Here at the shore we organize our days according to the tides. Quiet time first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee sitting above the beach on our deck listening to the rhythmic swishing of the waves, in and out and in and out. Today it is peaceful with little wind. A few lone birds fly over head.
Later mid-day is high tide and that is when we like to swim. Low tide is when we like to walk. Most days we see our lone great blue heron come to hunt for a meal.
There are storms of course, and higher highs and lower lows, but still a steady backdrop to our days.
Against this predictability unfolds all the drama of our lives.
Friends are worried about the grid going down, environmental disasters, “not if but when,” they say with an alarming tone. We need water most of all another says, and a long talk ensues about manual water pumps. In the backdrop we are all aware of our aging. Should we supplement with collagen, with creatine? Vitamin something? The heat has gotten to us this summer like never before. We no longer take long sweaty bike rides, and garden work is restricted to early and late in the day.
Many people around us are dying. I read beautiful eulogies on Facebook. We are all preparing for aging in place even though we have no idea what that means or what it will actually entail. We are afraid of losing our minds or bodies capabilities. Discussions ensue. Which is worse, which would you tolerate better? Which of us will go first?
Another friend group is organizing to get Compassionate Choices legal in Virginia so we may decide when and how we would like to die.
Smaller dramas yet equally incapacitating take place all around me. A friend is in distress, feeling rejected, shame flooding her. As I prepare to travel, I hear of massive flight delays, travel is no longer fun. Alliances and friend groups change. Family members stop talking to each other. These all feel like life and death too.
My husband and I watch a show on Hulu Dying for Sex. We agree it is one of the best things we have seen on television. It is about dying and sex and both are so real. For dying the palliative care group leader encourages everyone to dance their death. Doing it performatively as instructed does not work for our lead character but she finds her dance later alone with her friend. Goose bumps break out all over my body as it feels so meaningful and real. Later the hospice nurse describes with great enthusiasm, “our bodies know how to die.” And goes on to describe the process clinically.
In the Pathwork material that I studied for 30 years there is a leap in the cosmology. It describes our outer reality as simply an out-picturing of our inner reality. As if we are all projectors and what we see, feel and experience is on the screen created by what is inside of us. If we are discontent with the world order we must be creating it. If we are in some sort of drama it is uniquely our insides playing out. We are both the perpetrators and the victims. Like in some dream interpretations we are all the characters in the plot.
It is hard to feel that young girls washed away in the recent flood in Texas created this reality and it is hard when you are on one side of an argument to believe that you are creating the other side too, but it does give me pause, and an approach to all the drama. It drives me inside. I watch and notice and work with my reactivity. Sometimes I find some humor, boredom (oh, that same thing playing in my head again). And then I give it all back to the tides. They move in and out regardless of what I want or have or don’t want or don’t have. They don’t care that we lost most of our garden to the drought, and that it is too hot to weed, trim and water. They are benign and give me tremendous comfort. I decide to hang some prayer flags a friend gave me on the garden gate and let nature and some unseen forces I do not understand take over. Amen.
