Buckets and Boards

Tree and Mushroom, Appalachian Trail, 2019. Photo by Chris

Dear Friend,

Listen. I get the temptation. When you receive what is all but certain to be a terminal diagnosis, it seems almost natural to begin planning. To list all the things you wish to do before your last day. To consider all the mountains you have dreamed of scaling, but for whatever reason, you have been unable to break away to visit. To list the trails that call to you. To wander through the music room and consider all the instruments you intended, but never learned to play. To think about learning to paint or to make Peking Duck with perfectly crispy skin. To imagine a meal at Atelier Crenn and all the other restaurants that you have for so long longed to experience, and wonder what it might be like finally to find even one Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concert (April 21 in DC!) or one festival at which The National is playing near enough for you to attend, and when you consider that money has been exposed as completely fraudulent, and recognize that time has become your most important currency, it seems almost natural and responsible even, to turn your attention to forming a list of experiences for which you are willing to trade your precious time. And it’s not hard to find suggestion for what such a list might contain.

Just google it.

And what might, on the face of it seem a little self-serving might actually be far more than that. When I was introduced to My Little Tumor Friend (MLTF), people around me wanted to see my list, seemed genuinely disappointed I didn’t have one, and I’m convinced, even now, that such interest and disappointment rose up from their love for me, and their desire to help me check things off of my list. Not only to check them off, but to experience them with me. What could be more loving than that? For a minute or two, I wondered if composing a list might actually be an act of love for Kathryn and for my boys, no matter how, and maybe even because of how distasteful I found the idea of a bucket list to be.

Why? I couldn’t get past the idea that compiling a bucket list was reducing my life to a scorecard, and it simply was and remains unclear what constitutes a passing grade. Fifty percent? Ninety-five percent? Or I wondered whether if I died with even one thing left on the list, would that mean I somehow failed at life, or if I somehow and miraculously completed all of it, would I lie wondering if I had failed to aim high enough? This was a deep well of overthinking with steep and slippery walls from which I could never escape. That much seemed clear.

Worst of all was the concern that by having such a list I would spend my time obsessed with its completion, and through that obsession, blind myself to all of the life and love that was teeming all around me.

For instance, when I’m sitting on the porch staring at a computer screen as the rising sun chases the darkness westward, and I’m searching for The National shows within five hundred miles of Richmond in the next six months, it’s hard nearly impossible to hear that one particular cardinal announcing to her mate that she made it through the cold night, and that is a song I would put up against any The National ever recorded - even this one - (and this one always, always pulls me inside-out.)

“You put an ocean and a river between everybody else
Between everything, yourself and home
You put an ocean and a river between everything, yourself and home”

It’s hard for me to think of my own personal bucket list as anything but an ocean….and a river…between my life as it is-the life I was made to live and a life of to do lists that was never intended for me. Better, I thought to wait for life come to me without expectations, instead of working so hard to conform my days to my tiny, little ideas of what they ought to look like.

For a long time, this was far more than enough. I would take my morning forest baths, and notice almost everything - how the colors of tree barks and the particular shades of blue of the bluebirds and the golds of the goldfinches and even the grays of the gray squirrels changed with the seasons, almost daily. I noticed every single spider web. It was an exercise in seeing everything as if for the very first time, and it was magnificent. Marvelous. I think it almost certain I would have missed nearly all of it had I been working through a bucket list. I don’t regret the choice at all.

But things are changing.

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Recovering from the last battery of treatments has been more challenging than the first time. This December’s surgery seems to have affected my balance and motor coordination more than the first. The radiation has knocked me down and I am spending more time napping than walking in the woods these days. And as it gets more difficult to find the time and stamina to walk, and as I continue to pop steroids to prevent seizures (The steroids are working by the way- no seizures in weeks!) and as my weight blooms, and, believe me, it’s blooming, I wonder if waiting for life to come to me is still the right approach.

This week, I heard from a number of people (The saints again? Maybe?) suggesting that I zoom out a little and find some space between a simple bucket list and a more expansive vision that might guide my daily steps and my daily posture.

At first, when somebody at a weekly free-writing group a friend and I co-facilitate suggested a “vision board, “ I bristled. We've all seen vision boards, and the idea never did much to capture my attention. No, it is hard for me to distinguish between a bucket and a board, each of which seemed simply to describe a different container for the same underlying concept: a listing of goals and aspirations - that might help to focus my days in the direction that I determined (somehow on my own) might fulfill me. And we’ve already recognized the limits of my imagination and inability to know what it is I truly want, so it had to be more than this if I was going to trade time to complete it. I was not interested in either a bucket list or a vision board that described all the places I’d like to go or how much money I’d like to make someday or a place to park the ways in which I hoped my circumstances might change so that I strive in the right direction, and with any luck might be happier in some small way as a result. When you know your days are drawing to an end, these things simply don’t mean what they once meant, and striving is the absolute last thing I want to sign up for. Not then. Not now. Not ever again.

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Not that I am discouraging you from doing your own bucket list or vision board. I am not. At least not intentionally.

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There is another thread I’ve been pulling at recently, and I’m beginning to wonder if the threads are connected.

"Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise [...] If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity

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Yet if there is no such things as a true home for us in this world, how is it that we have such a strong sense for what it is?

Christian Wiman - The Bird that Sang I Am

I don’t know exactly what to trace this back to, but I find myself thinking a lot about home these days, and by home, I’m not exactly sure what I mean. Perhaps you can help. What do you picture when someone says home to you? It’s not a rhetorical question. I am seriously wondering. What does home look like? Smell like? Taste like? What colors do you see? What sounds do you hear? I wonder if you, like me, go sifting through fading childhood memories when someone asks you to describe home.

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Christian Wiman offers some possibilities of what we might mean by home: a house; a country; a language; a love; a longing; a grief; a god. But Wiman, to his credit (and perhaps begrudgingly) acknowledges that our conception of home can often be so big and smooth that we cannot possibly find a place with sufficient texture to which our anchor can find its purchase. So thinking we may have finally arrived at some idea of what home is, we continue to drift without even sensing our own movement until we are aground on a shoal and hopelessly stuck. In his effort to better define the word home, Wiman says he found “more definitions than one book could contain.” He ultimately concludes that “A word that means everything means nothing,” almost suggesting that the distance between utter oblivion and complete fulfillment is infinitesimally small. Or, as we have talked about so many times, perhaps the way to fullest life is through death (of self).

So where does that leave us, except not at home, with no clear sense of what home even is, or any idea how we might get there, and that to define home is immediately to reduce it to something it is not. Still, I don’t want to give up, and I’m wondering if home is at the end of this vision thread, and when I pull the thread all the way through there might be something there, a poem, an oil painting perhaps, or a misshapen, unnamed flower that, even imperfectly, traces the edges of what we mean by home. I think so. I believe so.

For a long time, I tried filled the gap between the longing for home and not finding it by conflating memory and identity, as if Mnemosyne might have planted a dormant dream, ever and still in me, in each of us, of a time-place where we were once completely content and in effortless communion, a particular and unique intersection of time and space of complete belonging- where we walked unashamed and naked among creation, without fear of rejection and without competing to survive, and that if we worked hard and long enough we might excavate all the experiences of life that left that beautiful memory buried and gasping for breath.

Do you recognize the place? We have a word for it in every culture, don’t we? Consider that the origin of the word paradise implies an enclosed park, or a garden. Is Eden home?)

But I no longer believe any of us, least of all me, had any such memory of the place where things are as they were intended to be, as they were created to be, and if this memory exists, I’m convinced it resides only in the collective unconscious from a time before we began our misguided quest to be God, and to reshape creation to suit our own desires. Before we dared to call these desires “needs,” and thereby created competition and striving and scarcity in a world God seems to have intended instead to overflow with abundant love, communion, and grace. I have no personal memory of lions and lambs lying down together, nor a memory of trees and mushrooms cooperating to sustain one another and not a single recall of mountains and hills breaking into song, nor trees clapping their hands in approval as the birds watch from their shaking branches. I have never seen every creature dancing with every other creatures to the song that never stops playing, and yet I believe the vision. I don’t need memory for that. There is an easier explanation to me:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11

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I hold the vision of a place where the whole notion of “survival of the fittest” has been tossed onto the pyre of good intentions and replaced by the idea of “survival the thriving of all God’s creatures in communion with God and with one another.”

That is how I think of home now. It’s more than a thought. It’s slowly becoming a vision and what is a bucket list of goals and aspirations compared to this vision? And vision does not mean, to me at least, I’ve got to make this happen. But rather, I find myself asking How could this be? Not understanding, and yet still believing. Mostly because I know I did not make this up.

You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the Lord’s renown,
for an everlasting sign,
that will endure forever.

Isaiah 55:12-13

So we have that to look look forward to. Most importantly, so long as I can give my heart to this vision, what circumstances can possibly discourage me? The question barely makes sense. Instead of being discouraged by cancer, fatigue, a growing belly, or a failing memory, I find myself longing to be home, and hoping to be fully ready to live there, and I mean the very instant I arrive.

Fair to ask, what might it mean to be ready to live there? I think it would be dishonest to say that I have an answer. I’m encouraged that others, before me, have dared to ask this question, and recognized how difficult (and also how simultaneously simple) it is to answer:

“That there needed neither art nor science for going to GOD, but only a heart resolutely determined to apply itself to nothing but Him, or for His sake, and to love Him only.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

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St. Augustine of Hippo said it this way:

“Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.”

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

What is a traditional bucket list compared to knowing God and to living with Him, in the world as he intended it to be, where everything is made beautiful in its time including us? What might it mean to see every creature through the eyes of their creator? I think we get hints and sometimes even pay attention to these hints, but can you try to imagine how clear and strive-free it might be when when even the term thin place has lost all meaning because the veil has been once and forever removed?

Seriously. Can you? And if you think you can, try to imagine it even clearer and less strivey than that, because if you or I can hold it in our imaginations, then it can be only a shadow of true paradise, and not my forever home.

Then the vision informs the only item on the bucket list, which turns out to be a question;

1. “What might it mean to practice the presence of God today? And everyday?”

Oremus,

Chris

p.s. And to the members of the writing group who suggested a vision board: Thank you!