No responsibility to come upon death

It feels to me like time is moving too quickly. This is August and this is Sunday. Soon, it will be January and I’ll be forty and I don’t have enough time between now and then to accomplish much of anything. Soon, it will be Monday, too. The occupations of each day seem enough to drive life forward without a destination.

I am not ready to say “forty” and to have implied in that word a life half-lived, half-done. Again, because I am nowhere near as accomplished as I’d like to be.

I am reminded of Thoreau’s deadly words, the words I first read in high school, the words that in a moment became the theme for my years after: “…to find, when I came to die, that I had not lived” (from Walden - look for paragraph 16). Thoreau is speaking of his adventures at Walden Pond, and his retreat from the bustling life that seems to shed no tear over lost time; the zombie life of forward movement without a destination besides the next meal. He strove to extricate himself from that, believing that life is lived in quieter, more intentional ways.

In high school, I read those words and an imperative settled on me: do not live only to die with regret. And, in one manner or another, that imperative has driven my choices, ruled my days; and when they could not, when circumstance kept me in a job I found unrewarding or filled my days with triviality and unintentional, unchosen activity, those words and that imperative sat on my shoulders heavily and whispered. I have felt guilty for wasting my time in fruitless pursuits. I have felt ashamed for staying in employments that were not satisfying, against my better judgment and without a choice.

I am no where near ready to say “forty.” I have spent so much of my time enlisted to urgency, debt, and duty.

There is another side to all of this, though.

In season one of the X-files, a precognitive man who can foresee people’s deaths tells FBI Agent Dana Scully that she will not die. He says to her question “How do I die?”, “You don’t.” On watching this episode with my soon-to-be husband, I decided in play to declare the same about myself. I said, “I won’t die,” as if I have this choice. Instead, I told him, I will just disappear, or be abducted by aliens, or be lifted bodily into Heaven.

Obviously, this is only a joke. But the longer I’ve held to this joke, the more it has shifted to become a fledgling philosophy. “I won’t die” seems a perfect antidote to “to find, when I came to die, that I had not lived.” Without the pressing responsibility to one day come upon death, living becomes freer, and something more easily lived with patience and tolerance. If I won’t die, then I do not need to live so carefully, walking always on the broken glass of each passing moment, fearful of the irreversible damage of any single misstep. Instead, a person who will not die knows that he will have plenty of time to walk many different paths.

For me, this is a frightening and also beautiful new philosophy. The certainty of death, and the threat of feeling one has failed when those last breaths come, have sung their fret to me every day since I turned seventeen. In a grand irony, Thoreau’s words have made regret so imminent that I have not lived the quiet, untroubled life he advocated. My urgency to live life right has prevented me from living a life of peace and appreciation.

I have occupied myself with doing everything I could, shoving in joys beside duties, and not usually giving them equal time. For the pain it’s caused, though, I am accustomed to it.

I am both anxious, and loathe, to let go of my habit of urgency.

But I should start somewhere (maybe here). There is a saying so many people use to motivate themselves: “Live as though you might die tomorrow.” (I can only imagine the catatonic state of panic I’d have suffered if I’d heard that one in high school!) I would like to alter that: Live as though you will never die. Fill up your days because you can, not because you’re about to lose them. Be gentler, less urgent. Regret nothing, for there is time for everything.

“I have the ocean as my dress”

I had a dream last night that, upon waking, left me cradled in a confusion and disorientation profound enough that I had to tick off the pieces of my life like reciting the alphabet to put my mind in order again.

It was a simple enough dream: I lived with my spouse - both male and female in the dream - in a small house by the ocean. Our home overlooked the sea, being perched on a high cliff wall. Below us, on the beach, there was a cove that at night filled nearly to the edges with the high tide and with moon light. On occasion, we went walking there, my spouse and I, splashing our feet between the sand and the sea.

In this dream, I slept and had a dream. I dreamed there was a woman in the water in this cove. She lay flat in the waves, drifting with them as one who is asleep and as one who breathes. There was a respiration in her movement back and forth. But slowly, her hands, resting on the surface of the water, began to strike at that surface, and she moaned. She stood, and the water came up with her, as would a heavy wet fabric. She pulled at it all around her and it pulled up - the waves themselves pulled up in her hands like heavy wet fabric - and the water clung to her around her shoulders and waist as a dress.

And she moaned: “I have the ocean as my dress.” “I have the ocean as my dress.”

Her mournfulness was countervailed only by the exquisiteness of her situation. She was as lovely as she was tragic. As beautiful as she was imprisoned.

In my dream, I awoke from the dream about the woman in the cove and cried. I cried for the sadness of her plight, for the sublimity of her grace, and for the perfection of her melancholy. I sat up from bed and paced about the room until my spouse came to comfort me.

And then I woke. Not by the sea. Not in that other house. Here, in Denver, with the cherry tree outside my bedroom window and the dogs watching me for signs of the journey I’d been on while I slept.

They say that dreaming within a dream draws you closer to your spirit self, your energy body, your Krishna, your Holy Spirit. They say the number of layers to your dreams has some correlation to the number of your incarnations. I’ve had dreams within dreams, and dreams within dreams within dreams. If the dreaming I had a dream is meant to be profound, then perhaps that is why I was disoriented.

But in truth, I believe my disorientation arose from the plight of the woman with the ocean for her dress. Was this the feminine, I want to ask? The feminine principle, the yin, is bound closely with the waters of the sea, the origin of all species. It is the nurturing force and the creative force.

But the woman in my dream was not nurturing anyone; she was creating nothing; nor was she the ocean itself. Instead, she pulled at the heavy brocade of waves around her body, wishing in her moaning, that she could free herself from them. So, did I dream some manifestation of the feminine, or was this beautiful sprite something else?

I want to say she was my sister self; my tormented feminine, my wounded imagination, my melancholy. And her suffering and her exquisiteness was a beacon-light to show me the way to art and fascination. But saying so sounds unfortunately sentimental and romantic, and I remind myself of some young college poet seeking his muse in the wild imaginings of his slumbering.

I think, most of all, she reminded me of a thing out of medieval legend; a new Lady of Shalott. Ghostly as a fairy, elemental as the women of Celtic legend, my lady with the ocean for her dress speaks to a deep mythology in me. She tells me the creative act is always as bewitching as it is vexing, as inevitable as it is reluctant. The muse has within her the ocean - all its variety and plenty, all its storms and moon light - and yet she is imprisoned by all she is able to create. Profoundly divine, utterly visceral, perfectly melancholy.