Status Report

One day when I thought I was more or less fine, a feeling of sadness came over me, a sadness so big it might swallow me up, and an unabiding loneliness. The sadness was familiar, but the loneliness was odd, because I am a person who in fact is seldom alone. But it was more of an ancient familial loneliness, an awareness of having outlived others in my family of origin whose unique place in the world and in my heart I did not always fully appreciate. And it was an historical loneliness, the knowledge of having jumped off one trajectory and gone against the grain to get myself to a different kind of life, and maybe that was selfish, and my guilt is the price, along with the gone-ness of people I wish I had helped more and with whom I now yearned to talk and laugh sometimes, the way people do in this segment of life when the events that are over are far more numerous than the ones that are pending, and it would be so nice to reflect upon it all with a few who started out with you. But it was finally an existential loneliness too, the simple awareness of being on a little boat solo, as indeed each of us is.

The scenery is great. I cannot remember a more gorgeous and flamboyant springtime than this one still happening around us. As Rilke said, "Everything is blooming most recklessly." There are poppies and lupines in places that are usually bare, mariposa, filigree, and shocks of bright pink phlox. The wind is rippling the tall grass, and plump white clouds are sailing above, casting beautiful shadows on the hills.

"If it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of night," Rilke wrote, and in the heart of night, I feel the shrieking as a shuddering, a mounting sense of panic, a free fall. Maybe we're all just veering out of control.

No wonder I can't sleep. Starlight strikes the rooftop, wind whistles through trees, coyotes howl as a train rumbles through, and somehow I am the recipient of this unlikely gift of existence, whether or not I make sense of it.

A friend of mine recommended a book by Pema Chodron called The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. He warned me that it is a difficult book...troubling, I think, is the word he used, which in itself scared me, but I bought the book and am resolved to go through it. "We gradually discover that we are big enough to hold something that is neither lie nor truth, neither pure nor impure, neither bad nor good," she writes.

"But first we have to appreciate the richness of the groundless state and hang in there."

I'm groundless and dangling, that's for sure, and maybe feeling scared and sad and small and lonesome is a stage along the way to enlightenment.

Einstein-with-the-fine-mind said this: "The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."

I do indeed wonder and stand in rapt awe, while my very dull faculties comprehend little. But I recently came upon another quote, from a 12th century poet and monk named Saigyo, that I found reassuring: "A soul that is not confused is not a soul."

And I suppose that puts me squarely into soul-dom.