114. Life is a Rare Commodity

Apparently I took my last post quite literally, as there has been a lot of “doing nothing” happening around here lately.

I am showing up here tonight, simply to crack the silence and say something, anything, a lot of things …

The message came in from Facebook, maybe a place I am finally ready to make peace with, for this is where she found me, a place where the flame of community, connection can be ignited, or nurtured or sparked.

A message that simply read, “we just wanted to let you know that he has two to four weeks left.”

Since then I’ve been spiralling — downwards, upwards, inwards. Here, again. Trying to make sense of any of it in my limited mind, trying to understand. Trying to figure out how our culture, our lives, mine included, got here … when we’re all headed there. How to be.

I watch the ant crawling across my blanket, winter imminent and wonder why he doesn’t stop to consider the big questions of existence, still dutifully living when he too is facing the “two to four weeks left,” or probably much less. Aren’t we all and yet, we so easily forget, how does one live with that awareness … and still … live?

And amidst all of that there’s dentist appointments and suppers to make, Halloween and movies watched, floors swept and and hair cuts, walks and eggs to collect, laundry and mathematics … life and death. Fear.

How do we live so we may fully become our dying?
How do we accept our dying that we may fully embrace our living?
How does the certainty of my own mortality inform my living and even infuse my life with meaning and beauty?

Meredith Little

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.
- Li-Young Lee -  "To Hold" 

When I met him, I was barely twenty. Cocky and insecure, I had little clue of anything. I was entering a world that I knew nothing about. He saw me, he met my fear and experimenting with love in his both gruff and soft way. He let me be bold and brazen, soft and innocent, joking with and embracing me when entering a world and a family that met the yet child-version me with suspicion in all that I might change and ruin and damage. Yet he saw me. Gifted me. Us. He let me be me.

Through throngs of creatures moving this way and that, as creatures do in their cities, I spotted two men passing each other on a crowded walkway. Complete strangers.  In the eight million beings living in the city, these two had never met before, never chanced to find themselves in the same place at the same time.  A common enough occurence in a city of millions, and as these two strangers moved past, they greeted each other, just a simple greeting.  A remark about the sun in the sky.  One of them said something else to the other, they exchanged smiles, and then the moment was gone.  

What an extraordinary event! 

Two men who had never seen each other before and would not likely see each other again.  But their sincerity and sweetness, their sharing an instant in a fleeting life.  It was almost as if a secret had passed between them.  Was this some kind of love?  I wanted to follow them, to touch them, to tell them of my happiness.  

I wanted to whisper to them:  "This is it, this is it!!" 

- Alan Lightman - mr g 

Tonight … fitting, we started our Ancestor month. Each night we bring in an ancestor, with pictures, with stories, with the bits and pieces of what we know and have heard. We set a place for them at the table, send blessings to them, make offerings and ask for them to guide and be with us. This world and the other. Seen and unseen. They live, through us, through their living, their stories, their being, their deaths, our living.

“Because of him, Dad’s here,” said Ella tonight of Blake’s Grandpa that they never met, “and so am I.”

Sometimes I think about death as being the transition from a solitary aliveness to an anarchic polyphony of aliveness. Years ago, a deer, hit by a car, managed to struggle into the woods at the periphery of my parent’s property where it died. It was high summer, frying-pan hot, the peeling birch bark almost crisping into cinders under unrelenting sunshine. Day after day I would visit the carcass and watch as one life melted into a riot of lives. Worms. Ants. Maggots. Beetles. Mushrooms. 

Death was almost the moment when life overflowed its cup. Death wasn’t an end of life. It was the end of the singular. The deer decayed out of its shape into explosive, generative plurality. One narrative diverged into four hundred narratives.”
 - Sophie Strand excerpted from the essay “Confessions of a Compost Heap”

“Mom,” Clara says the other day in her questioning voice as we walked together, “is there any humans that live more than one hundred years?”

“Not too many,” I answer, “humans are here on earth for such a short amount of time, but trees and this rock and other beings, they can live for hundred and hundreds of years.”

“Well,” she answers without a moment of hesitation, “our bodies do go back into the earth with the trees and soil, so I guess we live here for a very long time too.”

"Whatever doubt we have ... put that doubt in conversation with grander, more eternal, more essential parts of ourselves.  Underneath the face, underneath the surface ... underneath the brief obituary in the paper, there are forces grander than any individual human life at play.  To lose contact with these forces is to lose a real sense of living, and especially of living a life we can call our own ... Any life is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits and starts.  The details only given truth by the whole, and the whole dependent on the detail. 
 - David Whyte - "Crossing the Unknown Sea" 

He called yesterday. Amidst cereal bowls and sweeping the floor, a moment of marital difference and a query for where to find the glass cleaner. Life. A personal request for the funeral. A thank you. Goodbye. Again, gifting us. My chest aches and my brain is screaming. Here, then gone … Sharing moments, in a fleeting life. A life overflowing.

Since the universe began.... stars had been born, stars had aged, then exploded or dwindled to dim and cold ashes.  Galaxies had collided.  Living cells had formed, then minds.  Cities had risen in deserts.  Cities had fallen.  Civilizations had flourished, then ended.  Then new civilizations emerged.  Nothing was lasting, nothing was permanent.  Living creatures, beings with minds, were the most fleeting of all.  They came and went, came and went, came and went, billions of lives, each quick as one breath.  Atoms converged in their special arrangements to make each precious life, held together for moments, then scattered …  

Atom for atom, life was a rare commodity.  Only one-millionth of one-billionth of one percent of the mass of the universe abided in living form.
- Alan Lightman - mr g

Years pass, paths diverge, and yet the sheer mystery and miracle that they ever crossed at all… a gift. Life is a rare commodity.

Until Next Time …

N