Some critter rustles leaves out there in the otherwise quiet woods. After consuming much liquid before bed, I rise several times in the night and converse wordlessly with the waxing gibbous Moon.
Everything feels fragile, but hopeful in a way that tastes strange.
. . . I’ve never seen my neighborhood like this, without lights. And I still have phone service. I’m in the dark but still connected. It feels like an apt metaphor for the country at the moment. My houseguests are all getting excited and lighting candles. We can live with this.
—Amanda Palmer, “I’m Getting WARMER.”
Do people entreat the weather gods behind the scenes, keeping things less intense than they might otherwise be?
There in the shadows, a lonely house. That house is closing in upon its love. . . . Or on its lassitude. Gathered round their lamp-lit table, they don’t know the measure of their hopes; they don’t guess that their desire carries so far, out into the vast night that hems them in.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
In a dream, I meet a few medicine people and then encounter one standing on low hilltop at the edge of a collection of structures of varying heights, overlooking the sea in the middle distance.
As I approach him, he’s blowing or singing into a round, blocky, wooden thing—making a sound—with an air of focus and humor unlike any of the other medicine people. A medium-size shorthair-mix dog—maybe pitbull with some pointy-eared breed—sticks close to the man’s legs, growling a little at first but warming up to me as the man and I converse.
“I’m calling for information,” the man explains.
So somehow putting the sound out there is what brings the information in. In-form-ation, perhaps from the sea.
“I’m listening through my hair. If this doesn’t work, I’ll just use”—and then he says a word starting with p, unclear to me. PayPal? Patreon? (I’m fond of neither.) I sense that the p-thing is easier but less natural than the wooden instrument and therefore less rich.
He turns to the dog, utters some phrases I don’t understand, and turns expectantly to me.Is he inviting me to repeat after him? Is he my teacher? He feels more like an older peer. Will I have to make silly noises? Some kind of sound magic or healing might be in my future, but I’m not there yet.
But feelings are meant to be felt—that’s what they are for. We heal by acknowledging our emotions and test our heart’s resilience by lingering within the unbearable. It is something music can help us do. We find our hearts are much stronger than we presumed, and what we thought was unbearable was nothing of the sort. Music draws forth these subterranean feelings and simultaneously rescues us from them.
—Nick Cave, “The Red Hand Files #306”
“Do I . . . repeat after you?” I venture.
He laughs. “No, your way is different.”
I relax. I like listening to (good, meaningful) sounds, but making them is a different story—unless I’m talking with ravens or something like that, obvs.
When I fail to respond in whatever “my way” is, he smiles and begins to move toward one of the tall buildings. I follow to a ground-floor elevator, which we and others enter. My companion punches a button to go all the way down, to the goodnatured exasperation of the other occupants, who must now go with us before reaching their floors. The elevator, from which we can see out, whirrs downward and then sideways and then down some more. On one level, I glimpse a couple of colorful figures with skull heads—horse and maybe deer—beautiful and eerie.
We emerge into a crumbling industrial area with a pastel cloud-streaked sky.
Thinking it might be an illusion, like a big movie set, I ask, “Are we still in a room in the building?”
Ageing well means shedding roles that suit no more, illusions and delusions, clutter and collections, even mirror images of younger selves and broken dreams with sharp edges.
—Imelda Almqvist, “What She Sheds”
My companion’s eyes twinkle. “Things are different here.”
To the sounds of windchime and breeze and rain, I wake to the underside of a sky hinting at morning around the edges. The day sifts in, absent the dread or sorrow I usually feel at leaving my dreams.
Not that judging intense emotions fixes anything—so I might as well listen to them. Dread and sorrow are useful information, telling me about where I am and where and how I’d like to be. Or consider anger: it reveals what’s important—what calls for protection or nourishment—like when I need space and when to stand firm. In the aftermath, what remains is what’s enduring.
Best to channel strong feelings toward something constructive, though.
Anger is easy. Too many huddles of women discussing this stuff end with “f*ck those guys” energy. I know and love too many men in this field to think it’s their fault as individuals. My discomfort at being different is, in some ways, not their problem.
I like men. I really like smart, curious men. I think philosophers and scientists and apologists (male and female) should get to engage in the way they want to engage. The point of the hemisphere hypothesis is not to set up a false binary, to say right hemispheric ways of knowing are always better (though they are, in theory, able to give us a more accurate picture of the world) but to redress the balance from centuries of being told they are lesser. Even though the desire to take revenge when we have felt disparaged goes deep in all of us (no, you’re the loser!), I can hear how childish that inner voice is. She needs a hug. It is not wise for her to be in charge.
We need both hemispheric approaches, and they work best together. Just like men and women.
—Elizabeth Oldfield, “Just Call Me Token Woman”
The Sun comes up. I rise to feed the birds—but before I reach the sunflower seeds, a bird flies right at my head, twice, veering at the last second, a dark blur so fast I can’t tell who it is: once head on and once from behind. Maybe Jay? Maybe smaller. Surely not Chickadee. Maybe Spotted Towhee? Probably Jay; it’s their kind of vibe, even cheekier than usual. A jay squawks now, in fact, as if in confirmation.
One time, in a waiting room for a friend, I sat by a tall live potted plant, who kept tickling me, eliciting a smile.
When my friend came back, he apologized for the wait.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I have friends everywhere. I made friends with this plant!”
He laughed.
“I’m serious!”
“I know! I’m laughing because I believe you!”
Sometimes when I leave my place—the forested Tenterraces, where my tent is—the people there do everything they can to say, Don’t go! Recently, as I started down the trail, blackberry brambles held on for all they were worth. Then the small oak who bends over the trail snagged a solid chunk of my hair, and then a fallen stick tried to trip me up and the leaves slid such that I went down on my butt to keep everything I was carrying from tumbling down the trail. When I reached the bottom, I realized someone had snatched a pair of leggings from the basket I was carrying. Very funny, everyone! Also sweet and sad. How might I someday settle into a soul-aligned place wherein we can’t be taken from each other, where I can live out my days?
Home means many things. I haven’t experienced the deepest level since I was a kid, except in my dreams.
The structure has existed for far longer than she’s been alive, and hosted a number of families; after Biss dies or moves, it will pass on to somebody else. She might exchange money for it, and have her name on the deed, but the house exists as part of something greater than her.
—Devon Price, “A Non-Disposable Place”
It’s okay to spend time away, no matter how much our people might miss us. Here at my absent friend’s tiny home, Raven calls again. Friends are everywhere. It’s not that the dreams and loves and life don’t care; it’s that they need care, too.
Sometimes the most healing
thing we can do is remind ourselves
over and over and over—
Other people feel this too.
—Andrea Gibson, “Illness and the Myth of Strength”
I’m not antisocial while away from human-centric worlds; it’s just a different kind of society.
The tools of science and analytic philosophy are noble and useful but they refuse to stay in their lane. They have a bad habit of land-grabbing, squeezing out all the other ways of knowing, all the other disciplines. In the nineteenth century when trying to collectively name the emerging fields of those studying the material world, the brands of “nature poker”, “natural philosopher” and “nature peeper” were rejected in favour of “scientist”, from the simple root “knowing” in Latin, so the problem was baked in.
I have come to believe that some questions will not open up for you if you approach them with the hammer and chisel of your intellectual might. Science and philosophy are simply not fitted for them. They require us to lay down the anxious human craving to tame and control, to nail them into the system in which we sit, like Descartes, the emperor of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms. Only those sufficiently aware of their powerlessness, who offer not power but a cry for help, a poem or a prayer can be welcomed inside these questions and find therein a different kingdom, a different world. They are existential, relational questions, and these kind of questions are vulnerable. We don’t get to stay safe in our systems if we want to actually connect. . . .
I have worked hard to shake off the conditioning of my culture that says my intuitive, relational and embodied ways of knowing aren’t the “right kind of smart”. Mainly now, I’m happy to be the one who brings a poem, who cries when discussing the “problem of pain” because it seems an obscenity to do otherwise. I have learned to ignore the YouTube commentators bitching about the over emotional woman, this stupid, tearful hand-wavy bint. Bless their fearful hearts, I think, I hope they get to really live, really feel what it is to be alive, at some point. Maybe through the love of a good woman. On my best days this is my response. Not all days.
—Elizabeth Oldfield, “Just Call Me Token Woman”
More and more, I recognize how sensitive I am, how much of it I’ve suppressed to survive, and how much better I feel when I honor it, even when it means a lot of time away from humans.
During my darkest periods, when I was particularly vulnerable and susceptible to the elements—so much so that even the slightest chill would send uncomfortable shivers through my body—I discovered an unexpected path to empowerment. Instead of surrendering to these challenging conditions, I chose to embrace them wholeheartedly. In a profound demonstration of the human spirit’s capacity to transcend perceived limitations, I found myself performing energetic bhangra dances on the frozen lakes of the Yukon in temperatures as extreme as –45°C. . . .
My eyes, once constantly filled with tears of sorrow and clouded by sadness, gradually transformed—they started to radiate with an unmistakable sparkle of pure joy.
—Gurdeep Pandher, “Put On Those Happy Glasses—The Blurriness That Hides Joy Will Clear Away”
Am I at the vulnerable stage of a just-hatched dragonfly: soft before hardening into my new form? Whatever it is, my life is richer for my sensitivities. Despite requiring extra care with the types of energy I’m around, it’s worth it to experience worlds that can be reached only by feel.
But I know how much love is within me because I am sad all the time. I’ve beaten myself up so badly trying to shut both feelings out—the ardor and the longing, which can only exist in tandem. . . .
There is so much to lose—that is, so much to hold dear. And so many discoveries to make if I only remain present. It is a delight to watch Loqi pause at the foot of Dump Truck’s cage, remembering she is not supposed to bother him, and instead grabbing a toy. It thrills me and rends my heart to see her learning, the same way it did when Dump Truck first learned he liked the opening theme to Twin Peaks. With every loss, with every change, we are finding ways to be alive with one another.
I will take on the inconvenience, the extra duties, the distractions, and the loss. I will vacuum up the hair and the dry chinchilla turds. I will watch their bodies schlumping over cutely as they kick and fend for my attention. I will wake up to the sounds of them dashing and rattling the floorboards. I’ll take the scuffs on the walls, the costly repairs, the lines from smiling on my face and I will be better for it.
Let life be harder, messier, and so stuffed full of meaning that it almost bursts from its weight. I want to be right here. I want to care.
—Devon Price, “A Non-Disposable Place”
I feed the usual people: stellar jays, spotted towhees, chipmunks, and chickadees.
They then beg for more, but I can offer only occasional treats and admiration. They must depend on the forest, not on me.
How do chickadees crack into sunflower seeds, anyway? Sometimes they peck adorably at my toenails or fingernails, either suspecting my extremities might be seeds or indignantly demanding attention—more cute than painful. There must be weaknesses in the seed shells that allow access when pecked in just the right way.
Speaking of birds, two hummingbirds recently flew into the bookshop. One flew back out, but the other repeatedly banged at the high window above the shelf from where I was relocating rare finds. I tried psychic encouragement toward the door, but that one was too panicked. A duster pole finally coaxed them out.
A hummingbird recently flew into the tiny home, too. That one swooped into the upstairs bedroom like a stellar jay did once, so I knew from experience that the only way to help was to open a window and remove the screen. Afterwards, I brushed tiny feathers like dust bunnies from the bed.
I move to the pond with a matë and a jay. The air has shifted in that inexplicable way toward fall; the redwoods have begun to shed tawny old fronds. Soon this year’s hatchlings will encounter their first ice on the birdbath, trying to sip from what was previously liquid, and Canada geese will spread across the sky, arrowing laboriously and gloriously South.
I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.
—Oliver Sacks, Gratitude
Acorn Woodpecker, worked up about something, brings my attention back to the present. Then Raven stops by, and we catch up.
It was dark, it was predatory, and it was light at the same time. Beautiful beautiful intelligence.
—My friend Facet 44 (shared with permission, as are all quotes from him)
Now caffeine-fueled, I clear most of a downed ceanothus, lopping with the Cyndi Loppers and sawing with a hacksaw, and converse with a chipmunk and the plants around there, as well as with Raven. Physical work feels good. I love a lot of lop-lop-lopping . . . time after time.
With the trails cleared, I pull a big branch (from a different tree) out of the pond and then start sawing through one of the two ceanothus trunks. About halfway through, the saw repeatedly binds up, so I stop, to resume when the wood has dried more.
In a dance with a slight breeze, I do my exercise routine. After a sunlit shower, I feed more peanuts and sunflower seeds to the critters.
Some gods are tiny. Some gods are slow. And the snail gods teach me a lot about creative practice. In the hustle and output fetishization of capitalism, there is little space for the deep, meandering, underground work of creative practice. Creativity is not a to do list. Creativity is a wild god. And in order to have a relationship with a wild god, you must be willing to surrender. You must be willing to listen. You must be willing to have all your plans destroyed. You must be willing to change directions, get lost, fail, and look ridiculous. The creative practice, if done right, will transform you. You will be someone else on the other side. Therefore, there is no way to plan for this or control it. It’s a lot of allowing. It’s a lot of being willing. And it’s a lot of daring, of boldly going into the unknown.
—Clementine Morrigan, “The Snail Gods”
In a text, a friend shares about a delectable recipe of bubbly broiled butternut squash. I can almost taste it. Is this what it’s like for spirits who receive offerings—living on love and goodness if not physical experience?
The friend mentions the 1 Percent, reminding me of a comment I saw on Mastodon recently—something like: “What do the billionaires think will happen when they emerge from their bunkers? Are they gonna come out and try to make it on their ‘leadership skills’?” (If anyone knows who said it, let me know; I’ll credit them.)
For Susie and me, humour is as necessary as breathing—without it, the darkness becomes unbearable. I find there is no more heartening sound than laughter, and in particular, the laughter of my wife. There is a gentle defiance to it, a bell-like musicality that gives grounds for hope.
—Nick Cave, “The Red Hand Files #305”
Would the billionaires even emerge? Wealth-hoarding precludes fairness and generosity. Would the avaricious and their lackeys survive being cooped up together until . . . ?
But of course, it’s that knowledge when you externalize evil, the way many Zionists do towards Palestinians, you, in the name of cleansing evil, commit more evil. But it’s when we recognize the evil within us that’s the most important element to preventing ourselves from committing evil, because we know it’s there.
—Chris Hedges in an interview with Gabor Maté, December 2024
Maybe bunkers would serve as cocoons: hierarchies could dissolve into imaginal soup and in-form the mycelial webs of our collective wings.
Why do killers fear poets? You were not a combatant. You did not carry a weapon. You put words on paper. But all the might of the Israeli army and intelligence services were deployed to track you down. . . .
Killers are trapped in a literal world. Their imaginations are calcified. They have shut down empathy. They know poetry’s power, but they do not know where that power comes from, like an audience left gaping at the deft skill of a magician.
—Chris Hedges, “Letter to Refaat Alareer”
I learned from a moment of overconsumption recently. Midday one day, I splurged on smoked salmon tortellini to-go for dinner, thinking it would be two meals—which it could have been, especially because the cook did not skimp. By dinnertime, though, I realized I wouldn’t feel safe letting the fish sit overnight, so I ate it all and was so uncomfortable I sat up long after my usual bedtime to aid digestion. Then I carefully chose sleeping positions so as to be gentle on my maxed-out insides. I think I’m cured of that kind of indulgence for a while.
It was good that I stayed up late, though, because it meant I could be there for an online friend going though a rough time. It helped me, too, because at first he came across as toxic but I managed to hold myself together instead of lashing out or shutting him out, which gave him the opportunity to share about devastating things he’d been dealing with and gave me practice in questioning my perceptions. Maybe billionaires will metaphorically “sit up with their indigestion” and thus find it in themselves to listen, too.
Everything under creation is flapping like dismembered, dawn-awakened batwings right now.
—Facet 44
Also I did not need breakfast the next morning, so I guess the tortellini made two meals after all. It’s amazing what the body can do. That was So Much Food, and then I basically felt fine. Where did it all go?
But back to the state of the world: from my vantage point, it looks like a lot of us are thinking, Fuck it, let’s do this.
What we need is a radical, rebellious, fuck-you optimism. The kind that spits in the face of despair and keeps moving forward anyway, middle finger raised and teeth bared.
—JA Westenberg, on Mastodon
Fewer and fewer of us are trusting anyone to bail us out; increasingly, we’re rolling up our sleeves to bail ourselves out or go down fighting. We’re growing some backbone.
“It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”
—Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
WE are all suiting up to be warriors in gardens, it seems.
It’s about . . . what we can do, the simple tasks, right in front of us.
Not trying to save the world, but trying to save the family, the village, the garden. . . .
You can only do what you can do. Find what you can do.
This is what I can do right now.
—Amanda Palmer, “I’m Getting WARMER.”
I’m less interested in basic survival than in balanced thriving. I don’t need to stick around where there’s no place for me.
We are war orphans, you and I, displaced from lands and their stories, cleared out from enclosed traditions, lost refugees seeking home in cultures just as lost as we.
The older I get, the more I feel my grandfather. Sometimes, I see him in the mirror and say “hey,” though I’d never said that to him when he lived. He would have said “hi,” and called me “mister,” as he always did, and smiled with strangely-young eyes despite his aging body. . . .
He was always doing what he was supposed to do, and that’s the great horror of his life. This is what I feel from him most in my flesh, the regret that he never let himself do anything wrong. It was also the great tragedy of his death, a deep sadness I can never shake when I feel him.
. . . For decades he did all he was supposed to do, so he could one day do instead what he wanted to do.
And the time came, finally, the years of life after more than the half-a-century of work. But my grandfather only had a few years of doing what he wanted: he finally retired, but so, too, did his heart.
Hearts—and dreams, and loves, and life—are like that, I think. You can only put them off for so long before they finally tire of waiting around for you. And it’s in exactly the times I put off something for another time that I feel my grandfather’s flesh in mine.
“Is that what you really want?” he seems to ask, “or only what you’re supposed to want?”
I don’t always have the courage to answer him.
I’d tell you I miss him, but that would just be silly. He’s around more often than most others I’ve ever known, and I literally feel him in the muscles of my chest. And that, I think, is what my ancestors’ ancestors knew, where the archives really are, and how their wisdom survived the war of forgetting.
—Rhyd Wildermuth, “The Archive of Ancestral Flesh”
Because I promised in a dream, I write a letter in my journal to a person I once hurt because of how I acted on my feelings—not to send, which could stir up a can of worms nobody would want, even if I could track her down. (In the dream, she expressed continued struggles with me, even though we haven’t interacted in years; I asked her what she would like from me, and this is what she requested.) I apologize for the pain I caused when I didn’t understand things I do now. I tell her I hope that in time the pain might soften in a way that nourishes her life. I like to think the message goes out there in some way, perhaps in the dream realms, and will be healing. It feels necessary and good, if a challenging navigation of emotions, still, after all this time.
And the Poles tried him for murder, and, of course, mass murder and war crimes and sentenced him to death. And a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his son, saying, Whatever you do, let your heart be the guide. Listen to your heart. Don’t just let your mind decide, and don’t accept what authority tells you. Question everything. Let your humanity shine. I’m paraphrasing him, but you know what? He meant it. He had a real transformation, and he wasn’t looking for clemency. He wasn’t gonna get any. He just came to terms with his conscience. And he says the reason I was able to do this, he says, is because the Poles showed me compassion like nobody in my whole life had ever showed me compassion, despite what I’d done, they showed me compassion, which put me in touch with my God again. So he’s somebody who, a few days before he died, overcame his fragmentation. And there were a few Nazis like that, a minority. Many of them never came to that point, and they went to their deaths convinced that they were victims of injustice or defiant. I’m just saying that wholeness is possible, but it’s not guaranteed.
. . . The emotional health and demeanor of the former prisoners was so much more solitary and composed and grounded, whereas these guards were just broken. You can tell by their facial expressions how tormented they were, even though it was the prisoners who suffered the torture and the guard who had perpetrated it, it’s the latter who, in old age, were totally broken.
. . . And human morality, if you look at the actual studies, develops not because people teach you morality, not because people indoctrinate you in good ways of being, but because they treat you well, because they see you, they understand you, they love you, they embrace you. They promote the development of moral faculties, which is a natural human process given the right conditions. So the lack of moral sentience is actually a sign of trauma. It means that these people were hurt very early, very early, so that they shut down, and that shut down from feeling that what we’re really talking about here is an escape from vulnerability. Now, vulnerability from the Latin word “vulnerare,” to wound. So our vulnerability is our capacity to be wounded, which we have from moment of conception until we die. But the mind can handle only so much vulnerability, and only if there’s protection, so that we escape not from true vulnerability, but from our capacity to feel and acknowledge our vulnerability.
. . . I’ve experienced my heart being cold sometimes. I know what that feels like. I don’t like it and it’s a trauma response, and it takes some work and some awareness and some support to move out of it. . . . There’s a Holocaust survivor, Edith Eger. She’ in her 90s now, a wonderful woman. She was probably on the same train that my grandparents were on, on the way to Auschwitz. Her family died there. My grandparents did. They lived in the same city in southern Slovakia. She survived, and she wrote a book called The Choice, and she says in that book that we all have a Nazi in us, so that capacity for closing down and being cold hearted—that’s certainly in me, probably in you, I don’t know you personally. It’s in all of us. The question is, what circumstances help us melt that heart? And what circumstances free it even more?
. . . The first thing is find others. Don’t be alone with it, because it’s almost impossible to suffer and to witness all this without sharing it with people that understand you and can support you. So I think we need to be in community about this, whatever community you can find, number one. Number two, don’t get consumed by it. Don’t let it take over your life. Not in the sense of don’t be active, but take care of yourself . . . for two reasons. One is, if you don’t take care of yourself, whatever that means . . . you’ll burn out. People talk about compassion fatigue. People talk about burnout. What that is, is not taking care of ourselves, so we burn out. And then you’re no good to anybody. The second reason is, if you don’t take care of your own mental health in this then the quality and impact of your activity is going to be impaired. So I’ve spoken many times on this issue over the years; certainly when I come from a place of rage or come from a place of bitterness, my speaking is not that effective. So you have to come from much of a place of groundedness and some understanding especially of the people that are on the other side, which doesn’t mean condoning or supporting or agreeing with or putting up with, but it does mean you get where they’re coming from. If you want to speak to people and have any hope of getting through, you got to speak in a way that doesn’t immediately threaten them. And I don’t mean that in any way to censor your words or to suppress your truth, I’m talking about the tone and how you talk to them.
. . . Don’t stay inactive, because the inactivity itself is demoralizing. So join with others. Take care of your emotional health, whether that takes counseling, sometimes, if it takes yoga, meditation, walks in nature, physically taking care of your body, how you eat, journaling, listening to music, whatever inspires or feeds your soul. Do it and and then be as active as you can be within the relative limitations or relative possibilities of your situation, and don’t take it on personally. . . . I often talk about the spectacular failures in history. Take the Buddha. How is universal love going? You know, Jesus, how is forgiving your brothers and your enemies and turning the other cheek? How’s that going? You know, Lao Tzu, or the Hebrew prophets and their cries for justice. How’s it going? So you might say they’re failures. Are they, or did they not contribute massively to a human project that is a long term project? In our own little ways, we can each do the same thing. It’s not for us to finish, so we can’t take it personally.
—Gabor Maté in an interview with Chris Hedges, December 2024
A chipmunk goes into one of their nigh-interminable chirping stints, establishing territory. I throw peanuts in that direction, which often does the trick, but not this time. When the sound finally peters out, a chainsaw starts up. And stops. And starts and stops and starts and stops, like a man moaning in agony. Then come the leafblowers.
I asked the spirits: why did he have live through such horrific pain, it seemed inhumane! They said: “Without the pain he could never have accepted that it is his time to go. The pain was about growing into acceptance and letting go”. When he breathed out and it wasn’t followed by an in-breath, I felt as proud of him as I did when our eldest son took his first baby steps in our kitchen. He has done it! He has stepped into the other world with courage and without looking back! . . .
However, with son number #1 (I went into labour on Tuesday evening and by now it was Thursday evening!) there was a moment of despair where the Gates of the Land of the Dead loomed large in the otherworldly fog. This baby suddenly seemed like the worst idea we ever had. I just wanted the pain to STOP. Failing that, I wanted to die. Whatever it took, I could not handle the pain any longer!! Now, I don’t know about the pain level (some) people experience when they die, but I do know that human consciousness can narrow to a tunnel or even dot: MAKE THE PAIN STOP!!!
I do not believe that someone who dies feeling that they are being tortured, is a good death. It may be a “natural death” (without medical intervention) but not a death where someone consciously steps into the other world. . . .
Last but not least a few words about the painting at the top of this essay . . . .
The painting was inspired by a dream where a Great Goddess embodying (or personifying) Death appeared and returned the bodies of dead souls to Mother Earth with immense gentleness and compassion. She lovingly stitched the bodies of the deceased into the Earth, the way we put a baby to bed.
—Imelda Almqvist, “Assisted Dying: The Absence of the Dead Is Their Way of Appearing”
As darkness gathers, I shower, chilly around the edges and warm in the center, and brush my teeth. Moonlight filters through, making everything extra-magical.
After a dear aunt died a couple of years ago, I honored her transition, but also it didn’t feel like she was gone. I wondered if I was in denial, but it didn’t have that emotional charge. She simply wasn’t gone. I could still converse with her, and in fact I think she appreciated that I accepted her new state, while she understood that others must mourn. She’s further afield by now, having moved along to other things, but it’s not like being torn apart—more like a friend who’s away but still within reach. In fact I feel her attention turned this way right now—her smile—as our affinity is activated by my thinking about her. I suppose it would be different if she had been a day-to-day part of my life and left a hole, but overall her passing simply felt meaningful.
As for me, for now, I’m going about life as unusual. I can’t find home, and anyway I seem to have lost the keys. For however long, though, there’s a place for me where I am.
It is up to me to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.” “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.” . . .
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. . . .
This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people—even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. . . .
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
—Oliver Sacks, Gratitude
I was thinking I wouldn’t eat this salad yet, because now it requires a flashlight—plus the teeth-brushing already happened—but it calls to me so I do that before bed. It’s so good, with oil and balsamic vinegar.
Night comes on quietly, like a curious doe.
1. The soft pressure on my face paired by a deepening silence, as if someone had folded the blank air over on itself, before I realize a deer is watching me from the edge of the forest.
—Sophie Strand, “31 Stars in a Life’s Sky”
In sleep, I dream of a small green-and-yellow kestrel or kite who has just hatched, still among eggshells.
I understand it must be painful to feel those “amazing times” are behind you, but they are not, there are many more to come. There will be further heartbreaks too, but hearts break stronger. We must not retreat from our feelings. We must confront them. Rehearse them. Get better at them. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett—hurt, hurt again, hurt better. This is one of the things live music allows us to do—to hurt and heal concurrently.
My advice? Get back out there. Live life to the fullest—and stay for the whole damn show. It’s amazing.
—Nick Cave, “The Red Hand Files #306”
On a hike the next day, I meet a kestrel or kite among rock formations broken like eggshells.
Time to fly.
badge is free from Andy Carolan.