On the Living Shore

Wild and Scenic Section of the Rogue River, Oregon: August 2023

Best Beloved,

Does this ever happen to you? Do you ever find yourself stuck in thought circles? Not the nice, neat circles that you drew in sixth grade when the center point of the compass stuck firmly in thick construction paper and the trace of the arc came together perfectly - so perfectly. 

No. not that, but instead circles that never quite seem to connect to themselves? Circles where the center of the compass preferred to wander around the page looking for God-only-knows what. Undisciplined and unreliable circles. 

Well, that’s where I am. I’m just not sure if the problem is that I have nothing to hold the center point of the compass, or if seeking a nice, neat, perfectly formed circle is  a bad idea to begin with.  I’m leaning toward the latter.

These are some of the arcs that are struggling to connect.

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Two days ago I found a Joni Mitchell interview with Kevin Newman from 1994. You already know that Joni is another one of my people, and you already know I want you to read or watch the whole thing so we can take our discussion off-line and wait for her paintings to lead us wherever they lead us. But let’s just start here:

…I don't understand why people (might see their creativity dry up), if they are living at all. The only reason it could dry up is because they are afraid to state what they are feeling at the current time. You're always living and you're always feeling, and you're always seeing and you're always hearing. So there is no reason, really, that I can see.

Is it - whatever it is -  always about fear? I am beginning to think so.

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My brain surgeon called on Saturday. Woke me from a delicious afternoon dream.

That sounds like the beginning of a Stephen King short story, but it’s not. It was lovely.

In my mind’s eye, my surgeon was having a relatively light Saturday - no surgery, or maybe he simply had a break between rounds and something stirred him to dial my number and he had the courage to pay attention.  After the obligatory questions about how chemo and radiation went, we ended up talking about his move to America as a child and his getting adjusted to living in a culture without naps. (Imagine living where naps were expected instead of shameful…if you can.)

A few weeks back you asked what I was falling in love with. Well, add being-woken-from-a-Saturday-afternoon-nap-by-a-call- from a-neurosurgeon to the list, especially when the neurosurgeon is kind and trusts me with little, human bits of himself.

During the conversation, he also told me that when they extubated me, I was all smiles and calm. I’m still not sure I completely believe him, but he claimed this was pretty unusual in his experience. I wonder.

Of course, I don’t remember that at all. But his account did remind me of something that was so clear the next day and the day after that and the day after that. I remember waking knowing with all my heart that I did not have to be afraid…not then and not ever again. It was almost as if someone had breathed this truth into my lungs and it had made its way into my blood and into every cell of my body and I knew by heart there was nothing, not one single thing, to fear. Not then. Not ever.

I think Andrea Gibson was getting at the same thing here:

…But I woke up from surgery and they told me it was (cancerous), and almost immediately I could feel something changing. For example, I was in that room and, granted, I was on drugs, but even as they started to wear off, I could feel that the texture of my life was already different. For example, whereas a day before I might’ve been annoyed by my father, suddenly he’s in the room and I’m thinking, this man is the best father in the world. Suddenly my partner and I had been having trouble, and suddenly I just felt so much love for her. And I was overcome with this sort of sense of being adored and cherished by the universe. And also a sense that every living being was. I just felt more at peace than I could ever imagine feeling, even on a great day in my life where everything else was going right.

And so here was this thing that was supposed to just be my biggest fear come true, and suddenly I was there. I was just there. And I guess that’s the way of putting it. And I still don’t know exactly what happened. I describe it as feeling that I was just graced with a sudden experience of peace…

You might find it easy to explain my brain surgeon's comment away, but I do not. You might say that this experience of complete peace and fearlessness is common for people coming out of anesthesia, which may be true.  It’s not lost on me Andrea described it almost exactly as I would have.

But is that an explanation? Really? Does the ability to describe the manner in which a cell is fertilized and begins to divide and eventually develops into a child mean that we can explain life?  Or does having the word instinct to describe the force that pushes the birds to descend, en masse, to our little feeder in the hours just before the snow begins to fall explain that force or how it got there in the first place? Does our ability to sing along to a new song explain music, or explain why every love song is really about God? 

Um…Not to me.

This certainty, this freedom from fear lingered for a weeks, until it began to wander off into the woods while I attended to estate planning and all sorts of really, really important stuff.

Sometimes that freedom comes by, knocks on the door, and invites me to go swimming. And when I accept, I float down a fearless stream - letting it take me where it will -  and my only striving flows out of my desire to share this secret place with every single person I love, which, as you know, is a sizable and growing and utterly unmanageable list of people.

This week, through grace, I’ve been swimming most days. 

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This morning, I was talking to a friend about fear over breakfast. He asked how I would define “fear,” and of course, I stumbled because words and language and those sorts of things that we talk about all the time. But we trusted the question enough to follow until it eventually led, by way of words like rejection and security, to a little island where I’d like to spend some time wandering. Wondering. 

What if fear is the sea between surviving and living? What if I have been given the gift of not having to navigate that sea at all? What if a diagnosis, and this particular diagnosis, simply and gently lifts us from the shore of surviving and drops us, carefully and delicately, onto the shore of living, where the stream of fearlessness flows -  sometimes gently and sometimes not as gently, but on which there are always eddies to rest? 

So this is where I hope to pitch my tent for the indefinite future. Wandering and wondering what it might mean to stay here, on the island of the living, far, far away from the land of merely surviving. Wondering what my days would look like and what sorts of things might be here that draw the breath from my lungs and  stir my heart to music. Wondering what it might mean to see life as it is, to feel it all and to paint what I feel without fear.

I’ll let you know how it goes. You are, of course, welcome to come try it on with me. The tent is plenty big enough for you and Joni and the brain surgeon and anybody you might want to bring along. 

I promise.

Oremus,

Chris

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(P.S. Did you ever just give up, and simply free-hand a segment to connect the ends of the “circle.” I think that’s what just happened.)