Walking each other home, the cookie edition

"We're all just walking each other home."  Ram Dass

I've talked about darkness before in these pages.  I like to think about what darkness was like for the Puritans, in particular, who came to this vast, uncharted country and had no idea what lurked in the dark woods, what manner of creature.  If a tall, dark man lingered at the edge of the field, it could be Satan.  Of course, that's still true.  But I think it meant differently then.  No one living in this country, what we now think of as a country, had the puzzle shape map of the United States in their heads.  You might live near an ocean, but you would never see the ocean bordering the other side of the land, thousands of miles away.

The darkness of caves.  I went into caves as a child, but I don't think I could now.  I don't like to think I'm afraid of that deep, irreproachable darkness, but I know I am afraid of the borders being too close. My stomach hurts when I think about crawling through a space, about touching the ceiling and floor in one fell swoop.

Outside my house, it it pretty dark at night, as far as these things go these days, on the east coast. We don't have street lights, and the meagre flashlight from my cell phone strains to light up the path right in front of my feet. I see the dog's tail in the light.  Last night, we both heard a kind of weird yipping from the just-harvested corn field.  I wondered if it was a dog down a cross street, but it sounded too close.  I decided it was a coyote, or maybe a coyote pup, and then guessed coyote pups aren't born in the fall.  I got nervous when the sound was tracking us as we walked.  I think my body (and yours) is hardwired at this point, at all points, to be plenty careful when it comes to a dark road.  I spoke loudly and bravely to Sebby, and turned us back home early.

I've also been thinking about the dark spaces of the ocean.  Those strange photos you see of otherworldly creatures who are suddenly caught in the light of a fancy deep sea camera.  Alien and threatening somehow; it's not a question of where each of us sits in some food chain. The deepest sea exists just above the seabed--those creatures live mostly on food that falls to them from the photic zone, the part of the ocean that receives sunlight.  People always say teeming when it comes to the ocean.  The deepest layer is teeming with life.  I'm going to share two things I learned recently about the deep sea.  The falling organic matter that serves as food for these deep sea creatures is called marine snow. The deepest underwater a human has ever reached is 702 feet: the deepest part of the Pacific ocean is 36,161 feet below the surface.

And so they say we know more about the Moon than we know about the depths of the ocean.  We've all gazed upon the surface of the Moon in photos.  Long ago, people thought the Moon had continents and oceans and they named the dark areas: Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds), Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility).  We hold onto this convention, even thought we know they are not seas; I like to think it's because the idea of a Sea of Tranquility on the moon is hauntingly gorgeous.

And also there's what is below our feet, missed as we walk around acting like the grass and the field and the road are the edges of our existence.  I honestly have no idea.  I had the idea that there is a core of molten lava at the center of the earth, but when I looked it up, it turned out to be, probably, an inner core of an iron-nickel alloy (which should be named, for posterity's sake: perhaps the Core of Contemplation); the core holds a temperature something akin to the temperature of the surface of the sun. We aren't completely sure because we have never traveled to the earth's core, or taken a sample.  People figure these things out by measuring seismic waves and the like, which requires a comfortable familiarity with languages I don't speak.  There is a wonderfully named Census of Life which seeks to catalogue communities of living organisms, including the nematodes and the worms deep in the earth.  

Our vision is taken up with what we can see, and what we cannot see, we filter through that which we have already seen.  But we get these glimmers, these golden flashes in the pan, when we sense how little we know.  In many ways, the very fact of knowing there is much in the darkness, of caves and heavens, of oceans and planets, that we simply cannot see with our naked eye, which is to say with our eyes overlaid with our particular and specific moment, our very own pair of rose-colored glasses, that there is so much left to know, reassures.  It could terrify, I see that. 

Yes, my dear friend Robin died.  We all partook of a good-bye ceremony for her, in the Buddhist tradition, which holds that a person's spirit remains quite near her body for a time, for three days, before seeking a new body and a new life.  We were asked to share stories and sentiments meant to celebrate Robin, to encourage her to move on. Her family and her friends, which felt somewhat indivisible at that moment, shared stories of Robin's specific humor, and energy, and spirituality, and generosity.  I imagined Robin literally hovering around the Zoom call, somehow.

But the ceremony and the passing days aren't helping me move on--I find myself hovering near the idea of Robin, wanting to keep her near.  I don't want her to be gone and I feel like a small child, having a tantrum when asking for the most impossible of things.  I must have a cookie, even though there are no cookies left in the house.

Or perhaps it is the moving on that I despair.  For I certainly feel her absence, not her presence.  That's the problem.  If she were to come into the room right now, she would upset my applecarts, all of them, for all I talk of silver strands connecting us, and straining to find my grandmother in my dreams.  I just wanted more. More Robin.  More time.  More living.

The idea of a sea on the moon, a sea in which you could swim tranquilly--for me that is a sea with answers, a sea whose depths I could travel, a sea where the creatures I met would not be adverse to my time on the moon. A dark woods that is filled, not with monstrous creatures and unknowable borders, but with the quiet hum of the badgers and the bat-eared foxes at work.  Gentle and tranquil, these are impossible worlds, worlds without true darkness, worlds without fear and without death.  We all know that can't be, and we've heard the truths: you cannot know happiness without knowing sadness, you cannot cherish life without the hard stop of death.  Must it be so? Might there not be one more cookie?  Might there not be magic?

As Ram Dass says, I am honored to have been one of the many, many people who walked Robin home.  Perhaps that is the solace.  That there is home--after the dark strangers, and the bioluminescent creatures, and the tight limestone of the cave wall, and the seas that turn out to be moon dust.  I know this is true on earth, that there is home from which to run away and run towards.  Perhaps at the end of the day, home will be enough, an answer--a beginning, rather than an end. 

I know that you cannot comfort a hurting child with words like these, you cannot reason with someone being unreasonable, nor can you offer platitudes to ease their frustration and hunger.  All you can do is love them through it, sit by her side and rub her back while you murmur sounds of understanding, or hold him in your arms while he rails at the world.  Or wait, while she throws her body around the front hall, the store, the coatroom, the playground.  Wait for her to exhaust herself and the calm to return.  

But all I have is words.  Words I hope feel like comfort, feel like the last cookie.