Questioning
I was having what I felt was a rather rough June—nothing seemed to be going right, things were breaking, my health was in the pits, and I was suffering a minor depression. I think back to my whining then and laugh bitterly at myself. I didn’t know when I had it good. I can almost hear the universe saying “You think things are tough now? Wait ‘til July! You are going to be so fucked.”
What I didn’t tell anyone was that I’d also been feeling a pervasive dread, a feeling like death was all around me. Billy Preston (of “5th Beatle” fame) passed away. Syd Barrett (of Pink Floyd fame) died. June Allyson died, and there were others, too, people’s whose names I knew, even if they were themselves strangers. People die every day and don’t affect me that much, but these did. And then I came upon a blog that affected me deeply, that of a man whose wife had just passed away after a hard battle with cancer, who grieves while he continues to fight cancer himself and be a dad to their kids, too. There were things in the news, too, as there always are, that just struck me beyond the normal “gee, that’s sad” response you have when things are far away from you. Death seemed to be everywhere I looked, and yet I could not know that it was lying in wait for me. Or maybe I could have, but I didn’t.
The reason I mention it now is that I decided to check out the Yahoo group that DID let me in, and see what was going on there. One thing for sure is that it is too soon for me to be reading too many posts at that Yahoo group. I like to think I’m empathetic by nature, but right now, I understand only too well the pain they’re feeling, and I haven’t the defenses to protect myself from being crushed under the weight of their grief on top of my own, nor the energy to reach out to them. Reading about their sorrow just tweaks all my raw nerve-endings.
Anyway, the morning’s posts were from a new member who had semi-prophetic dreams 4-5 nights in a row prior to the unexpected death of her father, and is feeling a considerable amount of guilt that she didn’t warn him. But who takes dreams that seriously? Likewise, I chalked up my feeling of dread to my existing depression, maybe a touch of PMS, and my usual Scorpio hypersensitivity to the world around me. I still do, and yet…
I have been doing a lot of thinking and feeling about what is seen and what is unseen, and what we might be able to tap into under the right circumstances. Despite my considered lack of religious belief, I have had, and continue to have, experiences that cannot be explained away as self-delusion or by any logical means, and I cannot discount their reality. There is more unknown than known out there, despite all we have learned, and whether you want to designate it “divine” or just “currently incomprehensible,” it may well be the same damn rose.
I don’t think I will ever be able to buy into a single deity, or even a pantheon. They’ve all had too much bad press, their loudest agents small humans with petty agendas of their own. But I might be able to see my way clear to accepting all of them as symbols, constructs created by humans in an attempt to understand a universe whose mystery is equal to its vastness. It is that mystery that I am trying to wrap my mind around, just like everyone else, but I don’t need images of long flowing beards, official books, a shaman, or Rome to tell me what it is and how it is, for they do not know any more than I do, and I can feel it for myself, even if I cannot understand it.
I recently described myself to a friend of faith as a “mystic agnostic.” It’s a line I’ve danced upon for years, unable to reconcile my beliefs, my disbeliefs, and the experiences that have somehow managed to fall in between that leave me with little choice beyond accepting them or living in cognitive dissonance for the duration. I think I’ve managed to do both half-assedly, but the loss of A seems to beg me to find some kind of accord between them, for my own comfort and healing. Or maybe it’s that I’m grasping at straws to achieve the same end. It hardly matters. Whatever gets me through the night, it’s all right. It’s all right.
I don’t believe that “everything happens for a reason.” However, I do think that one can reason after everything happens. Given that I cannot turn back time, cannot undo the horrendous loss of A, it seems that when I am able, it is my duty to learn something from this, and the most important questions you ask during such a devastating lesson are not the ones that can be answered by “heart disease.” When a piece of you disappears beyond your reach, beyond even your sight, you have to follow it, and find it, wherever it leads.
Yesterday, my dear friend P said to me, “Do you remember when you told me that you feared you’d die in your thirties?”
I said “Yes.”
She said “Maybe it was just a part of you,” and there were tears glistening in your eyes as she said it. It was an interesting little bombshell. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and later I went back to her and said “I can’t get what you said out of my head.” She said what I’d said always stuck in the back of her mind, but came front and center the other day, and she thought it was interesting that I’d had that feeling. I joked ruefully, “Maybe I’m psychic.” She said “I think you are.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”