Spring New (Passover) Moon
We had snow. Will have more snow. So good to see moisture. We don’t get much here, this is the arid West after all, so what we get we need.
Right now dewpoint and temps are the same so we’re in a foggy state. Black Mountain is invisible. That something so massive can disappear, either in the dark or in fog, seems odd to me. Still. If I didn’t know it was there, it would not be, from my perspective.
Yesterday afternoon Kate said the hard snow falling was making a sound on the skylights. She imitated it. I couldn’t hear it. As the hearing in my right ear declines, and with total deafness in the left, there are aural Black Mountains in the fog for me. I don’t hear a lot of things within the range of normal hearing, but I don’t know I don’t hear them. Those sounds don’t exist for me.
Of course, all of our senses have a limited range to begin with. Ultraviolet and infrared are light waves outside the visual ability of human eyes, yet, they, too, exist. We exist in a perceptual bubble, our evolved ways of knowing the world shutting out far more than they let in. Science, of course, is a direct attempt to extend human experience beyond the range of our senses, to discover what we don’t know, in fact, can’t know without sophisticated instrumentation.
I find this humbling and inspiring. Our inability to see, to hear, to taste, to touch, to smell the comprehensive array of stimuli around us means we exist in a constant perceptual fog. There is not only more than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, there is more all around you. Considering these, our real and dramatic limitations, it’s inspiring to me that we humans have been able to develop our lives and our cultures in the incredibly complex and nuanced way that we have.
I suppose, too, that there may be an important metaphysical point buried here. If we can’t see ultraviolet, smell the 10,000 things that any dog can, hear the very low sounds of whale communication, it’s possible that there are more worlds out there, perhaps places where life goes on. How can we know such things if we can’t even hear the snow on the skylights?
Writing can lay bare something hidden, perhaps something that needed excavation or something attached to a thread, even a flimsy thread, by which it can be pulled from the inner world. Things get lost in there, pushed behind stacks of unused memories or stored with a faulty label. Sometimes ideas once full and vibrant get partially severed from their context, crucial links of thought go missing and the idea fades away.
Which, speaking of ideas, then links to the idea of the third phase. That quote comes from recent thoughts on the third phase. A primary wondering for me, I think for all third phasers, is this: what am I about in this last phase of my life?
Part duty. For whatever reason I came out of Alexandria with fully formed political ideas about justice, equality, fairness. They were strong, rooted in the powerful union movement among my friend’s parents who worked for General Motors, reinforced by the liberal politics of my Roosevelt Democrat parents and then pushed toward action in the turmoil of the 60’s.
And another one by Cassini.
There are shifts and changes going on, movement in my soul. When we moved here, I left behind relationships precious beyond words. Not entirely, no. I’ve stayed in contact through facebook, e-mails, occasional visits, especially from the Woollies, but the day-to-day, go to lunch chances for nourishing those relationships has disappeared. I was lonely here atop Shadow Mountain.
But it was real and significant. It manifested as a sense of yearning, a desire for companionship like what I’ve had with the Woollies and the docent corps at the MIA. I think, had it continued, that it would have become corrosive, perhaps even damaging to those core aspects of my life that remained solid.
No certainty yet on Kate’s malaise though the likelihood of something terminal has receded. Dr. Gidday is good at reassurance, no false cheer, just a reasoned confidence. I remember in the midst of my prostate cancer workup she looked at me and said, “We’re going to get you through this.” I believed her. She’s moving methodically through the possibilities for Kate’s shortness of breath and her fatigue, ruling out the most pernicious first. We’ll know more over the next month or so. I’m relieved right now and want to stay that way.
“You know, if we weren’t in our 70s, I’d say this move to Colorado was jinxed. But when you take 70 year old+ bodies and move them somewhere else. Well. Wherever you go, there you are.” Kate nodded. We’re in that time when the body comments on its journey in unpleasant ways. The way things are.
Yet it is not a true analog. Mother earth only seems to defy winter and the fallow time. It is not, in fact, death and resurrection, but a continuum of growth, slowed in the cold, yes, but not stopped forever, then magically restarted. Corms, bulbs, tubers and rhizomes all store energy from the previous growing season and wait only for the right temperature changes to release it. Seeds sown by wind and animal, by human hand are not dead either. They only await water and the right amount of light to send out roots and stalks.
I prefer the actual analog in which human and other animals’ bodies, plant parts and the detritus of other kingdoms, all life, return their borrowed materials to the inanimate cache, allowing them to be reincarnated in plant and animal alike, ad infinitum. Does this deny some metaphysical change, some butterfly-like imaginal cell possibility for the human soul? No. It claims what can be claimed, while reserving judgment on those things that cannot.
It is spring, I think, that gives us this hope, no matter how faint, that death might be only a phase change, a transition from this way of becoming to another. It’s possible.
The full anniversary moon lit up our way home from Bistro Colorado. It was the 27th time we’ve celebrated our wedding day and it was peaceful, funny, thoughtful. With flowers and chocolate.