I was in the shower, where most ideas find their genesis, listening to a song by one of my favorite bluegrass artists, Gillian Whelch, “I’m not afraid to die.” And as I listened to her enchanting voice, the water hitting my face became a patterned rhythm.
The enchantment quickly began to extend to my own imagination which teleported me to a smoky and dimly lit room, wherein I was dancing to the ghostly music with my wife Raquel… a slow-dance because my feet don’t afford me anything more elaborate (even in my daydreams I’m clumsy)... and as the song reached its overture and the chorus rang for the last time a beautiful and mysterious robed figured asked in a voice that was barely audible…
May I cut in?
The politeness was not lost on us, because we both knew who was going to finish the dance with me. There wasn’t a choice and we knew it. And before anything more could be said it was just the figure and I, like a blade piercing stone I could see this was it. And Raquel and everything I knew was over there, my love’s cries of protest for otherwise becoming ever more inaudible as the music encircled me and took on the omnipresence of tinnitus. Until it ended.
And I watched myself look back at it all one more time before turning around with the most faithful dance partner any of us will ever know as we exited the room into oblivion. The door closed and its sound, like a gong returned me to present moment, wherein I collapsed to my knees in absolute impotence of my ability to change any of it. Both my tears and the falling water hitting my body became indistinguishable.
Perhaps if I come to be old and my body is too weak to allow any more tears to come, as it happens with many of the aged who come to that time. Maybe I’ll be able to sit in that absolute reality, and not be so damn anxious about where I am, rather perhaps humbled and content having cried when my abdominal muscles could handle the heaving of my lungs and my body could weather the contemplation of it’s own annihilation. Maybe I’ll have a little reserve of the feeling of gratitude and love for life following those deep and guttural cries. And maybe in the absence of the ABILITY to cry, the skill of having BEEN cried will last the terminal storms of chronology and pathology which draw from my body my final breaths.
How can I possibly persist? I feel so tired. Not in my body, though some days it certainly seems so. But my heart. It feels like it has beat more than its allotted times and with each thump reminding me of my borrowed time. The bill is to come due soon, it says.
My wife and I were alone for the first time in a long time where we hadn’t anywhere to be but in the present moment, captivated by one another’s company. And as two people who are attracted to one another do, the kitchen became a place for something other than the dinner we were making together. They do say that clams are an aphrodesiac… And as my face begin to feel the tingle that accompanies a rush of dopamine to the brain from your lover’s embrace, the tingle begin to burn and blur my vision, such as when you squeeze your eyes and all those blurry worms obscure your field of vision. And then the feeling went to my chest and across the front of my body, like my cells were frantically looking for a place to hide. My wife looked up at me and likely thought I was having as good a time as she was, but like the hesitant other half that forgot his antiemtic before getting on the roller coaster, I was no longer in a place of bliss.
The heartbeat I could feel in my ears gave way to an intense buzzing and then burning feeling my ear canal that made it difficult to use the perceptual functions of my body. I announced to my wife, very directly and with all of my orative capacity “Babe… I need to go sit down.” She helped me to a stool, knowing that the last time this happened months before I announced how I didn’t feel well before falling backwards and collapsing to the wood floor. That time I had very little recollection to the goings on before and after, only the memory of my announcement followed by a bright light. The next few minutes remain a mystery. My first memory was Raquel cradling me on the floor as I erupted into tears.
This time as the light filled my gaze, I could hear Raquel’s muffled voice and feel her trembling hand on my body. It was like she was holding on to me as an unknown force pulled from all directions to remove me from my body. As minutes passed I sat in the guttoral feeling that remained. And as I wept, I was gripped by a longing that I couldn’t put my finger on. And then it dawned on me. It was the same feeling following my breakthrough DMT experience, minus the euphoria. It was everything that I longed to return to in glimpses of divinity but in this moment everything that brought my greatest fears to realization. We took turns finding and checking my pulse, which was extremely low in contrast to the racing palpitations I had experienced at the outset of the event. My time in the medical field would lead me to suspect that I had inadvertently activated my vagus nerve, one of the cranial nerves that when activated inhibits the automaticity or automatic beating of the heart. Did you know it beats independently of brain function? Isn’t that wild? Long and short is that it slows the heart down. Too much of a good thing can cause bradycardia, a slowing of the heart that can cause syncope, or passing out. It’s usually benign but can be also be cardiac rhythm disturbances and other more terminal events.
My breathing began to normalize and once Raquel was convinced that I wasn’t going to seize and herniate from my brain, she went off to the bathroom, probably to check her own pulse. And as I tried to remove my own subjective judgement on what I had just experienced, it became apparent that the only thing that separated this event from the more favorable ones was indeed the euphoria that accompanies drug use, meditation, sex, and similar altered states of consciousness.
I wasn’t saded, and it wasn’t as if I hadn’t just spent the past 15 minutes crying over my brush with finitude, but what did happen was the angst, longing, and that deep pit in my stomach began to subside. And when Raquel returned we spent the night talking about some of our own fears, joys, and reflections on people in our lives. Those who saw us into it, and those who will see us out. So many core memories… jokes and tears that belong to us alone, and will stay with us - for me at least - until my memories are themselves but a memory. The night itself was divine, in every way the English language can allow us to express the word.
And if you’ve had a night or two like that, I don’t have to tell you what it looked like. I can point to it, which is what a word does. What it points at animates itself by the nature of our willingness to engage in it.
Love. That’s what the alchemists were brewing.