A Soft Rainfall: Hints of Time

As I drove along a city street early one morning after my swim, the morning bore a heavy cloak of gray clouds. The air was moist, fecund with humidity.  I saw that it had rained lightly in the night.  The street surfaces were damp and cars beaded with water.  All the wetness was evidence of what had passed very quietly.  Its transient nature meant I was only aware of it because of what remained. I had missed knowing of its presence as it happened in the night, having heard no sound of dripping water in the drainpipe and no pronouncement that a storm was on the way.

I looked up ahead and saw a woman crossing at the intersection, on foot, walking with a distinctive loose gait that reminded me of artists' renderings of the parade of mankind from the earliest ages to the present.  The spark of life in her body, I thought to myself, has existed since the dawn of time.  She is the current version of her lineage.  Untold thousands of her ancestors produced her, custodians of an eternal flame that lives within her now.  I watched her cross the street, stride to the corner and then disappear from view, a metaphor for all her forebears and every living thing that has ever existed.

There has been - (the idea seems so profound) -  no interruption of the life that now resides within her or me, ever, not even for an instant.  How long has that been?  What were the stories of all the ancestors and predecessors?  What happened along that long chain stretching into the mists of time? If she does not have a child, what will be lost that no other human being can pass forward?

Evidence of the silent rainfall spoke to me of things that go lightly before us in time, hardly noticed.  There is so much that is unknowable about the past; the rain has evaporated, so to speak.  And yet, every thing and all life forms bear evidence of what has happened.

The thought that life is both complex and mysterious as well as simply there or not there is a lot to contemplate.  I drove on, newly aware that wet did not look simply wet; it was proof of a transient storm.  People were not simply people but vessels of historical evidence presented in exquisite detail, perhaps totally ignorant of what might have happened in the past in order to endow them with life now.

I got home and saw rain on the leaves and flowers of my garden, more evidence of the night's rainfall, all wet and cool.  The rain had been so light and silent.  I had no idea it had come and gone while I had slept until I saw the glistening droplets and a sheen of moisture on the ground.  It had been a light rain as ephemeral as the spark of life within every living thing, within me and the leaves dripping wet before me.  I had seen mankind represented in the swinging stride of a briefly glimpsed woman and felt in awe of my own forefathers and mothers, whoever they have all been since time out of mind. It is too much to know.  The rainstorm passed as a shower of crystalline droplets, and my ancestors before me passed too.  Here I am now, for now, my life transient as a storm.

What Is It About Dying

I attended a funeral this morning for a woman who died on Christmas day.  She was 80 and had lived a very full life.  There were tears and a quiet solemnity that was facilitated warmly by a uniquely gifted priest. He found a graceful balance between warm loving kindness, respect for the grief and loss among close relatives and friends.  The ritual of the Mass and the design of the service had meaning and power for we who attended, providing us with guidance and then room for our own thoughts and memories.

If there is ever a time for considering The Return, as defined in Joseph Campbell's mono myth called The Hero's Journey, a funeral is it.  Life is a journey, we agree.  Our myths and legends represent that journey in heroic proportions, and we are inspired and informed by them.  But journeys end, and we must take time to learn something from them, or we are lost and become fearful and depressed.

There before our eyes was Death and its unknowable dimensions, the unavoidable disappearance of self that ends Life.  The priest pointed out that symbolically death was a return to our origin, to heaven, where we are eternal and unblemished by difficulties.  It soothed our hearts and minds to be turned in a hopeful direction, but we still do not trust death to be a very simple or easy thing.  How can we when preservation of life is what we strive for all our lives? Suddenly, you just aren't a someone anymore.  You stop being.  

I thought about Gabriel, my grand nephew, so new to the world.  He came from somewhere else, an unknown dimension.  Did he just assemble himself from bits of substance and become a living being?  I do not understand it any more than I understand where Mary went when she died.  Did her energy and life just dissipate?

Becoming alive is far preferable to becoming dead.  In day-to-day life, I would rather hear, "Welcome! Come on in and join us!" than "Time to leave.  We'll miss you.  Good-bye."  We welcome new life to us and become anxious when life leaves.  Or rather, that which we can see we understand and become familiar with.  That which is undetectable is fearsome and suspicious.  For those with full-fledged faith in the hereafter, in a place called Heaven, the concept of dying may be less uncertain, even a welcome thing.

I don't know how I feel about death.  I don't feel ready to die, I miss people who have died (I can't talk to them and know them anymore), and I know I can't sit down afterward with living people and say, "You know, when I died, it was pretty amazing."

This journey called living is a very peculiar thing, being bookended as it is by such vast unknown spaces.  I think the only option is to love and live well.  I hope the rest will take care of itself, all in due time.