in the crazy house making miraculous contact with one who won*t talk i’m depressed about losing and watching love die there is no indicated pathology and if i find a place to live then i’ll probably live ‘til i die…

…on the beach i’m a wildman sleep in the sand by a fire at night i smell like woodsmoke wander mad as a dog up and down the seacoast drink with the bikers in red’s tavern at night a man lost his leg in traffic at noonday and the raped indian girl found her way to my safe fire one midnight…

…smoking hash we all laughed with each other with flashing eyes i still, numb confusion fell the lights died…

…i left my home my heart and my family you had died 8 months prior and i still thought we were alive i went out and let the whirlwind take me i went out to live and die…

—–

It’s hard to articulate the root of my eventual resurrection other than to say I think I owe it to my father and his love for me, and the love of others as well, in those early days of childhood when I became aware of and it was impressed upon me, again and again, how much goodness there is in this world. In my own experience a manic-depressive nature and deep-trauma stressors aimed me for death. That love made the difference, and somehow it stood between me and the abyss.

There is no magic bullet that will erase wounds. Wounds are injuries that cause changes. Wounds go two ways; they fester or they heal into a healthy scar. Healing a wound doesn’t mean it is erased from memory or consciousness. Wounds don’t disappear. The so-called healing process is not marked by a wonderful return to a former status quo where the wound is not present.

There are wonderful returns to happier mental and emotional states nearly identical to healthy pre-wounding conditions. The amputee returns aided by a prosthetic. The broken mind returns supported by an orderly coping system. The isolated, broken spirit returns with a spiritual connection. The shattered heart remembers how to love.

Yet scars are real. In my experience there are still times when dark offerings of despair and depression and hopelessness appear, threatening to open the wound again. So I am careful. I am plainly aware of my limitations. I carry scars from things too painful to forget.

When my father died I was uprooted, flung into tumbling chaos, buffeted by the storm, helpless in the fury yet to come. He died young, raging and thrashing with the pains of life. Somehow, I didn’t. That’s what happened. There’s no answer here but that.

On my father’s last day my mother remembers sitting in his lap and sharing a watermelon with him. She remembers a searing moment when everything changed, and he stood up and looked at her with a terrible clarity and said, “I know every way there is to live, and I don’t want any of them.”

I know that time, that place, that feeling. It is my father in me. It is the world we encounter, the separation it confronts us with, the anguish found in the hard and horrible facts of life. It is our shared nature, our genetic make-up, our rejection of every unloving thing here. It is our defiance of evil, our unwillingness to allow it to stand, our willingness to sacrifice all in order to end the unbearable horrors we encounter here. It is the deep, driving urgency to end the pains of life and find peace. It is the force which ruthlessly drives us.

My mother remembers the instant, knowing exactly what he meant, realizing that she had to fight for his life with everything she had, knowing that what they had between them was not enough to win, knowing that every lever she could find had to come to bear in that very moment.

She looked at him gravely and said, “I can’t raise these kids without you.” Hoping that love would hold him back. He looked at her and said, “Yes. You can.” And he was gone.

That’s what happened.

ENDINGS and BEGINNINGS

When I was seven my father died. The gate of the palace of my childhood opened onto the roadways of samsara, and I left the palace and began to experience the suffering of the world.

On that path as a young adult I decided I wanted to live a full life.  I didn’t know what I had chosen until it became terribly real. I found myself compelled to go out into the world to live and to die, and managed to do both. Like Mithridates I sampled all of earth’s killing store. I became as empty of life as a husk.

Then, at the end of a road in high mountains, I found myself in a place of learning where there were sages who knew and lived and embodied truths I had despaired were not present in the world. It was a spiritual oasis in the materialistic, mechanistically complex wastelands of modern society.

It was a time and place marked first by forgiveness of myself and healing from the wounds I had given and taken from others and myself on the road of suffering. Study and contemplation and meditation followed, and the ruthless discovery and explication of my divine and worldly selves. In that place I woke up to many things.

After a season there a choice appeared. I could continue to refine the spiritual clarity I had found in the contemplative life, or I could leave and walk the road of the world. I deferred my decision and waited patiently, trusting that the way would be made clear to me. It was, and no choice was necessary. I took the path of living in the world and experiencing the existential joy and woe of humanity. I chose it, it chose me.

It’s the path of returning to the stream of life we re-enter after the first satori, after awakening. Satori is often seen as an end in the mirror of mind. Yet in essence it is the opposite of what is seen in that mirror. It’s a beginning. Most people reading this have already achieved satori, yet seek it still. They are already far on their way, engaging in a process of refinement through attention to their unique existential experience until reaching the realization that the divine essence and the existential experience are not separate.

I returned to the stream of life. Out into the world I went, open and cheerful and free and agreeable and at peace, not far removed from the purity of the transcendental forge. In my passage from the pristine chamber of pointed mindfulness into the world of Baudelairean flowers and Levitttown tracts, a certain grace came out into the world with me.

The perspective shift was massive. The whole and holy core of being, pure and inchoate and known, was in my chosen return into the world once again overlaid with perception, language, emotion, movement, polarity. Dualistic mind asserted its function as navigator. I employed the map of mind overlaying the universe.

I carried on embracing the earthly life, making choices, becoming familiar with what it is to be chained to karma, to be influenced and coerced by perception, language, emotion, movement, polarity; to experience free will and its triumphs and defeats and be guided in this existence by the returns of the karmic principle.

I expected to encounter others who knew the divine mysteries of human existence. People who had found the key, unlocked the door, found the answer to the great question; others who also knew the secret of life. I thought I would encounter many people practicing awareness in daily life, perfecting their existential ways and means, learning to be reflexively aligned and balanced in their apprehension of spiritual and worldly being.

I was surprised when I discovered that while many named it, and named it well and extensively, there were few who claimed it and knew it truly. What surprised me most was that those who taught it, while being good teachers, often knew not of what they taught. That is to say, they knew it, as truth is always known, yet they did know it well enough to live it. They were awake, yet sleeping. They were connected, yet not incorporated. Their words were clear, yet the manifested nature of their lives involved status, power, money and self glorification. They were in the stream, yet caught in powerful eddies and whirlpools which had conducted them far from the natural flow into backwaters and brackish pools which would eventually, slowly, find their way back to the river.

In the mountains of Colorado I did find a person awake to the spiritual nature of being and living in it, walking with a breathing grace and tenderness, embodying the insight and knowledge of experience and the wisdoms gained therein, emanating daily the simple, practical essence of love. I could no more turn from her presence than the earth could flee the sun, or the moon spin away from earth, and so we became friends.

Our friendship grew and deepened and one day we were welded together by what is called the “thunderbolt.” I reached out to gently touch her hand during a full, quiet moment together, and without warning the lid of the universe exploded and an indescribable fullness beyond filling poured in and permeated us both simultaneously.

In that instant we became one whole and indivisible person, mysteriously bonded by the unknowable essence of wu wei; a natural, wholly harmonious and inexplicable union. It was a heaven of a thing. We went together on the karmic path, cosmic wolves mated forever, loping down from the high places into the town below.

We lived the way we knew. In our early lives we had passed through the dark wood and the pitfalls there. Now we shared the desire to experience life on its own terms, in the light of our knowing, and we proceeded to do so. We carry that light still, and always will. It’s come a far piece with us down the river and road of our lives, down through the peaceful stretches and panoramas and the rapids and hard rocks there, and sustains us.

On we went together, laughing and loving and dancing and living this life. I found satisfaction and fulfillment as a carpenter. We had a child, we lived in an ever-expanding realm of love in the home we created.

We were challenged by the world. It’s a narrow path, walking through a civilization defined by hubris and fear. Several times I attempted to incorporate myself into the ways and means there. I conducted myself in an open, honest, agreeable way and succeeded after a fashion. Yet it became ever clearer that my assimilation there would be a spiritual tragedy, a life compromised.

I could not lend my energy to the enrichment of ignorant, greedy bosses, could not in good conscience strengthen the snares they were caught in with my own participation. I knew that what I give my attention to I give power to, and I did not want to empower the separations of spirit I saw there. I left that world as an employee and decided it was best if I deployed myself rather than be directed by the appetites and desires and the authority which others imagined they had.

We started our own construction business. We rendered unto Caesar the forms and taxes required, we dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s  necessary to be regarded as a legitimate, acceptable entity in our business community. Behind the veneer of our business façade we conducted ourselves quite differently from business as usual.

We worked side by side in the service of others, designing and building things which enhanced the quality of life in the homes of good people, avoiding projects and clients infected with selfishness and arrogance and uncooperative spirits and desires for excess and wasteful luxury. We charged what we thought was fair, and what we thought was fair were the wages a worthy laborer is due, and no more.

In America such a decision has grave consequences as people grow older and are no longer able to work. Older now, we know that had we done it differently we would be much poorer in spirit as a consequence of having devoted ourselves to material wealth. In the eyes of some we lost a fortune of money, left on the kitchen tables of our clients. In that sense we paid a price for what we have and do not have as a result. What we have received in return is beyond price to us. We lost nothing, and gained much.

We were not driven by societal and cultural values. We were in it for the satisfactions of a humble, honestly-earned livelihood and the rewards of generosity of spirit. There were days working together when the pure joy of work was so present it became a dance of exultant, wonderful being, in the world.

While we were conducting ourselves according to our light we encountered over and over again people beset with troubles and fears. We encountered people who sensed a mutual resonance and the wisdom behind the model we presented to them in the conduct of our own lives as we worked in their homes. We met others unable to see anything more than their own closely held troubles and fears.

We saw and knew the ways people employed to hold the dark beast at bay while it chased them down the halls of their lives. Some staved it off with blind, societal religions wherein good principles of love were twisted in toward special selfishness. Some sought to outrun it with furious, unceasing industry and earnest pursuit of vague, promised satisfactions which would magically appear as soon as they had obtained enough money, power, or prestige.

We knew the root of their unease. They had come to believe their souls would be fulfilled as soon as they met the laws and demands of the materialistic world they believed in. They feared homelessness, poverty and hunger. They feared ostracism and loss of community. They feared the vast, open expanses of the universe, they feared imprisonment. They feared death, they feared life.

Who among us can say we have not experienced these same fears, have not felt chased by the same dark shadows? I certainly can not. They appeared from time to time in the shadows of my existential experience, and in those moments they seemed very real to that part of me. They still do, there. This is how it is. The divine and existential coexist in seeming paradox, simultaneously in conflict and reconciled.

God is troubled, God is without troubles. This is the life the Buddha awakens to. This is the life the Christ lives. This is the life humanity lives, the knowing it seeks.

PROFOUND GRIEF

A Love Story

A stone, a leaf, a door… O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

INTRODUCTION

Profound grief is as unique as the person experiencing it. Grief is a place where, in the end, each person discovers their own way and finds their own means.

I am a grieving, bereaved person who shared a profound love with a remarkable person named Lenore. This is the story of our love and my grief in the wake of her death. Grief is not linear. It is a tumbling, chaotic round of turmoil. Ground passed over before returns; unbelief and the emotional horror of the beloved’s loss does not fade simply because it is acknowledged once.

This book is being written in that world at a desk surrounded by unfathomable depths of darkness. There are times when I can think, and remember and feel. I write during those times. The rest of the time I neither think or remember or feel. I am null and void, a dweller in the regions inhabited by crushed souls.

It is all in pieces now. These pages hold what is left of a once whole, true, profound love between two people who found the secrets of the universe and the true meaning of life.

Profound Grief: A Love Story

The Human Being Behind All Anatomy

In the short story “The Anatomy Lesson” by Evan S. Connell, Andrev Andraukov is an aging artist and art teacher in a college. He is eccentric and obsessed with his vigil for a student who will “understand what it meant to be an artist; one student, born with the instinct of compassion, who could learn, who would renounce temporal life for the sake of billions yet unborn, just one who cared less for himself than for others.”

As his class attempts to draw a female model, Andraukov lectures them, instructs them, and initiates them into seeing anatomy as a vehicle to understanding the human being behind the anatomy, the particular human. Andraukov as mentor takes them deeper into the particular to see the universal: “He spoke of how Rembrandt painted a young woman looking out an open window and said to them that she did not live three hundred years ago, no, she was more than one young woman, she was all, from the first who had lived on earth to the one yet unborn who would be the final.”

I have lived with that very woman. For 33 years I saw her look out that open window to behold this life and then walk out to meet it daily with passion and gentleness and strength and goodness, being cheerful in all weathers and truly more interested and concerned for others than herself. She is the one I kept vigil for in my earlier life. She is the human being behind all anatomy, and from her I learned to care less for myself than her. She is, has been, and will always be my greatest blessing.

“I Understand.”

Today I have driven to Cannon Beach, a coastal town on the Oregon Coast and a place Lenore and I often went. On the trip here I found myself looking through Lenore’s eyes, or her through mine, I couldn’t tell you which. At times it seemed the first, at others the second.

Before she died we agreed to meet on the beach there after she had gone. I would bring a bottle of wine and two glasses. We would meet there, she on the other side of the curtain, me still here. And we would see what happened.

Everywhere, as I drive, I am looking for the light she saw here.

The grass on the hillsides and in the fields and orchard lands east of Portland is a brilliant green this time of year, glowing in the spring rains with life and new growth. It is farm and wine country, and the barns and farmhouses and wineries roll across the countryside with the grace of the undulating land. Under the cloud-scattered sky as I drove, gray chiaroscuro shades in the landscape filled with brilliant color and sharp definition in patches of sunlight drifting across the landscape.

On the winding highway through the coastal mountains sudden vistas of valley and forest appear, spread out for miles. I stop at an overlook and a swath of sunshine floats across the valley below.

The first week of last September we were here. She was able to walk short distances with her canes, in a wheelchair the rest of the time. We did what we always do, wheeling her all the way. We bought fresh salmon and vegetables and salad and fudge and wine in the markets and took it to our room overlooking the ocean. We prepared our meal together and drank the wine and ate together and afterward went out on the balcony and gazed at the ocean and talked for a long time about life and death, and beauty and joy and sadness and loss, and about how important every moment is.

On the coast today, driving through town, sunlight drifts between cloud shadows on the ocean. Light and shadows. In the sunshine the roiled surf glistens like foamy, hammered glass. The clouds are white on top, and gray beneath. Their reflections on the wet, tan sand create columns of soft white light with stretches of faded charcoal between. Light and shadow.

Sitting in the truck after arriving at our hotel, I was looking down the long, gray, weathered-cedar shakes on the side of the building and wondering if – even after the drive here, even after all the beauty and light seen in new ways and even after the presence of Lenore in me and with me as we rode together – if there is enough here in this world to hold me here. I wanted to be with her so much in that moment, to be with her where she is.

She spoke to me then, telling me that as long as I am here she can be here too, seeing through my eyes and feeling in my heart the beauty and joy of this life she loves so much. I asked her if she would fault me if I took that from her and broke my promise to stay here and shine my light, and she said, “Oh no, my darling. I understand.”

The sadness here is terrible, the grief worse. This coastal town we enjoyed so much together has become a place of shadows and sad memories and suffering for me now. The condolences coming in from many feel rote and superficial even though I know they come from good hearts, reaching out to connect, to touch me with love in the best way they know how. Some grieve with me, and I do my own best to connect with them and touch them with my love in the best way I know how. A few see how devoted I am to her, how very much I love her, how I honor her and how I cared and care for her. They touch me the most, they break my heart, they see and say the truth and in those moments I break down and cry, inconsolable.

I am leaving this place today and won’t come back. Instead I will hold the memories of our earlier days together here; the gulls arcing through the air; our walks together on the wet sand next to this great ocean; the clouds of tiny birds sweeping and turning in unison over the waves; the sunny times when two souls wandered together as one through this wonderful, beautiful life.

Unknown Waters

We used to sail on a nearby mountain lake. Lenore was an accomplished sailor and loved the idea of sailing in the mountains. We had some wonderful times in that high country.

Now I’m adrift on an emotional ocean. There are peaks and troughs and breakers; sometimes I can see a horizon, sometimes I’m down in shadowy depths surrounded by walls of dark water and can’t get a point of reference because everything shifts and changes. There are times when breakers hit and the world is turmoil and tumble and I’m drowning and my chest aches and everything washes away in tears. I’ve sailed beyond some mapped boundary into unknown waters, alone, where the only truth is the storm.

Her death has unmoored me. Together, for each other, we were anchor and tiller and sail on the sea of life; we found our way together in the winds and under the sky and sun and moon. We navigated as one. Now she’s gone and I’m trying to find my way alone.

I’ve been willing and open and cooperative in seeking out help and information about grief. I’ve reminded myself of my spiritual beliefs and knowing, my learned wisdoms, and previous experiences with loss and grief. I’ve done my best to use it all.

People tell me what I’m experiencing is normal, and with the best of intentions offer me the conventional remedies and wisdoms. They say it’s normal to feel this way, that love and loss are the same for everybody; that the bereaved always regard the love they had as truly special.

Conventional wisdom doesn’t apply here. Head-tooling and heart-tooling fail; it all proves to be nothing more than feeble attempts to rebuild this world so that Lenore is still in it. I tell myself she is here with me, she is in me. I tell myself we are one and that can’t ever be undone. I tell myself we can still be here together. I tell myself it just takes time and is hard and eventually I will find a way to live here. It is all desperate and removed from the truth that howls beneath. She is gone.

Recently I looked at a photograph of Lenore and only saw a picture of a planet that no longer exists. It’s an entire world gone, lost in time, a memory fading into history. I’m far away from that place, alone in an ocean of deep space in a dark capsule, moving ever further away. The only remnants of the world we shared are these faded pieces of photo paper, archiving a light which no longer exists in the world.

This is not normal, this is not conventional. We were not normal, we were not conventional. We were extraordinary, we were rare exceptions to the rules that define normal and conventional and typical. A few people know that. They saw it, they recognized us; they knew who we were together.

The Existential Netherworld

I arrived on the Oregon coast three days ago. Yesterday I drove north, today I drove south. In two days I’ve explored about 65 miles of what must surely be one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.

The drive north was on a day of rain showers beneath billowing clouds riding easily inland on a gentle sea breeze. Today, going south, a spring storm hammered the capes and beaches under dark skies and storm surf. Hammering winds across the headlands curled down into the lees and drove deluges of rain across isolated bays and coves and the highway.

Both days spent in some kind of existential netherworld where I am there but not there, aware yet numb, moving yet isolated; and behind it all there’s a subtle, subliminal urgency to just keep moving.

Strange things happen on these journeys. I drive past places we have been together and forgotten about. Fragments of memory appear. On the journey north when I pull into a beachside place where we played with children on the beach and flew a kite and explored a tidal pool and lay on towels in the sun and had a picnic, the sun breaks through as I pull into the parking space. It filters down through tall coastal trees and I wonder if it is her, happy to be here again.

When I leave the sky goes dark, and as I pull onto the highway a cloudburst of rain floods the windshield and I wonder if it is her, feeling my sadness, sharing my sadness; or is it her own sadness at not being here anymore. And I am crying, and driving on.

On the drive south a beautiful panorama of stormy coastal beach appears and the unexpected, sudden beauty of it all is first an unbidden, joyful surprise we are sharing together – and then I remember she is not there, and I am crying yet again.

Standing on an overlook at a place so beautiful and perfect all I can do is be there with it and experience it, I remember how we stood together in those moments and places, her arms wrapped around my arm, snuggled up next to me. And I break, and cry, and move on.

This is how it is. This is what grief is.

A Part of Every Day

I’m glad she died first. I’m glad I’m the one taking the blow and not her. She died well, it was a good death. She was herself to the last; unafraid, enduring terrible pain, yet ever who she was to the bone – a sweet, loving person willing to hug everyone she met and learn their story.

Bereavement is a shattering experience. They say the pieces of the shattered self come back together slowly and a person is never the same as they were before. I wonder how that will look, that changed self. In our case that self, that person, is actually two people who are really one self. Lenore is still as much a part of me as I am, even though she has died. How can that ever come back together? She died, she’s gone from the body, and I’m here without her. That’s truth, plain and simple and clear. Her loss is in me forever. Wherever I go, it will go too.

Tears are a part of every day now. They come with thoughts, they come with memories, they come suddenly, unbidden, when I least expect it. Yesterday I was grocery shopping and when I turned a corner on my way to the next item on my list, without warning, an empty, overwhelming sadness welled up and just gutted me right there.

I live in some sort of exquisite, poignant, crushing alternate reality these days. Life is so beautiful and full and so colorless and empty. When I see couples together I don’t listen to what they are saying to each other anymore. I don’t listen and look for the nuances in their interactions that would inform me of the nature of their relationship. I’m just glad they have each other.

I hope they are making the most of their love, hope that they are aware of the perfect, terrible beauty of this life. We are born here, we live here, and we leave here. The love we find and share is here, now. One day the person or persons we share our love with may not be here anymore. It’s so easy to push that fact into the background of our lives.

I’m grateful Lenore and I knew that. I’m grateful for every moment when, unbidden, just like the grief that comes and engulfs me now, one of us went to the other in a moment of spontaneous, inexplicable joy and said to the other, “I love you.”

“How sweet,” we’d say, pleased and touched. Then we’d say something like “Why? What brought that on?” It’s always nice to know why you are loved. And the answer was always the same. “No reason. Just because.” We’d smile at one another, and kiss, and go on about our business in the glowing warmth and light of those moments.

No reason. That’s it exactly. It’s not a head thing, it’s a heart thing. The mind is a useful thing, yet when it comes to matters of the heart it only holds processed shadows of what the heart knows; it’s a repository of annotations, a reference source which may or may not be able to conduct us back to the source of true knowing.

There’s a Mary Englebreit card Lenore saved on our bulleting board here and it says, “The heart is the temple wherein all truth resides.” It’s true. Soaring love and desolate grief are the truths which live there. Joy and mourning live there. The perfect, terrible beauties and facts and realities of this life live there.

The Swallows

Six days ago barn swallows started building a nest on top of the porch light above the entry door of the RV. It felt like both a reminder from Lenore and a hopeful sign; life goes on, and our life together will too. I thought of how delighted she would be about swallows nesting with us in our nest. It was a good thought, and I didn’t feel sad.

I thought about it all through the day as I watched the swallows come and go, bringing mud from the river bank and tiny twigs from the forest and earnestly building the nest of this new season. I knew they had chosen the spot because it was under cover of the RV awning in a seeming eave on a human-built habitation – those are the conditions barn swallows in the northwest seek first for their nests. 

I recognized it wasn’t a place that would be permanently that way for them. The eave is not always there, I have to retract the awning during strong winds. The Mystic Wind is not a fixed habitation, it moves from place to place. I still wanted them to be there anyway. I started trying to devise a plan that would make it work for them.

These days I look directly and unsparingly at a lot of things. I looked into the length of time it would take for them to accomplish their aim. I sadly realized it would be better if they found another, better place to nest. The next morning at sunrise, before they returned to continue building, I retracted the awning and removed the beginnings of their nest.

I watched when they returned. One in particular with a small twig in its beak flew in again and again, looking for the home no longer there. It would approach, and hover, and then leave and fly in a tight arc about twenty feet out, anxious and confused. Finally it landed on a perch about a foot away from where it had placed the nest, had a good look at what was not there anymore, and flew away. It hasn’t come back since. I miss their wings fluttering purposefully under the awning and am sad that they won’t be back.

They’re in a new place. So is Lenore. I miss her angel wings fluttering purposefully here in my life and our nest.

Thelma and Louise

I always thought we’d be doing a Thelma and Louise together into the Grand Canyon before, at the last, she told me I must stay behind and share my light. That’s the honest truth. We spoke about it several times, laughing yet seriously looking at it. We belonged together; it was natural to think we would die together. We never really could decide on it one way or the other. It was pending, awaiting a decision when the way was made clear and certain.

I was so good with that plan. I was ready and willing to die with her, to go out together, to enter the next life together; to always be together. She knew all I was waiting for was her word that it was time to go. It actually surprised me when she told me I needed to stay here. She knew being with her was all I wanted and it meant more to me than life itself.

I know she considered my thoughts and feelings about that along with all the other things facing her, and us, and I know that when she told me to stay here and shine my light she meant it with all the knowing she had in her wonderful heart.

This morning after the sun was in the eastern sky I went down to the river and sat on a bench there. In front of me tall, thin stalks of grass, heavy with the seed-sheaths of springtime, bent and swayed in a soft land breeze. The river ran smoothly toward the ocean and light flashed on small breakers in the water above sand banks just below the surface, rising in the ebb tide. The contoured horizon of the treed hills on the other side of the river felt eternal and everlasting.

Down river toward the bay I saw the town crowded on the shoreline and the houses on the hill above and thought about how human beings don’t really have dominion over the earth at all. They nestle up to it and draw their sustenance and the food of their souls from it.

I watched a blue heron hunting on the sand shoals of low tide, seemingly walking on the water in the middle of the river. Its paced, majestic stroll and sudden, quick spears into the water caught something deep in me and I watched it with a peaceful, patient fascination for a long time.

And everywhere, everywhere – light and shadows. The heron’s beak gleaming silver in the sun; the eternal shadows in the trees on the hillside; the brilliant green moss on old stumps, ancient river snags, dark with age and twisted roots and branches. The impermanent buildings and houses in the town washed bright in light older than the ages.

On the bench I imagine Lenore is beside me, seeing what I am seeing. Yet again I feel her arms wrapped around my arm, her cheek snuggled up to my shoulder as it was so many times when we beheld the beauty of the earth and this life together. I lean into her embrace and there we are, together.

Later I get up slowly from the bench. In all this beauty I am again alone and she is gone. I walk back up the treed path from the river with tears in my eyes. There are moments these days which end with a wail, and moments that give me peace. There are times when grief pierces my heart and I bleed, when sorrow crushes me and I cry, when love comforts me and I rest. This is what it is now. Love in pain, joy in sorrow, peace in turmoil. The full, terrible beauty of this life is what’s real. All I can do is let it all happen, let it lead where it will lead and do what it will, let it be what it is.

My God, how I miss her!

Perfect Endarkenment

At times during the day I take my glasses off to clean them and notice a field of fine, dried salt drops sprayed across the backside of both lenses. Tiny dots, a lot of them. When grief hits me the explosion blows a fine spray of tears straight off my eyeballs.

I don’t get thoughtful or mildly uneasy anymore about the potential, low-probability dangers present in places I drive – like high, long bridges or roads along steep cliffs, or tsunami zones, or high-speed two-way traffic. Instead I feel a tiny, wistful measure of hope that catastrophe and deliverance are both just around the next corner.

Sometimes I suddenly come back to myself and realize I’ve been staring at the same place for several minutes, seeing nothing, feeling nothing; just numb and fixed in a state of suspended animation. Life, stopped in its tracks. It’s like the dark side of meditational bliss, the opposite number, the evil mirror-sibling. No-bliss, no-life. It’s Perfect Endarkenment.  

Sometimes Lenore and I kid each other and I’ll say something about how she’s the one in the box of ashes next to me and I’m the one left in a damn body to deal with all this. She’ll reply, “Yes honey, that’s true – but you’re the one hanging on to every word I say.” Then she flutters her wide-open eyes at me and gives me a big, sweet, innocent smile. She’s right, as usual. The authorities here are more likely to frown on my condition than hers.

Standing Alone Outside the Godhead

I try to keep it at bay. I stay busy, I hold to a loose but fairly consistent daily schedule that provides structure to my days. I keep up with mundane daily duties of taking care of basic needs. I shop, I do laundry. I make sure I get enough good food and sleep to take care of myself like Lenore told me to do. I keep our home clean and ordered and maintained. 

I read, and think, and learn, and write. I go down to the river or to the ocean or mountains and spend contemplative time beholding and experiencing the eternal perfections of nature and this earth. I go fishing, I eat out, I treat myself to special meals.

I meet new people and shine a part of that light she told me to share, smiling, looking them in the eye, communicating the countless nuances of connection she and I learned together, projecting energy which helps them feel safe and comfortable and invites them to join us – now me – in the moment.

It’s about connection, and up until now it’s been my experience that connection brings peace. Now there is no peace in the connections I make with the people and places and things in my life. The moments come, the moments go, and even in those moments of connection the loneliness I feel in her absence lurks like a dark, empty shadow in my mind and heart and gut and life. We’re separated, and there’s no peace in that.

We’re connected too, of course. Yet memories, and the presence of her in me, and the thing that became us and still abides in me, and the spiritual knowing we gained together of who and what we are really in this universe – none of that comes forward to stand strongly against this loneliness.

I think there’s a difference between being heart-sick and being soul-sick. The soul sickness I’ve been experiencing after Lenore’s death is like standing alone outside the godhead that together we were immersed in as one spirit.

The Fragile Edge

Every time I look at a calendar my eye involuntarily glances at her death date. Last month and now this month it’s been a day on that fragile edge that Lenore spoke about at the last, a place that sometimes just won’t hold you.

I open a cabinet door and there are the things she used to bake bread and muffins, and all the spices, and her shadow is in the kitchen, baking and cooking.

It’s a beautiful day here. All the beauty and she’s not here. She said she wanted to die before me because she wouldn’t know what to do in this life without me. I don’t know what to do in this life without her.

Every point of purchase gained doesn’t last and I am constantly back at the beginning, crying, driving away from the hospice center, dead, a robot on automatic pilot going forward out of habit without her.

I actually reset the trip odometer on the truck before I put it in gear in the hospice parking lot that last day. Mile zero of the road ahead. I have no idea why I did that or what it reads now. Today it’s still at zero as far as I’m concerned. Or it reads a million billion miles away from where I want to be.

The Ones Who Don’t Survive

The survivors of grief tell their stories, share their pain and loss and hope and wisdom and the nature of their lives after the blow. They’re still here, life goes on, kindness and caring and serving others and survivals are all confirmed and present. We are reassured, and since we are not the one dead and we have turned again to our own affairs, albeit with the enduring presence of the after-effects of our loss, we carry on.

I want to hear more about the other people: the ones who didn’t survive, the ones who died of broken hearts, the ones who ended their own lives. They couldn’t all have been weak, or sick, or clinically diagnosable, or in some other way conformed to the viewpoints and judgments the general consensus assigned to them and then comfortably filed them away under.

Were they just unexplainable anomalies? I don’t believe that. I think they were probably unexamined, but not unexplainable. I think that happens because there are things people don’t like to look at if they can be avoided, and death is one of those things, and most certainly suicide.

Religion condemns suicide, pigeonholes it neatly as a sin that earns the curse of separation and damnation. People seem to want to take the loss of another person to suicide as more painful than other losses to death. Voluntary death-with-dignity laws make people uneasy, they don’t want to think about it.

There’s just something about suicide that inspires a human being to look away, to quickly write it off with a neat label and push it out of mind. Is it fear of the possibility that rational reasons may actually in certain cases and conditions be present there? Is it because doing that is dangerous for the temporarily despondent or depressed individual who might see rationales and justifications in that knowledge which, in their condition, are neither rational or justifiable, but merely seized upon to be the vehicle which conveys them to the end of pain and suffering?

Why not simply have a look at it and regard it calmly as an honest fact of life and seek to understand it?

Ghosts

It’s a contemplative morning on the river here; the sky is gently overcast with cloud. Inland heat pressed in from the east last night and condensed the cool, wet sea air. Sound is muffled and colors muted and the slowing of sensory input gives rise to thoughts which ride just beneath the surface of louder, brighter days.

I wonder why this world is not overrun with ghosts, because I live with one these days.

Ghosts – the fading, ephemeral essence of those who once were here with blood burning in hearts which rose into the throat for a swallow flying, a morning rising, a lover’s touching. Why would they not linger here in this place where earth and air and fire and water burn and freeze, where the sun and moon and stars hold fast and turn, where connection and loneliness abide together and an exquisite fullness is present in every moment? 

Ghosts fade and eventually disappear from our history. We all do. Each day, all around us, the vast, dynamic, organic continuum of human life is filling with new arrivals, filled with lives living unique legends, and emptying with constant departures. Where are the ghosts of the ancient people who lived in what are now the ruins of history, the long forgotten everyday citizens living long forgotten everyday lives in Akkadia and Babylonia, Troy and Pompeii, living in the cliff caves of the Dead Sea, and the cliff dwellings in Mancos Canyon and Mesa Verde?

Where is Lenore? She burns bright in my heart and memory. Yet soon at some unknown time I too will leave here to join her where she is now. My memories of her will leave too and sooner or later, in a hundred years or perhaps more, a final article of her particular, unique life – maybe an old photograph hung upon a wall with no memory of the particulars and personality of her life – will be taken down, and put away, and lost.

Where are the ghosts? Where is she?

We are here. We are in the earth and air and fire and water; in the rocks and sand, in the cloud and winds, in the sun and flames, in the river and the ocean and the tears and life in rain. The physics of the universe is not confined within the overlay mind presses over it. We are here.

The Vanities

Early this morning, having my first cup of coffee and watching the sunrise and the birds and trees and clouds and river, my head laid back against the wall of the Mystic Wind, I had a chest pain and thought it would be perfect to die right there.

Everything has changed for me. The breakdown of my belief system which has come in the wake of Lenore’s death no longer embraces the spiritual beliefs and understanding I developed over my lifetime. The matrix of understanding I put together has proven to be  a collection of learned and taught bits. It’s the result of my nature as a human being, that adaptable creature who adjusts to relative conditions. I observe and experience life and then incorporate that into a relative reality.

The things within my ken which are real and true have dwindled. The planet and the life force, both of which persistently and habitually continue on, are still in the remainder of things which I see as being true. The rest is fading fast.

It’s been observed that there are seasons which have a purpose. My season now is in a land where old men dwell. It’s time to recognize the vanities of my life, time to own and admit that those pieces which formed the aggregate of my personal identity and my matrix of understanding and my navigational map were useful and necessary when I was young and not so useful now.

There is a time for vanities, for constructing and then living by belief within one’s particularly assembled matrix of understanding. There is a time when we learn about the virtues and vices of human conduct, about the things which fulfill us and the things which empty us, and navigate according to the map we assemble. And there’s a time to see the essential vanity of it, to admit the uniquely personal construct which we formed was merely a useful tool for the self while it existed in a certain season of particular conditions and circumstances. It proves to be only a substantial, serviceable, useable – and temporary – application.

I no longer believe in a personal life after death. I believe that when I die I will be dead. I believe that all the temporary perfection which Lenore embodied was just that – a temporary, exquisite, embodied perfection which existed then and does not exist now. She is a part of the essential material of the universe now. It will be the same for me.

What is true for me now is simple. Life goes on. The universe goes on. There will be, for eons to come just as for eons passed, earth and air and fire and water, the mountains and the trees and birds and clouds and sky, the sun and moon and stars – and human beings who encounter them.

Living Dead

Memories come unbidden now; they’re random emotional tics that hit my heart like a spear point. I wrench my mind away from them and go do something that requires my full attention. They return. Everywhere I go my face is numb and my mind barely engaged. I don’t smile except when it happens reflexively, when I meet and talk with other people. I am merely an automaton, but a good one. In those moments I am engaged, registering, responding, identifying, sharing without joy.

I’ve had a good life. Unusual, a rare mix of gifts and graces, a nature and nurture and experience that removed me so far from any norm or mean that I found myself a dweller on the outside edge of human society. I found few peers but those few were a joy to me. The one person I found who was my equal in intelligence, passion and insight was even more than that. She was the complementary fit to every aspect of my life, and I was that for her as well. The result was that two-who-are-one thing that everybody claims for themselves but few have.

Who were We?

Lenore was the one person in this life who really knew the most about who I am, and she loved me for it. In a way I’m like one of the old tea clipper ships with a very, very long anchor chain. I tend to wander widely across the oceans of the earth, rising at times on the tides of the clouds to sail far above the earth, among the moon and stars even while being tethered to the earth. We were both born to sail together on such a ship, and we did.

I have been gifted with an odd, strange genius and a nature and a heart that has made my life very interesting and rich. Lenore was the only person I ever knew who genuinely liked and enjoyed and loved always being in my company, and understood my unusual experience and the person I am, and took delight from it all. She was brilliant, she was uniquely odd in the rarity of her many gifts and perfections, and she was very, very human in an indescribably angelic way. We were so much alike in so many ways. And so much of what we were was far beyond “normal.” It was exquisite. Our life together was a constant, ongoing shared experience of those exquisite nuances of life which often go unnoticed by most people.

Contact

Yesterday afternoon, bent through a half-open transport van window, I spent 20 minutes with my hand on the back of a traffic accident victim, speaking to him calmly and keeping him from moving his head until paramedics arrived because he had facial lacerations and a probable head injury. I walked through a crowd of uncertain, milling bystanders and just did it.

I have no training at all as a first responder. All I could do was the little I did, letting him know through the contact of my hand and my words that another person was there with him and he was not alone. I learned how to do that from a stranger many, many years ago. No matter how little we can do in such circumstances, there’s always something we can do.

I came back to the RV after the first responders had arrived and a young fireman had been assigned to stabilize the head and neck of the man I was with. I wanted to share what had happened with Lenore and she wasn’t here. I realized she would have been there with me, doing what I was doing. I felt like it was her in me, doing what I’d done.

Ghost World

Yesterday morning I woke up drained empty of tears and found myself headed south down the coast for no reason at all. On impulse and numb from the day before when the seemingly depthless well of my mourning drowned everything, a sort of animal instinct took over and I fled the scene.

Lenore and I visited the southern Oregon coast often. If you come here with your eyes and ears and heart and mind and spirit open it roars and whispers and reveals magical things. The ocean and coastal mountains and trails into the wild, natural areas here are full of eternal truths that inform and fill the soul. When shared by friends and lovers it becomes an indelible part of their deep connection, a touchstone of memory, a vault of life’s true treasure. That’s what this area became for us.

Yesterday I was exhausted and instinctively fleeing. My grief followed close behind and every once in awhile caught up to me, threatening to drown me in my own tears yet again. I rejected it and fought it and redirected my thoughts and kept pushing down the road, blind to the fact I was driving ever deeper into the heart of a place we shared together, into one of the vaults of our shared, sacred treasure.

The first time I saw the ocean I was 11 years old. It filled me up with an indescribable awe and a certain measure of fear; it was immense and depthless and I felt the overwhelming power of it in my chest and gut.

Yesterday on the road the deep emotion of that old memory rose up again and the tsunami of my mourning threatened to engulf me so I cut off the memory, cut off the feeling. I just killed it all. If Lenore had been there with me I would have shared it again with her, would have let it live and grow into us together yet again.

All through the day I encountered places we had shared together. I remembered the general locations, but when I arrived somewhere and started moving through the area again I found myself on trails and remote lookouts and particular places we had walked and stood at and seen together. After awhile it almost seemed surreal to be standing like a ghost in those places. I became a sort of detached spirit wandering through old haunts, retracing steps made long ago in a different world.

In a gift shop I shopped for jewelry for her as I had the last time we were there. She liked my taste in jewelry and there were times when I found something I knew she would like even when she wasn’t sure of it herself and then later it would find its way into the jewelry box that held her favorites. I found a pair of earrings yesterday I knew she would have liked and thought about buying them for her, but I didn’t.

Now I wish I had.

You had to be there

You had to be there. I’ve been searching and trying to find a way to express to others in my writing and my words what Lenore and I were and are to each other.

Those expressions have mostly been about grief and sadness and the effects of what it feels like to be half of a split, separated soul. That sense of separation goes directly to the heart of Lenore’s personal path to self-realization, A Course in Miracles. It was a part of my path as well. Ultimately though, our path to truth in this life was through each other, with each other.

I remembered something we wrote together in 1992 when we introduced ourselves to an ACIM online bulletin board and dug it up out of our archives. Among other things, I wrote: “Lenore long ago taught me to say, ‘Thank you, God, for you.’ Lenore is a gifted person. When I see her in perfect clarity I see a high being, an old soul, a presence in my life that is a profound and indescribable grace. Our marriage is a great example of learning truth together through the principle of ‘wherever two or more are gathered.’”

In that same introduction Lenore wrote: “I have worked with ACIM (A Course in Miracles) for the past 12 years and also learn from that wonderful man I actually married. I guess when I think about it, it is really true that special relationships pale in comparison to holy ones.”

She continued: “Keep spreading your joy and remember that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Joy that ties us all together. I share that joy with you. Forgiveness is so rewarding – as we go through our days with forgiveness in our minds for others, for situations and ourselves, we are truly miracle workers and nothing can stand between us and heaven.

“We show up for our day with great expectation of the next miracle, the next moment that we are able to forgive another, a situation or ourselves. We show up for our day with the knowing that our life is better, happier and filled with blessings. We realize that we truly do have everything that we need to be happy right now, right here within our circumstance, our relationships, our job, our home, our family, our dog and the trees in the back yard.

“We are here on earth in a shared experience where we have forgotten who we really are. People everywhere are having this conversation about our oneness, about the love that we are capable of, about demonstrating in our lives every day who we really are and who we can be. Our participation in it is a blessing to others and ourselves.

“We know that we have the power to change the world because we are God’s creative force. We may be asleep most of the time, some of the time, or nearly all of the time, but the good news is that we can wake up.”

You had to be there.

You had to be there in the explosive holy instant when we saw each other clearly and were bonded together for the rest of this life for us. You had to be there down through the years we lived on the path ACIM calls the “happy dream.”

You had to be there when in some unfathomable way at some unregistered moment our consciousness transcended the dream and we did wake up and were flesh and spirit and One with all, simultaneously. When religion and thought and feeling fell away and then came back coalesced and infused with the simplicity of being here, today, with it all.

You had to be there at the last when, living with daily pain which at times was unimaginably savage, she smiled often and gave and invited hugs, and died with a gentle, peaceful smile on her face.

You had to be there to understand where I am now.

To be here where the ego self, shocked numb, screams in pain and demands precedence and attention for its agony. Here, where the still, small voice within bides its time, whispering truth. To be here in the predicament of a soul at the end of flesh and in a life experience fulfilled and completed.

What holds me here? Nothing. Why am I here? Because I am. Where will I be? I can’t say, I can only say where I am. I am with her. Here, today, with it all. That’s what we learned how to do together.

Grief must be witnessed

David Kessler said, “Grief must be witnessed.” In the throes of grief and loss we find comfort when others acknowledge our condition.

Kessler tells the story of how a small village he visited witnessed the grief of a community member who had lost a loved one. Every household would remove an item from their home in the evening of the day of loss, such as a chair or lamp or piece of furniture, and put it outside where it could be seen from the street.

Kessler asked them why they did this, and the reply touched me.

“It is to show the bereaved one when they wake up the next day that we share their grief. It says we know everything has changed.”

Give me a moment. I’m considering the Hemlock.

The day Lenore died her loss and my grief appeared in a shattering explosion and was nothing like what my previous speculations about what it would be like. It consumed me. That’s what an explosion does. The aftermath was pieces and numbness, of living in a totality involving only grief and loss and mourning. It was inchoate emotional pain and unmanageable mental chaos. My world view blew up, the basic root of my life paradigm vanished, the matrix of my own understanding broke down into senseless chaos. My spirit broke.

As time passes I’ve realized that the terrible grief I have is just one part of my experience. The shattered pieces of my paradigm and my understanding have come back together in a new configuration, informed by new, critical information. Lenore is not here with me in this life. She is in me, she still speaks to me and me to her, and I can imagine her presence with me. Yet she is not here anymore. She is somewhere else. My perspective has been rearranged to accommodate this new, massive fact.

Why is loss and bereavement nearly universally regarded as a thing human beings pass through on their way to more life, to survival? The assumption proves itself true in all but a few cases. It’s something human beings pass through, live with, bear with, suffer with – and survive with. They go on, recover, reorganize, rebuild. It’s assumed. It’s fact. Options need not apply. Start as far away as you want, but when you drill down to the foundation that’s where you’re going to end up. You survive. It’s an unquestionable underlying basic assumption of human existence.

In a place where everything dies.

Even if your heart is full and your life completed and you have lived out your reason for being, even if everything ahead is dénouement, a slow slide into deterioration and eventual death – still it is assumed you will live. Even if you’re sure you’re done, even if your mind tells you it’s time to go, and your heart desires it.

When Lenore died her loss was not one more marker on my path. It was the last milepost. I am aware of the joy life still offers me and aware of the others I can still serve with my experience and gained wisdoms and simple presence. I’m still aware of how wonderful and magic and full life is. I still laugh, dance, listen to music, think, feel, move, have places to go and things to do, people I love, people who love me and care about me. I can still impart love and joy to others. I still know the unexpected amazing development is just around the corner, waiting to delight and engage me in something new and unforeseeable and wonderful.

The thing is, I don’t need any of that any more. I’ve had it all. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. It’s been enough. And the context I gained them in, my life with Lenore, is perfect. I have no need of a different one. I’m happy with what I’ve had, and with what I have from it now.

There’s not one thing I can think of I’d like to do, or still need to do. I’ve been trying to come up with anything at all I’d like to do for quite awhile, no matter how crazy it was. Go to Dharamsala and have a laugh with the Dalai Lama. Get a passport, fly to Florence, see the Uffizi Museum. Go to Machu Picchu. Go fishing in Montana. Take the Mystic Wind somewhere – anywhere. I really am done.

When I die I’d prefer that people celebrate my life and not grieve or suffer my dying. I hope they remember my living. I hope they know I had a wonderful, beautiful, full, hard, strange, amazing, loving, thoughtful, interesting, fulfilling, completed life. I hope they know it all came to fruition and completion in the life Lenore and I shared together. The best thing about all the great love stories is not that they were told – it’s that they were lived. Lenore and I lived one of them.

The Dead Girl’s Song

The truth is in the dead girl’s song

In air and earth and fire and water

In cloud and sky and wind

In rock and mountains and meadow

In sun and moon and star

In rain and river and sea.

Her song threads every tree

Fills the cove, lilts on the cay

Echoes in faint swirls upon on the road

Where we were we.

The truth is in the dead girl’s dream

In eyes and heart and flesh

Seeing, loving, holding, walking

Through all things ever that are ever one.

The truth is in the dead girl’s light

The rolling shadow of the night

The sunset scythe.

The truth is there

Where we were we

In all things ever that are ever one

In rain and river and sea

In the sunset scythe

In the dead girl’s song.

And Yet Still I Am Here

When I told her I wanted to be with her all the way down the line and go where she was going and die when she did, Lenore said I needed to stay here and shine my light. “You have so much,” she said. I’ve done my best.

I’ve left a hundred smiles with strangers in brief encounters communicating our connectedness. I’ve openly shared my honest truth. I’ve served the persons who needed anything who appeared along the way. I’ve felt the beauty of nature and at times the joy this life holds, and the laughter. I’ve been nice, and kind, and gentle wherever and whenever I can.

Yet it’s all happened in a world of half-light, it’s all been echoes fading ever more faintly away from their source, it’s all been ever-fainter ripples moving downstream on what was once the pulsing, flowing river of our life together.

There are moments when her loss guts me. I remember one time in particular, and it stays with me.

It started with the familiar empty weakness growing in my chest and slowly rising up behind my eyes, and then the tears, flooding and falling, and my heart falling into darkness, falling into infinite, aching emptiness. My face contorts into a soundless wail, and I hear myself from far away, sobbing, the words coming out of me as if spoken by someone else, “Oh, this is so hard! I want to be with you!” And then I heard her voice, answering. She said, “I know, I know, I didn’t think it would be so bad…” I sobbed and the words came on their own, “All I want to do is be with you!” And she said, “Then come my darling, come. I understand.”

And yet still I am here.

I can’t begin to express how sad and confusing it is that I am still here, feeling more darkness than light, stalked constantly by loss and grief and separation. The days hold pockets of time when an uneasy, edgy trepidation and faint nervousness and vague tension take over. I can feel the emptiness lurking near, stalking me. I feel like something is missing and I can’t locate or identify what it is even though my mind knows exactly what it is.

Part of me has always lived out in border land, watching life and humanity and existence from the outside edge of the human social continuum, observing, registering, recording, and assembling my personal matrix of understanding from that broad-spectrum viewpoint. Lenore could join me out there, and it was a rich, soul-filling, wonderful view for us.

Now I’m out here alone, further out, out on the edge of the very farthest reach of human existence, just this side of the border between life and death, regarding life itself, looking backward down the long path behind that brought me here; seeing what is there in the past, and what is here now, and considering what is left in the time remaining ahead.

The Way it Is

Humanity lives in a cosmic nova, vibrant and dangerous and beautiful and chancy, a place where black-hole hells and starry heavens mark the waypoints of our careening, sojourning souls.

If in our entire lifetime we only learn to truly love one other person, that’s a lifetime well spent. When we finally figure out what love is, really, we are somehow collaterally blessed with the answers to those gnawing questions we come here with about the meaning of life, the secret of the universe, and why we are here.

I always wondered about the cowboy who, about to die, shot his horse and burned his saddle, thus obliterating his entire estate on the way out of this life. I think I understand him now, at least partly, although in my life the horse lives and the saddle goes to the country thrift store.

What that cowboy meant to do is leave not a trace of himself behind, because he knew that’s the way it is. Our life is our own, and no one else’s, and only here and now, and only for as long as we have it, and we only live in that brief time, and only then can we share it with anyone.

Warrior of the Heart

I’ve been thinking about our last year together and what a hellacious, beautiful, happy, full, sad time it was. Lenore battled cancer as only a warrior of the heart can. And there were battles. We fought them side by side, always doing the best we could, and in between there were moments when we laughed and cried at how hard the battles were and how well we fought them. It was traumatic as hell and soul lifting at the same time.

Some of the things Lenore had to go through were inhumane; blows delivered by well-meaning people who thought they were serving her but were blinded by institutional and professional biases, bound up in misplaced priorities that put the person second and the rules first – and so often those rules were not legal constraints but simply protocols put in place to streamline systems and efficiently process people as if they were fairly uniform units rather than unique individuals.

I feel sad and am sorry for those people who had their humanity compromised by the systems they were embedded in and dependent on. The quality of the services they brought to Lenore could have been immensely greater if they had only taken the time to listen to her and be thoughtful and compassionate rather than unintentionally discounting and authoritative and mechanistic.

Lenore was never able to make her doctors understand what she wanted and did not want. The institutional bias there was toward “curative” treatment rather than palliation. The “curative” treatments for Radiation Induced Sarcoma of the hip are crippling, maiming procedures which extremely reduce quality of life and don’t extend life that long.

Lenore knew her options early on and wanted nothing to do with radical treatments. It proved impossible to inform her treatment team at OHSU of her desires – and there is a tremendous written record in the files there proving how hard we both fought to have her desires known. In the end she had to go to a different hospital to be heard and have the palliative treatment she wanted. The delays at OHSU caused by the system in place and in particular the institutional bias toward curative treatment there took precious time from her life and it’s sad to think about that now.

Lenore already had experienced the quality of life damages of her previous “curative, state of the art” radical treatment for cancer in 2001 – which is what caused her bone cancer 15 years later. She learned to cope with the damage that came with that former treatment but it was hard-won knowledge gained without help from the medical establishment which delivered her to it.

It’s also sad to think that what doctors are convinced of as being absolutely, inviolably right treatment at one time can so quickly prove to be wrong and even barbaric in its nature in the near future. I can’t help but think that the attitude and humanity of doctors and the medical profession generally would be greatly improved if they were to embrace humility and own the fact that what they are doing to the human body today will in the future seem as barbaric as blood-letting, mercury treatments, trepanation, insulin shock, and lobotomies – and among them will be included radical radiation therapy for cancers with a low metastatic probability and a high surgery-only rate of success like the cancer Lenore was treated for in 2001.

The doctors did their best and of course what they did is justifiable by the fact that what they did then was the best they knew how to do. But it certainly does not support the hubris and certainty they brought to their patients in the light of what actually happened to people as a result of their mistaken convictions.

It’s a long tale, the story of what Lenore and I went through. There was the care center in Arizona, the Catholic hospice in Washington. Every place we passed through held a combination of horrors and angels. The angels were human, the horrors were the protocols and rules and institutional biases in play at every facility.

There was one human horror, a hospice doctor in Arizona so unimaginably incompetent and insensitive and self-focused that her actions and character flaws had damned her beyond retrieval to being unable to extend any form of humanity to her patients.

There was a nursing supervisor torn between compassion and the unwieldy, ponderous rules regarding proper paperwork and procedures concerning pain medications for Lenore. In the end that supervisor succumbed to the pressures of the rules and as a result Lenore experienced unimaginable and unnecessary pain while the system slowly processed paperwork for already authorized pain medications.

That nursing supervisor made the wrong choice, choosing to let Lenore suffer until the paperwork was where it needed to be even though she knew it was on its way. I pity her for that. She chose the institutionalized rules over the person they were meant to serve. I wonder if she ever realized that the result of that choice had a deep and wide-reaching effect upon her own personal life that went far beyond the pain it caused Lenore.

I have one caution to give about hospices run under the guidelines of certain religious beliefs: be sure the values in place there reflect your own. In Lenore’s case death with dignity was not an option at the hospice she was in, and there were no under-the-radar morphine options available to her to end her life when she wanted to. When she was ready to die and wanted to, she was prohibited by the institution and delayed by the death with dignity legal paperwork.

On the very day she learned during the conversation with the death with dignity doctor that one of her alternatives was to refuse food and water and that death would result in two weeks or so, she stopped eating and only took small sips of water. She died twelve days later. Her body ate itself and she starved to death, god-damn it all. I hope you can feel the heat of my feelings about how people can be forced to do such a thing, how I feel about all the ways and means which make it necessary. God damn it all.

The angels were many. We felt like they were flying in formation with us, surrounding us with their light and love. They were the boots on the ground in these institutions, the very real human beings in the trenches of institutionalized care, caring truly and connecting with their charges and serving them. They were the agents and deliverers of the quality of life Lenore desired to have in the days left to her after her diagnosis. They were loving, sympathetic, empathetic, connected. They were human. They are too many to mention, but some of you who are reading this are counted among them. You know who you are. You always did know who you are, really. You knew you were human beings, and what that means, and how it looks, and what it does. I thank you for that and honor you for that.

We fought every battle side by side, and she fought like the Danish Viking she was. She didn’t fight with axe and maul, she fought with open arms and a brilliant smile and a warm, forgiving heart. She knew who she was, she knew what she wanted, and at every turn she moved with purpose and certainty to the very end. In the old days her people would have given her the funeral accorded their greatest heroes and sent her off to Valhalla in a flaming Viking longship. That’s who she was. A warrior of the heart. It was an honor to fight with her. I weep every day with her passing and look forward to the day when I rejoin her and we are together again.

A Person Can Live Too Long

Today at sunset in the park I saw an old man and an old woman walking together with an old dog, and I was glad they all still had each other. And then I thought, my God – I’m living proof that a person can live too long.

It’s very lonely here now. Lenore was the only other person on the planet I met who I regarded as my peer, and it took me half a lifetime to find her.

I miss my friend.

Then and Now

It’s about differences, and being honest about it. We grew into our greatness because of how we openly shared the wonderful things we honestly saw in one another. It wasn’t about compliments. It was about truths seen and then shared between us.

Lenore and I shared the same wonderful differences; intelligence, thoughtfulness, empathy, insight, imagination, passion, creativity, a desire to keep learning and growing. We had an extraordinary measure of all of those things on board in our lives – we were very rare people in the human world. It was a blessing for the richness of life and broad perspective it gave us, and another blessing that we found each other and were able to share it together.

We were people who wanted to share with others the story of the thrilling adventure it was to be who we were and live like we lived and knew what we knew and saw what we saw and learned what we learned. So often the people we met were still learning how to get across the schoolyard, or were set in the few paths they’d worn into. They didn’t have the experience or the tools or the abilities and qualities it took to understand our tale and the lessons and wisdoms and depth and fullness of it all; people who didn’t have the time or inclination to join in with what we were both so willing to share with them so that we could all together affirm how mysterious and wonderful and great life can be.

We both had broad and deep exposure to a lot of the things life holds before we met; good and evil, happiness and sadness, death, loss, beginning again, carrying on, and seeking what you want until you find it and never settling for second best. We always did our very best to be good people. When we got knocked down or made mistakes or even when things got so bad our spirits were actually truly broken by hard, terrible experiences, we healed and recovered and picked ourselves back up and carried on, and we bloomed again wherever we were planted next because of who we innately were.

When we found each other after having all those life experiences, and being who we each were, it was like a coming home to our own true self wondrously present in the other – of finally, miraculously, beyond all odds finding another person in the world who we fit with.

Lenore and I knew who the other was when most people didn’t or couldn’t recognize how different we were from them and how big our world was. We saw each other, we saw the world in the same ways; in rare breadth and depth and awareness. We understood. Together.

Now I am an “I” and not an “us.”

I don’t fear much anymore, or have the same level of vigilance. I don’t anticipate possible developments. I don’t plan as much as I used to. I don’t care about people, places and things as much as I used to.

I don’t think about dying with the same sort of consideration I gave it before. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t wonder when it comes whether I will conduct myself with grace or a complete lack of it. Lenore showed me how to die. When it’s time to die you just go ahead and get on with it, you do it the same way you live your life.

Words disappear from time to time now because words can’t catch the inchoate nature of this experience.

My spiritual beliefs have reverted backward through time and history and I am now a casual pantheist. The word “god” has been replaced with “life.” The words “heaven” and “hell” have been replaced with “earth.” I avoid symbols, metaphors, personalities and stories in my spiritual thoughts. I see spirituality without thinking as much, or making it magical.

I’m still annoyed by ignorance, fear, insensitivity, low levels of consciousness and just plain bad behavior in others, but the presence of those things in human beings doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. I figure that in a place where heaven and hell are both options, if some people want to live in some kind of limbo between the two because that’s what they were taught and have chosen to maintain, well, that’s their choice.

It wasn’t ours, and it’s not mine.

Lenore is in me in all the places we merged our consciousness. She is in my memory. She is also dead. Not here. Gone. Dead is not smiling and watching over you from above. Time passes here, memory fades, the rat-brain evolutionary mandate to move on and survive asserts itself and starts ruthlessly rolling up the higher cognitive memories and storing them in boxes in the basement. Existing, that’s what I do now.

Being, that’s a whole other thing. Our meaning, our being, was achieved as two who are one. After such a life one who is one becomes meaningless. Together we found what we sought, we achieved what we dreamed. Together we realized life’s hopeful, bright potential.

Sometimes I try to work on a suicide note in case this path I’m on comes to that. It’s an awkward business. I want people to not feel sad. I want them to understand. But they will likely do the first and not the second. I hope for more, but expect the usual. My suicide will be explained by each person in their way, for their comfort. There’s not a lot I can do about how people see things, and what things they don’t or can’t or won’t understand.

Life after Death?

For me life after death is a mystery. I speculate of course on what the nature of being might be after death, but in the end it is all speculation. It will be what it is and until that time it will remain unknown to me.

Before Lenore died I held hopeful speculations about the afterlife and took some comfort from my experience and my thoughts about death and what comes next. I noticed that living things, and the universe itself, follow a pattern of development beginning in simplicity which rises to an ever greater level of complexity, and hoped that meant that at the end of this life we humans did the same.

It was my hope that perhaps, unencumbered by bodily limits, we would enjoy an indescribable level of consciousness and connection in the universe of what we call our “spirit,” that mysterious energy which is life in the body, and which seems to leap from the body at death.

Lenore and I had a deep empathic connection which at times was telepathic, so we were no strangers to the mysterious energies present in the human experience. This gave us hope that our connection would survive death, and in some mysterious, unknown way we would still be able to connect through the curtain between life and death, that we would pierce the “cloud of unknowing” between the mind and what we hoped was an eternal soul.

We hoped that in some way our connection would continue. Before she died, we decided to both do our best to make a connection together between life and whatever it is that is beyond death.

I have remained sensitive and open to such a connection ever since. Yet the only connection I have experienced is here, in the “we” we grew to be together; in the singular, whole persona we shared as two who were one, now only in me, and in the memories of our time together here, in this life.

Alone

“Well, it really isn’t such a cheerful place… But let’s just carry on cheerfully anyway and let the tears fall when and where they will – what do you say?” That’s something Lenore would say, and it’s something we could do – together. It’s not that way now. It’s just not.

Tomorrow it will be 5 months since Lenore died. There are nearly 4,000 miles on the truck since I first reset the trip odometer in the parking lot at the hospice center and numbly drove into a world without her in it.

It’s a different world. It’s a world where loss and grief eclipse the light of the old world and her absence in it reduces it to a place of thin light and long shadows.

Today I found myself, for the first time since she died, planning something for the future.

I haven’t wanted a future without her and haven’t even considered it before now. I’ve spent at least as much time wanting and hoping and waiting for my own death as I’ve spent remembering our time together. Noticing that I am actually planning something doesn’t feel right. I still don’t want a future without her.

I vaguely resent or am sadly ambivalent about every wheedling influence in my life trying to conduct me away from the life we had together.

I resent time, and fading memory, and the human mechanism of adaptability trying to assert itself into my life. They all feel like the devilish denizens of deepening shadows, slowly swallowing the light of our life together. Our brilliance dims, our fire gutters and the coals slowly fade into darkness. Time marches on and we who were one together slide slowly down into the dark vault of history.

I resent the ancient biological mandate as old as life itself to survive at all costs. It’s wrapped there round the roots of my brain stem, overriding my identity, my experience, and my thoughts and desires and all things present in the seat of consciousness above it. It is finished, I say. It regards all the arts and pains and truths of a completed life and the complex vault of the higher mind with stone-dead reptilian eyes and stolidly replies, “Survive.” It makes no sense to me. It makes it hard to die no matter how profoundly I wish to.

I am sadly ambivalent about sunlight, and the soft sifting of tree leaves in the dawn breeze at the edge of morning’s light, and all the beauties of the earth. They are exquisite and beckoning; they promise nature’s elegant, simple pleasures again tomorrow and whisper an invitation to be here for them. Alone.

This strange world is a place where the animated seesaw of the perpetual human perception of a dualistic experience is often suspended. In those moments there is no light poised opposite to darkness, no good struggling with evil, no navigational chart between safety and danger. It is, for long moments, lifeless and null. There is no person here then – only a savaged, separated soul.

Now I find myself planning for a future I have not wanted all the way down this long slow drive away from where she died. It feels ridiculous to do it and I resent it. I feel cozened and pushed and shoved by insensate influences and monolithic principalities beyond my control, forcing me to return to things and places I have already been and already done and already know. It is time to be done, it has all been done, and yet this senseless, insistent, disregarding – thing – imposes itself on me.
A Broken Heart

Does the universe remember a dead girl and her love? Does a tree remember the rain that came and runs now in the sap of its veins? What honors and cherishes and makes all things memorable, and holy? Is the essence of life holy in and of itself?

No. We make it so.

Mind and heart alone, and for a mere spark of time, remember the girl who came and went.

She appeared for a moment in the eternal, ephemeral mists swirling down the vault of time. She walked in sun and rain and lived and loved and died.

What honors her and cherishes her and holds her holy memory?

A broken heart, who watched her fade into the mist, and ran to follow, and was left behind.

Things I Miss

Delight. I miss that most of all. Simple delight. Sudden deep bursts of gratitude and love, and seeking her out immediately and hugging her and telling her how much I love her. Eyes meeting eyes. Shared thoughts and feelings about everything; laughing together about practically anything; holding hands; walking side by side; seeing the same things at the same time; holding her hand as I fall asleep; holding her hand when I wake up; her playing the piano, cooking, reading, watering the plants – patiently, joyfully.

Just looking at the way she walked and stood. She was so exquisitely, naturally graceful, she had a fine carriage and I miss telling her she was an angel “turned on the lathe of heaven.” She always laughed at that and was modest and shy about compliments, and I miss seeing that and how I could see they pleased her, too.

I am Thee and Thou Art Me

Robert Frost observed that people who were confronted with the loss of a loved one, “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” I considered that to be a cold, cruel, cynical observation about human adaptability and selfishness, and how love can be left behind and forgotten by people who lack passion and emotional depth, and commitment, to those they once loved.

Now I realize it is a natural thing. I have done so many times in the past; I grieved, I mourned, I healed, I carried memories of love and goodness, and grieving too – and went on. I was not the one dead. Now time has continued on, and I have not turned to my affairs. Lenore is dead, and she was me. I am the one dead.

Clarity

A simple clarity has replaced many of my beliefs. I am now informed by what I see, and what I directly experience. I have no room for beliefs, hopeful interpretations, or even the most substantial posits of metaphysics; every single one of them is supported by a given value of probability and not one is proven positively. They are useful to the living and irrelevant to the dead. In my experience now, where I am simultaneously living and dead, it all seems superfluous.

I was recently exposed to a religious interpretation meant to offer comfort to the bereaved, observing that the presence of the lost beloved can be present in the consciousness of the bereaved. In most cases it does offer comfort, and many do benefit by developing a conscious awareness of that voice in themselves. My response is on behalf of those who find no comfort in such awareness, or truth in the afterlife it implies.

The dead speak in manifestations of the mind and heart of the living. It is not the dead speaking. Where the beloved is now is beyond mind and heart. In the universe nothing is lost. In mind and heart when the beloved dies – the beloved is lost. Only the mind and heart of the bereaved remains, and they may or may not find comfort in manifestations of the beloved in her absence.

Everyone has a matrix of understanding they have assembled from their nature, nurture and experience. Often that matrix includes a religion, a belief system, and faith. It’s a useful thing. It includes a story, a context, a lexicon, an ordered construct built up for the purpose of organizing the things encountered in our human experience, and then expressing them.

Lenore’s matrix of understanding included A Course In Miracles as a singularly useful point of reference in her own spiritual life. She did not regard it as infallible holy writ. She regarded it as very useful, a system which provided words, thoughts and concepts which established a basic ground and point of departure for her own spiritual walk.

On her path and through her study and personal regard of the principles described in ACIM Lenore came to know – not believe, but know – that all life is connected by and in an often mysterious web of energy.

One of the things she used to describe her knowing was the ACIM concept of “The Sonship.” The concept of the Sonship incorporates several concepts of the spiritual life into its fabric. One of those concepts is basically an expression of the collective consciousness generated by humanity and all life. It’s a metaphor validating the existence of our relationship with every single living person, and every single living thing, and the planet it all lives on, and the universe it exists within.

Lenore believed that the “Sonship” is supported and enriched by positive energy, and that belief defined her life and actions. She was devoted to the practice of extending real love to all of creation and everything and every being in it. She forgave all illusions and devoted herself to keeping her eyes on the truth she knew. She found joy in every day, satisfaction in work, fun in play, fulfillment in service to others. She consciously embraced and constantly manifested what she knew. She was good and kind and caring, gentle and patient and nurturing, she sought and found joy in every day, she was selflessly present and available to everyone and everything she encountered, empathetic with all, sympathetic and supportive with those in pain, enriching and enlightening to seekers searching for what she knew.

Now she is dead. She is gone from this life. All that is left of her now is circulating in that mysterious web of life energy which she contributed so many good, positive things to. I am connected deeply to her in that web. Everyone who encountered her is connected to her there. Her life is enshrined there and the energy of her life pulses there and will be part of the ongoing, cumulative collective human consciousness.

It is the afterlife I know of. It’s a realm of the living, by the living, for the living, occupied by the living and the energies generated by those who are no longer alive. But it is not the realm of the dead. That’s unknowable.

Acceptance

I am so ambivalent about participating in life these days, so split off of the person I was when Lenore was here. I’ve revisited some writing and blog comments I shared in the days when we were walking this life together, engaged with such grace and power with everything it holds, and it all reveals how far removed I am from that now.

In those days acceptance was a key that opened us up to the mysterious energies of life and allowed us to walk on with grace and power, no matter what the circumstances or challenges. Acceptance of things as they are, no matter how terrible, is a powerful tool. You just keep going, doing your best, doing what you can, and over time things very often change for the better.

I suppose that’s what the robot in me is doing these days. It just keeps going, walking on. I watch it doing what I used to do, see it extending the love in me in daily moments when I encounter and interact with others. What is not present there is me. I have no acceptance, no grace, no power. The acceptance that Lenore is gone from this life is not in me. I will not accept that because it feels like a betrayal to her, and me, and us.

Turning that key has never been harder.

One More Adventure

I’m running in cycles these days. Busyness occupies me for fairly long times now. There are periods when a sort of equilibrium sets in and the days just keep moving on by themselves. Then there are times when I register my present day reality a bit too sharply and it seems so clearly empty and senseless. I go through some sad and dark days then, and after that the cycle starts over again. It’s been seven months today since Lenore died and I’m basically still shocked and numb and walking on with a thousand-yard-stare in the aftermath of her death.

I really don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I’m very ambivalent about most things. I just keep moving.

The edge of winter is showing up here in the Pacific Northwest. Heavy rain and strong winds the next two days will begin to strip the trees and then give way to shorter days of cold sunshine. Soon the angle and quality of sunlight will bring on the contemplative season of late autumn. It’s a time of reflection and memories, a time for summing up the returns of the year past, a time to set another waypoint on the timeline of life.

Lenore’s ashes and Charlie’s ashes and I are heading out. We are going to the desert southwest where silent, soul-filling sunsets mark the end of autumn days. The Mystic Wind is nearly ready to go, and early next week we will pull out of the northwest woods and make our run south to a camp on the edge of the Saguaro National Forest.

In the days before she died Lenore told me to just put her ashes in the back seat with Charlie when she was gone, and I told her I’d rather she rode up front with me. She said that would be alright, and smiled. She was pleased about that. So off we all go together – one more time, on one more adventure.

As always, and because it pleases me, I will be the facilitator and servant of their spirit and souls. We will go where they want to go, see what they want to see, and do what they want to do.

We will have lunch on the roadside where endless panoramas surround us. We will look for that place on the road where, last year, rounding a corner on a downhill grade with the morning sun at our back, a cliff across the valley stunned us with layers upon layers of desert colors gleaming in the light.

On the way we will talk, and laugh, and once in awhile I will turn my head to look at her, wordless when we see some beautiful thing together, and see her knowing eyes looking back at me, acknowledging she sees and feels it too.

Potholes

This trip isn’t turning out to be what I thought it would. There have been emotional potholes all along the way – memories of things that happened and places we saw together on our trip down there last year knowing we were making our final run down the long road we shared together.

We were so go-ahead and doing what we wanted to do for as long as we could, seeing new and beautiful places together, and all of it was punctuated by pain and meds and the wheelchair and a constant round of doing it, getting worn down, then gathering energy again and going on. We wouldn’t have done it any other way. It was who we were. It was what we wanted to do. What we did and how we did it was beautiful, and heroic. Yet in retrospect it has all become so very, very sad as well.

I’m so tired of taking these heart hits. I bear them and somehow keep on keeping on but the wear and tear is cumulative and now the only way I have of holding on to myself is avoidance of them. I try not to remember, try to avoid thinking about much of anything other than day to day, mundane things. It doesn’t work.

I will arrive at our destination in half a week or so. This trip has been a collection of crossroads where the natural beauty of the landscape collides with memories of our trip down these same roads together last year. Memories of the joys and pains of Lenore’s journey and the times and places we shared and the things we did together in those days come back to me and I smile, and I cry, and sometimes I flinch and look away, and just keep moving on.

Down around Mexican Hat in southern Utah I found the landscape that stunned us as we came around a bend on the highway last year. I pulled over and took a picture of it this time. The sun was a bit higher in the sky and the palette of geologic layers was muted a bit more than last year. It was beautiful – a peaceful, lovely place in the middle of nowhere, a place that travelers for the most part simply pass by. We caught its beauty and power together last year. This year I saw and felt it without her and nearly cried again but caught myself and returned to the truck and moved on.

Today I visited an ancient cliff dwelling site in the Verde Valley near a park we stayed in last year. It’s one of the best-preserved prehistoric structures in the Southwest, built of adobe and limestone blocks and mortar in a towering cliff face. As I walked below it for a moment I imagined hearing the voices and laughter of the people who lived and loved and played and planted and hunted and built there. They’re gone now, faded into the deep vaults of history. What remains is a peaceful, beautiful green valley with a river flowing through it and the ancient, towering limestone cliffs above.

I sat quietly beneath those cliffs for awhile and felt a mournful ache for the passing of the people who lived there, and those who have followed them down into the ever-longer shadows of history, and for all the living who will follow them – and I cried for all of it, and I cried for Lenore, and for being here instead of with her. Later I walked slowly back to the truck, and moved on.

Lenore and I knew that when we went into the wilderness and nature and beautiful places the solitude and grandeur there would inform us of what was in our heart. Every time, without exception, we found joy and peace and a deep awareness of the truly sacred thing our life together was, and in certain perfect moments we connected with the whole and holy essence of life on this planet and in this universe.

Today I found only a deep sadness in my heart. Our fulfillment is history. My soul is split off from itself, I have half a heart. My spirit is broken. This is a shadowy denouement, one of the cruel counterpoints to a full and tender life; a sliding slowly downward into shadows and the end of our brilliant story.

—–

I am now settled in the desert near Tucson. In the night and early morning here Orion and the Pleiades are lower in the clear southern sky as a result of the astronomical sum of my latitude change and the earth’s circuit around the sun, bringing winter on. At least two patterns of the cosmos are still in place and consistent.

All night long I hear coyotes hunting and calling, and ranch dogs informing them of their own territory. In the morning off to the west there are two roosters crowing, one getting enough pluck into it to end in what sounds like a hog screaming. Yesterday the wind picked up in the afternoon and left a thin coat of caliche dust on the truck. It is ancient dust, a mixture of calcium carbonate and desert soil, the powder form of the rock-hard natural concrete laid down over eons on the desert floor.

The landscape of profound bereavement is a strange, alternate dimension. It’s a place where everything encountered is the remnant of a former life: the cherished ring once worn, the pillow slept upon, the instrument once played, the art created with nimble fingers and flashing eyes – each is nothing but a remnant, holding no more of the former life than a randomly encountered strand of the beloved’s hair. Nothing is more than a partial wisp of memory, a far away whisper, a scent fading into still air.

It’s a place which holds a far-away echo of laughter fading into dying light, a half-breath, a broken thought, a ghostly brush of touch, a shadow passing through the heart. Nothing there is ever real, or whole, or clear. It is where wholeness is reduced to pieces, and the parts are scattered. It is a place where souls are lost, and hearts broken.

In seven days it will be eight months to the day since Lenore died. I am now standing on the far shore of my sojourn here – the place I set out for when I first appeared in this life. I knew I was here the day Lenore died. It’s a thing both sad, as every heartfelt leave-taking is sad, and joyful, as completion and fulfillment and new horizons are joyful.

Bread and Music 
by Conrad Aiken

Music I heard with you was more than music, 
And bread I broke with you was more than bread; 
Now that I am without you, all is desolate; 
All that was once so beautiful is dead. 

Your hands once touched this table and this silver, 
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. 
These things do not remember you, belovèd, 
And yet your touch upon them will not pass. 

For it was in my heart you moved among them, 
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; 
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Time in Eternity
by  T. Merrill

When you were as an angel in my arms,
Had laid your bare head just below my chin,
Your length pressed up to mine, entrusting charms
My whole youth’s starward longing could not win;
With still the murmur of your love in me,
Miracle-tones of all my lifelong hope,
I wished that there might start eternity
And seal forever that sweet envelope;
And as it did, my thoughts are now for you
As every star is blotted by the sun,
And so the sun itself
Has perished too,
And with it, every dream of mine
But one.

Nothing Gold Can Stay 
by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Luke Havergal
by Edward Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall,
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

You, Andrew Marvell

            By Archibald Macleish

EPILOGUE

I’ve lived with my grief after Lenore died, have been taken to the larger picture beyond, and now I am here, on the edge of a slowly expanding transcendent clarity. I’ve walked this path a day at a time, a step at a time, seeking that clarity.

We see it coming, we all do. Down the long road ahead it appears, ever closer, each step we take another step toward death until it seems that death is taking another step toward us. When it arrives I will fling myself over the last ground and leap into it and be with her where she is.

Your life is your own to live as you will. I hope you will through your own efforts, combined with the mysterious grace which stands ready to fulfill the life of every person, have a life as great and wonderful as the one we had. It was full, it was wonderful; it was filled with joy and sadness, with every beauty and every ache our humanity encounters.

It was everything a life ought to be.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom after death. Do good; enjoy the good of your labors; eat and drink, and rejoice.

Enjoy life with the one whom you love. Two are better than one. If one should fall the other will lift them up; and if two lie down together, they will keep warm; but how can one be warm alone?

Our birth and our death are the happiest and saddest times of our lives. We are born to live and then to die, and leave this life. In between there are many small births and deaths. We grow fuller in life, we breathe it in. We learn love and know joy and gain wisdom. We see hate and pain and folly. We become filled with life and take it in. Then in the end we breathe it out; we are done with it.

Life is ephemeral and fleeting. While you are alive you are breathing in the soul of life; at the end you breathe the soul of life back out, return it to where it came from. The end of the world begins with the light from the sun, moon, and stars growing dim. The days have no pleasure in them; death comes for your beloved and waits for you. In the end you breathe one last breath out. You have been filled with life. You are done with it. You let it go.

This morning with coffee on the porch I reflect upon several things: the recently passed equinox and the gathering of Fall; the discovery that another old friend has died; the summer past; why I am the way I am; the relative perspective of mind; the gathering monsoon prologue due to sweep in from the Pacific this weekend with torrential downpours which will pound on our roof here in the mountains.

The days are shorter than the nights now and we are descending into darkness, slowly. The forest air is poignantly sharp, russet maple leaves blanket stretches of the river bank, the green glow burning in the canopy above us as we walked through summer now casts faint autumnal shades.

The weather shift took me to my barometers. I have a digital one, the sensor mounted outdoors and magically informing the station indoors. Next to the sleek station an ancient brass Proteus barometer leans propped against the wall. It is analog and I suppose obsolete, yet elegant in its craftsmanship and comforting in its humanity.

I noticed, not for the first time, that the Proteus needed to be recalibrated, and as I thought about that I recalled how and where I had acquired it. I bought it from Hazel in 2006. One thing led to another and I found myself searching for Hazel on the internet and learned she had died in 2011. The sort of message one expects in the fall.

I wrote a story about Hazel in 2006. A true story. All of it. Like most of my writing it has become a part of my personal archive, rarely shared. It wants “polishing” I suppose, and from time to time I visit it and tweak a bit here and there, knowing even as I do that the tale is told perfectly, and is done. I titled it “The Bridge of Souls,” and in this moment I’ll share it once again.

The Bridge of Souls

I never forgot her, and never will. We encountered each other for less than a half hour long ago. Forty-five years later we met again and shared another moment together. In between those moments more than twenty-three million minutes passed for each of us. Nearly 400,000 hours. Over sixteen thousand days. A lot of living. A lot of people, places and things met, known and left behind. A long sojourn of now forgotten specifics, merged and distilled into a broad gestalt marked by certain bright sparks. In our lives we spent barely more than an hour together. One of those certain bright sparks.

I met her the first time in 1961 when I was 13. My family was on the Great American road trip, leaving Colorado Springs, Colorado in mid-June, motoring across the northern plains of Utah, Wyoming and Idaho to the Pacific Northwest. In Oregon we took US 101 and drove down a rugged, beautiful coastline. At Bandon, Oregon we left the highway when it curved inland and followed a back-country road along cliffs overlooking remote beaches that wandered between volcanic rocks towering above crashing surf. It was mid-morning when we pulled onto the gravel shoulder at a remote wayside gift shop.

I remember it like a photograph; an elegantly solitary story-book shanty situated at the edge of a gigantic ocean beneath an endless sky.

There was no-one inside. My family milled around the porch, waiting for someone to answer our calls and knocking. I saw her first, walking across the road with a bucket in one hand, a surf-casting pole in the other. She called out to us, saying it was too beautiful to be indoors, so she’d gone fishing. She unlocked the gift shop door and told us to go in and have a look around while she put her gear away. My family went ahead, but I followed her through a gate on the south side of the shop.

In the bucket there were surf perch and agates, a glass fishing float, a piece of net, driftwood, old colored-glass bottles. “Neptune’s treasures,” she said, winking at me. It was the name of her gift shop. She sparkled with an intrinsic curiosity and kindness. Her eyes were framed in lines drawn by wind and sun and salt and humor, etched deeply by a constant look-out for the good, the interesting, the treasure of each moment.

She was kind to me. Independent and plain-spoken, wise and strong. She shared her life. She showed me her garden, the corn on the south wall with a surf perch under each stalk, the lush tomatoes gleaming, the deep and delicate garden colors burning like fire and ice in the coastal sun.

She told me what it was like to live on a cliff overlooking the ocean and sand and rock of southern Oregon, where wind sweeps the dune pines and plows inland under afternoon thunderheads rising over inland valleys. A place where she could feel the very earth breathe.

It was a place where new treasures appeared daily, on the beach and in the heart. In plain words, in paused moments when our eyes met and reflected each to the other, she informed me of life, and joy, and the choices to be made on the long road ahead.

I wish that I could add you to that moment we shared, instill it into you so that you would share the ground, the baseline instinctual substance of it. But words have limits, and beyond those limits there is a universe, solid and brilliant, the source of all reflections, its wholeness so soul-filling that when we try to catch it in words we find ourselves returned to a small place, neither as satisfying or as real. No video recording, no faithful capture of the form of the moment when souls meet souls can capture the substance there.

When I returned to the area 45 years later I began following the memory. My wife Lenore and I and our dog, Charlie, were on a camping vacation on the southern Oregon coast. I left the coast highway at Bandon and headed west toward the ocean. At a gas station I asked the attendant about the old beach road. I described the rocks in the surf, and he told us how to get there.

The rocks were the same, the beach, the cliffs. We observed them from behind steel railings at a new, large, elaborate concrete lookout. Now the road was bracketed by hotels and expensive vacation houses and burgeoning developments. It seemed doubtful that anything had survived the years.

In my memory she had been old, ancient to my young eyes. I didn’t think she would still be there, but I had hoped perhaps the house had survived. Maybe there would be someone who remembered her and could tell me her story. We got back in our truck and continued down the coast. Soon an old house with a cluttered front yard appeared on the left. As we got closer I said, “I think that’s it.”

It was. Older, faded, worn by the years. The sign that burned so brightly under the clear blue sky in 1961 was nearly unreadable now. A seeming tsunami-borne crush of debris had overwhelmed the place. Driftwood burls and roots, huge nets and glass fishing floats, bottles, signs, bells, hatches, transoms, a fractured dory, an endless volume of flotsam, jetsam and wrack had piled in the yard and washed up against the walls.

A piece of paper tacked to the wall instructed visitors to ring a painted cowbell on a rope, or the watch bell nailed to the wall. In sun-faded, sand-blasted windows there were colored bottles and eccentric collections of salt-air bric-a-brac. Looking through them I saw worn display cases piled over with bounty. Overflowing nooks and groaning shelves and corners piled high. Decades of sea-wrack and treasure. Neptune’s vault.

There was no answer to the bells. Exploring, I could still feel her presence. Yet there was something else. In the attached open garage, an anomaly; a clutter of garage sale debris and detritus. Clothes and skillets and plates and cheap flatware, electric heaters and faded linens, old curtains and shoes and chairs, a dumping ground of not-quite-used-up throw-aways. An incipient seediness working its way into the place.

Her spirit was still here, the foundation-rock beneath the burgeoning clutter and ruin, but I suspected she was gone. It looked to me like someone else had taken over, some sort of commercial pack rat peddler living in ruins soon to be razed for cash and yet another view motel. Finally, finding no-one there, we left.

Driving back through town we passed the local museum, and I decided to stop and ask about Neptune’s Treasures. I wanted to get the rest of the story if I could. The Director there listened to my story and said, “You must mean Hazel. Why, she’s not gone.” She smiled and said, “She looks like she could be a hundred and ten, but she’s probably only around ninety now. She’s still there, far as I know.”

She began looking through the phone book on her desk as she spoke. “She’s a bit of a celebrity, as a matter of fact. In the late 1980’s a famous writer mentioned her in a book. Not by name, but everybody here knows it was her. He was a photographer, and his photograph of some glass bottles out there was displayed in the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art. At least that was what the story said. Yes, here she is. I’ll call and see if she’s there.” She was. And she would wait for us.

On the way back a slow, breath-holding rise of anticipation. I had tracked down a memory more dream than real. Soon I would see her again. A broad arc in the patterns of my life, returning to where it began. In the truck with Lenore and Charlie we are three companion souls on a shared sojourn, a bubble of fullness gathering around us now, the rising swell of a looming epiphany. When we got there I walked through the yard filled with Neptune’s treasures and rang the ancient bell.

        And there were her eyes, sparkling at me. Wise, interested, knowing; still on the lookout for treasure. And I felt it. Across time, in a near-complete absence of the usual familiarities of connection, we were still connected.  I reached for her hand and ended up giving her a hug. We both smiled, each knowing the other wholly in a single holy instant. There we were, together, in the place where paths begin and swing wide across a grand creation and return again. In the place where time disappears and we are home.

I introduced her to Lenore and Charlie the Lab. She said Charlie looked sort of like a sea lion, and gave him a pat. She looked into Lenore’s eyes and then nodded, giving her a big hug. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you around.”

“It’s been a long time,” she mused. She went behind the counter and lifted up a guest register, old and tattered, bursting with comments of travelers from around the world who had found joy and delight in Neptune’s Treasures. It went back to 1964, too late to have captured a memento of that first visit. Folded inside was a newspaper article about the book she was mentioned in.

She didn’t remember much of the man, just a fellow in a hurry who took pictures of some colored glass bottles in her window. “People ask about it, so I show them that.”

She pointed out the window, across the road. “Been some changes here. When that hotel went in, it blocked the view. Now when I want to look at the ocean, I have to close my eyes.” A little smile. “One of these days I reckon I’ll just keep’em closed and see it all the time.”

Waving her hand at the shop, she said “The place is worn now, but I don’t see harm in that. I know it’s run down some. I can’t keep up with it like I used to. I’ve got a bad sciatica and can’t get down to the beach anymore. But there are still treasures here for those who care to look for them, and I’m still here with them.

“When the locals sold out and moved away they put the stuff they thought was too good to throw away in the garage. It’s not exactly treasure, more of a dumping place now, but there are useful things in there, too, if you look.”

Treasures for those with eyes which see. The oldest lesson, learned again.

Too soon it was time to go. I had found the barometer as she showed us around and paid for it. She rummaged in a cabinet on the wall behind her, and produced a seed packet of forget-me-nots. Emblazoned on the front of the packet was her name. I signed the register: “May, 2006 and Summertime, 1961. I forgot you not.” Feeling the fullness of the seed planted in me so very long ago.

I hugged her in the leaving with tears in my eyes, and she told me I’d made her day. In the truck the fullness overcame me and I cried, filled with an extraordinary and ineffable joy.

Later, driving slowly toward the end of day, I wondered about the writer/photographer who passed through that place. Did he know his source of light? Or were his eyes open only wide enough to catch the single ray captured in a piece of glass?

In Hazel’s realm there is a brilliant grace woven mysteriously and subtly into the fabric of a well-lived life. When his itinerant eye caught a certain quality of air and light in five colored glass bottles, did he also see her? The shimmer of her ancient harmonies in the salt-wind and sun-glazed panes? Did he see the spirit of Hazel centered in all the array of patterns? Did he know her as the all-pervasive, radiant source? Did he see the thousand perfect pictures behind the bottles?

Or was he content to click a shutter and leave behind the crunch of tires on gravel, carrying away only the merest hint of a profound and pervasive grace? A piece, like a heart in a cooler, to be transplanted not into another human breast, but merely to the wall of a museum where the harvester is glorified and treasure is contained and controlled and does not burst the soul into light, but only tickles it a bit?

I wondered. Sad at the thought that the fullness of life available to us all at every moment can remain unknown to us.

A day later I am sitting with Lenore and Charlie at a table on the veranda of a sidewalk bistro in a coastal tourist town. It is a community of artists and shopkeepers, of tasteful promenades and reworked coastal architectures where the soul’s art crosses paths with capital. The collision produces a jarring, odd juxtaposition of truth and lies.

At the next table over four people have met to share their religious histories. They pray publicly and earnestly and courageously before lunch. They converse and the biographical fragments drift over to us, threaded with affectations of speech and precise articulations. There are dry, memorized liturgies of personal epiphanies, regurgitated as easily as an eye blinks.

Usually I’d leave them to their paths; leave them to their journey and recall myself to this place at a table in the sun where I sit with two great souls. But today is different.

It is like a snake has entered the garden. My hackles rise as the too-loud conversation, on display, proceeds. In their conversation “I” reigns. It is the single word most often spoken. God has been retrospectively inserted into their histories like an all-purpose, all-explanatory footnote. Each story is egocentric, varnished to a faux-theocentric shine. Their tightly circumscribed consciousness radiates patterns. These are not the soaring, singing, crystalline perfections of Hazel’s life. The lodestone is unknown; their needles spin aimlessly within the local. Separation prevails. Ego and Deus, unreconciled.

And I wonder, seeing once again the knowing in Hazel’s eyes: Do we grow into it? Are we born with it? How have we come to be the ones who see and feel and know what others don’t, or can’t, or won’t?

I still wonder about that at times. And when I do, I close my eyes and see Hazel’s eyes, now closed too, looking at the ocean. And then I am at peace.

I check into the website Grief Speaks Out everyday, looking for expressions that reflect my own experience since Lenore died. I find reflections there which are informative and helpful and descriptive of some of my own feelings and thoughts. It’s a very useful, thoughtful, compassionate, helpful website – and in some cases I suspect it even saves lives. That being said, there is at least one thing it cannot do. It cannot provide a roadmap for the griever. In the end, every grieving person walks a path that is unique. And it leads to a larger perspective that is equally unique.

The day Lenore died her loss and my grief appeared in a shattering explosion and was nothing like what my previous speculations about what it would be like. It consumed me. That’s what an explosion does. The aftermath was pieces and numbness, of living in a totality involving only grief and loss and mourning. It was inchoate emotional pain and unmanageable mental chaos. My world view blew up, the basic root of my life paradigm vanished, the matrix of my own understanding broke down into senseless chaos. My spirit broke.

As time goes on for me I’ve realized that grief is just one part of my experience. The shattered pieces of my paradigm and my understanding have come back together in a new configuration, informed by new, critical information; Lenore is not here with me in this life. She is in me, she still speaks to me and I to her, I can imagine her presence with me. Yet she is not here anymore. She is somewhere else. My perspective has had to be rearranged to accommodate this new, massive fact.

In moments of reflection I wonder why I have the impulse to share with others what is my uniquely personal experience when everyone has their own in play. Near as I can tell it’s simply because I am human and therefore self-involved. I don’t want to be thought of poorly by others, I want to be understood by others. I would rather not hurt others if possible. If things go the wrong way in these matters, my chances of survival go down.

If I remove my selfishness from the perspective, then why am I writing this at all, and why would I share it? People think what they will of me. I have no power over that. People understand in their own way and their understanding is informed by their personal perspective, and I have no power over that. People can get hurt whether I mean to hurt them or not, that’s up to them and not me, it’s a manifestation of their own unique perspective. I have no power over that.

Yet also because I am human I am more than just an individual – I am also communal. I’m social by human nature, part of a collective. That collective is also selfish because it’s human, but its needs are different. It wants to know what its members have encountered and use that information to survive. So I have an innate desire to inform the collective of any useful information I have acquired which might be useful for that ongoing mutually selfish desire to survive.

Survive! It’s the commandment so universally assumed that even God did not feel compelled to tell Moses to chisel it in stone: “Thou shalt survive.” It’s written in the bio-code that stretches all the way back in history to the first living cell. It’s still, even in the most recently evolved part of the human brain, the primary purpose we put the prefrontal cortex to use for. Survival.

Why is loss and bereavement nearly universally regarded as a thing human beings pass through on their way to more life, to survival? The assumption proves itself true in all but a few cases. Grief, loss, bereavement – it’s something human beings pass through, live with, bear with, suffer with – and survive with. They go on, recover, reorganize, rebuild. It’s assumed. It’s fact. Options need not apply. Start as far away as you want, but when you drill down to the foundation that’s where you’re going to end up. You survive. It’s an unquestionable underlying basic assumption of human existence.

But what if we take the unrecognized, underlying basic assumption in all that and throw it out the window? Declare it crap, and start putting everything back together without assuming that survival is the be-all and end-all fundamental focus upon which all human purpose is based? We  assume that under all circumstances, at all times, the first critical requirement of the individual and the human collective is to survive.

In a place where everything dies.

Even if you’re walking dead, even if your mind tells you it’s time to go, even if your heart is full and your life completed and you have become useless to yourself in the attainment and conclusion of your reason for being, even if everything ahead is dénouement, a slow slide into deterioration and eventual death – still you are required to live because even in that condition your simple presence can still be used by others to fulfill their needs.

The purpose of this thing I’m writing right now, telling it like it is for me, is about describing how survival could not always the best way to go. Survival is an option if you’re consciously aware of it as such. And it could be not the best option in certain circumstances, including mine.

I know, I know, this sounds suspiciously like a long, slow, tedious rationale for suicide, and already the more sensitive and perceptive readers among you, having detected that possibility, are forming up responses from your own perspective if that proves to be the case. A body of information is already in play, gently but firmly opposed to my view of survival as an option, putting harder weapons on alert for self defense in case this proves to be heresy or an attack on the fundament of basic beliefs and instincts. Will I need to be marginalized, explained by my condition and circumstances, my thoughts rationalized until safely reduced to a comfortable perspective?

Or wait. Has that already happened? Upon rereading this I realize I’ve already said what I came here to say, and the reactions by my readers are already in play. I could explicate further, but the essence is there. I could stop right now.

Yet if the explication isn’t as full and developed as I hoped it would be when I set out to write this thing, one thing remains to be said out loud.

Yes, I’m a potential suicide. But a slow one. I am aware of the joy life still offers me, aware of the others I can still serve with my experience and gained wisdoms and simple presence. I’m still aware of how wonderful and magic and full life is. I still laugh, dance, listen to music, think, feel, move, have places to go and things to do, people I love, people who love me and care about me. I still know the unexpected amazing development is just around the corner, waiting to delight and engage me in something new and unforeseeable and wonderful.

The thing is, I don’t hope for any of that any more. I don’t not hope – I just don’t hope for those things anymore. I don’t have a driving desire burning deep inside me to have them. I don’t need them in the sense of filling a void, removing a lack in my life. I’ve had them. I’ve been there, I’ve done all that. It’s been enough. And the context I gained them in, my life with Lenore, is perfect. I have no need of a different one. I’m happy with what I’ve had, and with what I have from it now. I’ve had enough. I’m done.

I’ve come to that place where all truth is only a matter of perspective. It’s all relative, even what we sense about the universe behind the curtain of consciousness. Even the sense we have of the eternal nature of the stars and earth and natural life is a result of interpretation rather than fact. It’s an illusion of vanity, a manifestation of our separated individual identities. It’s all pretty great when we live within it and find our way there, but in the end it is still a limited place to exist within. Exhaust its possibilities, master it, and it becomes superfluous. It becomes time to move on, to explore further, to discover what’s on the other side of the curtain.

I think it would be ok to die today, but I’m not going to get all inspired and enthusiastic and energetic about it. I also think it would be ok to kill myself today – but ditto. All I know right now is that when the time for me to die comes, whether naturally or by suicide, it will be the right time.

It will be the right time. That’s all I want people to remember about my dying. It was time, it was the right time. The rest, hopefully, will be about my living, about the wonderful, beautiful, full, hard, strange, amazing, loving, thoughtful, interesting, fulfilling, completed life I had, and how it all came to fruition and completion in the life Lenore and I shared together.