Beginninglessness
Grant and I have just returned from a three week road trip. The reason for the trip was our son’s undergraduate graduation from the University of Denver, but we fit in so much more—we leisurely camped/glamped/yogaed our way from Georgia to Colorado; we spent four nights in a Sheraton in downtown Denver while Grant attended a work conference; we shared a beautiful house with my brother and his family and connected deeply with all of our beloveds who’d made the trek west; Grant, our son, and I spent several nights in an off-the-grid, cell/wifi free yurt in the San Juan Mountains.
Grant and I intended to then drive back to Georgia as leisurely as we’d driven to Colorado, but we were exhausted by change, transition, and initiation. When we arrived in Colorado, our son was a student, just as he’d been for the past eighteen years. I even spent a couple of days working across a table from him while he finished his last papers. And then the papers were submitted, and the ceremonies were over. On our last morning together, over omelets, he said, “I can go anywhere now.” He said it plainly, but also with wonder as his own life opened before him. I saw his life open too, and I understood that the anywhere he might go will no longer be linked with me and my anywheres. I will visit him, of course. (Anywhere!) I will be a guest. This is how it should be. And still it upends my notion of home.
So Grant and I drove back to Georgia in record time, belting Randy Travis’s greatest hits and consuming terrible gas station products that, for reasons having to do with the 80s and 90s, we can mistake for comfort food in low moments. This, after more or less pinkie-swearing as we packed our cooler with homemade kombucha and sandwiches for the drive to Colorado, that this trip would be one where we travelled “at the pace of life.”
*
I’m the one responsible for the idea that life has a pace I can match just as I match my friend’s running cadence on Thursday mornings. I encountered the notion a little over a year ago, scribbled it out on a sticky note, and stuck the note to the window in front of my computer. Who knows what Grant meant when he repeated it back to me. Here's what I meant: I would take time to savor, to linger, to appreciate. I wouldn’t hurry. I would let life be life while retaining an inner calm and a generous appreciation of the moment. In short, I wouldn’t exhibit the twitchy, anxious “rabbit heart” that a friend once commanded me to calm immediately.
But then there were moments, and I don’t meant the big ones. Not my son’s “I can go anywhere now,” but my millionth hour of waiting on lunch at a pizza restaurant in Idaho Springs after a cook had quit. I would’ve shrieked at a stranger’s dog if it meant I could zoom past the lingering and the appreciating to the mindless gobbling. And also the panicked ten minutes on the Saturday morning of graduation when I realized that, because of how easily the material scorched, I couldn’t iron the very wrinkled sports coat I’d purchased and driven across the country just for this momentous occasion, so I raced about my rented bedroom throwing open cabinets and drawers and cursing myself and all of my angels for not packing one of the no-iron dresses I’ve worn to every other significant out-of-town occasion of the past twenty years.
Rabbit heart, indeed.
Imagine how I felt when I found a clothes steamer.
*
There were other transitions too. During the time Grant and I were traveling, two of my friends died.
The first of these deaths I anticipated. Christy was in her early seventies, and when I packed that cooler with kombucha, she’d been on hospice for weeks. I’d had the opportunity to spend deep and delicious quality time with her, so while I was grief stricken to learn of her passing, I wasn’t shattered.
Christy was the first person who taught me that all of my theologies and ontologies could be localized. She was a mentor to me in the same way that turnip greens and sweet potatoes are staple foods. When she flipped over the Priestess of Wands in her beloved Motherpeace tarot deck and said, “It’s time to rip off your shirt and run topless through the Bi-lo!”, I felt what she meant in a place that predates language, which is to say that I felt in my bones the internalized structures it was time to eschew, structures born of a specific geography, a specific history. She was my first guide to the beginningless and endless landscape of the internal, a place where time is irrelevant, and nothing is tangible, and all is story. As I type these words, it seems entirely possible that the odd knowing I find there is what I will return to when I die, what will continue of me after death.
The other friend who died while Grant and I were traveling was wholly unexpected.
Sean was my brother’s childhood best friend, a man whose sweaty kid smells I remember. He died from an accidental overdose. The last time I was with him was at my brother’s fortieth birthday party. Sean was boldly and brilliantly sober then, while I was still making and breaking secret bargains with myself.
Sean’s death shatters me. My brother, who has also quit drinking, said, “I never got to tell him I was sober,” and these words touch a deep truth. Sean was the first to understand that there are more powerful and transformative ways to meet life’s challenges than through drugs and alcohol. He modeled how to do it, but he’s the one who died.
I didn’t learn of Sean’s death until I was back in Atlanta. I flipped through my trip notes to find some sign of his passing. At first I thought there wasn’t one. For a moment, it seemed entirely possible that we come from nothing, return to nothing. That story is a clumsy tool we use to try to make the unknowable known, the unbearable bearable.
But I cannot live that way. So I opened the running list I keep on my laptop entitled “Shit I Cannot Know.” The entries on this list are my psychological cautionary areas, quagmires that I’ve learned can suck me in and turn me into an undesirable version of myself. Ideas that I use to support my own assholery and self-destruction. Here are a few examples: what happens when I die; do individual humans have a “purpose” to their lives and how is this even possible with all of the suffering we experience and inflict on each other; is life a computer simulation; does it matters whether or not I am “good”; how much of the world have I hurt unknowingly; do other people feel like me inside of their heads?
After decades of searching, I’ve only found two beliefs I trust: life is causal; all is interconnected. Even if story is nothing but a clumsy tool, it’s a tool I’ve got. If I were dropped into the middle of a wilderness with nothing but a hammer to help me survive, I wouldn’t toss the hammer off a cliff for being nothing but a hammer. I’d probably name it Wilson, after that damn Volleyball in Cast Away.
*
On our way home, Grant and I stayed a night in a converted tin barn in Colby, Kansas. We wanted to stay in this place because we’d stayed in the owner’s other offering, a grain silo converted for glamping, on our way to Colorado. We’d been so impressed by the creativity, the upcycling, the carpentry, the boldness out there on the High Plains. We wanted to admire more of the man’s handiwork.
The tin barn did not disappoint: hand-stenciled floor, gorgeous photography, crayon-bright hippie iconography on the walls and ceiling. There was a clawfoot bathtub in front of a huge west facing window and, had we felt like dancing, a DJ booth in the sleeping loft. The doors of the sleeping loft opened onto a porch without railings, and we took advantage of the expansive, bird’s eye sunset view the porch afforded us. This was June 18th, a few nights before solstice, so not the longest day of the year but still a day that outlasted us. Christy had been dead for eleven days, and I knew this; Sean had been dead for five, but I didn’t know this yet. The evening was cool and fresh, and the view to the horizon in every direction was young corn, so Grant and I opened all three sets of sliding doors to the screens and crawled into bed in the sleeping loft.
It was fully night when I awoke to the sounds of something nosing around downstairs. I listened for a long time, not wanting to get out of bed, willing what I heard to be the ceaseless prairie wind. But there were two sets of sliding doors open downstairs, and a screen is no match for a raccoon or an opossum. I put on my glasses and my headlamp and went to investigate. I found no critter, no evidence of a critter. I closed the sliding doors. Went back upstairs and crawled into bed.
When I was next awakened, the noises were big ones. I was so certain it was Grant that I flung my arm across the bed expecting to find it empty. He awoke with a shout and a swear. This time, he put on a headlamp and went downstairs. He didn’t find anything either.
We lay in bed and tried to identify the sounds, feeling unexpectedly nostalgic for our first house in Atlanta, a rental we shared with Norway rats. During the day the rats were silent, but at night they were everywhere. We heard them in the ceiling, in the walls, ransacking the pantry. What we experienced in Kansas was a single creature who stuck to the kitchen, not an invading army, but like our roommates the Norway rats, it did not care at all if we clapped, shouted, flashed our headlamps, stomped downstairs again and again.
“I have two pairs of ear plugs,” Grant said, finally. Soon the short night would end.
As I closed my eyes, I slipped into that inner world that Christy taught me to visit. I wanted to see if any of the entities who live there might tell me what to do about the critter in the kitchen. Surprisingly, I encountered Christy herself. She was in good spirits, haha, and she had a lot to say about mouse and how mouse crafts her life, including the reminder that, for Mouse, Grant and I were the intruders. Then she said, “It’s just what we think it is.” I knew she meant death. “You don’t have any reason to be afraid,” she said, “but you will be. You can’t help it. You’re human. You can’t believe what I’m telling you now either. Not really. And that’s okay.”
She’s correct, of course. I both do and do not believe that this was actually Christy visiting to tell me—to tell us—that the afterlife is nothing to fear. I am both soothed by her visit and as terrified of death as I’ve ever been. I want my home to always and forever be my son’s home, and I also want him to know that the most important home he’ll ever have is the one he builds for himself in the beginninglessness and endlessness of his own dear heart.
At daybreak, Grant and I finally found the bowl of ransacked mints. Mouse had hidden two heavily-nibbled stashes, one behind the microwave and the other beneath the griddle plate on the stovetop. I pressed my hand against the counters and traced her path by following the stickiness. I identified and replicated every noise she’d made in the night, this mouse who was so busy being Mouse.
*
For a full round of seasons, that sticky note scrawled with “Live at the pace of life” was aspirational for me. I meditated on the idea. Journaled about it. Used it to decide whether or not I would take on this or that work gig. Like most aspirations, the idea turned out to be a doorway instead of a resting place. Sometimes the pace of my life is Jack Links Beef Sticks and “Deeper than the Holler.” I’m not proud of this. I’m not ashamed of it either. Imagine how terrible and unfathomable things would be if we hadn’t discovered Mouse eating mints in that kitchen in Kansas, but Shark.
A couple of days ago, I took that note from my window and put it in my burn box to wait for the next fire I build with the intention of release. I wrote a new note for my window: Live at the pace of timelessness. This felt like an epiphany, a moment I’d been working toward for thirty years. I know that it will also prove to be just another doorway, something that, with any luck, I’ll live beyond, a spawner of future entries for my “Shit I Cannot Know” list.
I’ll remember Christy kissing her own forearm and saying, “I love me!, I love me!”
I’ll remember Sean as the only sober person at the party, telling me the most loving stories about his dog and truly listening when I shared stories about my cats.
I’ll hold Christy and Sean and my son’s childhood in the only place large enough and timeless enough to hold all of the things eclipsed by the pace our human lives, the beginninglessness and endlessness of my own consciousness.
