My most intense experience of groundlessness arose when my wife suddenly passed away asleep last Monday. One moment I was in a long-term marriage, the next moment I was in this relationship in a very different way. Is this then Die Wende? Will this be a turning point in my life, a crossroads seeing me on a spiritual path? As much as I want things to go back to the way they used to be, my intuition is that I’ve been given a great gift. When life and death lose their proper meaning, that is to say, when they are no longer experienced as what they really are, then the awful and empty power of death creeps into everything and sickens everything. So when death becomes most trivial, it also becomes most pervasive. Death is called upon to nourish and to stimulate the “sense of life.”
This immediately begets another and far worse ambiguity. A “sense of life” that is habitually fed on death is corrupt and pathological. It is not life at all. In seeking to escape death, man becomes fatally attracted by the death he seeks to escape.
As awful as I feel, I keep thinking this is the chance of a lifetime. Anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues post-pandemic treated by my homeopathic tinctures placed against Judith’s death at 81, shocking and upsetting, places me in a fertile, tremendously meaningful place. Doubtlessly I am vacillating for a while between this feeling of limitless possibility and the overwhelming wish to return to the familiar. I know my best option is to go forward, FURTHER as day glo bus had it, into the unknown vastness of the next breath.
Thomas Merton-
Geography comes to an end,
Compass has lost all earthly north,
Horizons have no meaning
Nor roads an explanation:
I cannot even hope for any special borealis
To rouse my darkness with a brief “Hurray”!
O flaming Heart,
Unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,
You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found You.
Here will I love and praise You in a tongueless death,
Until my white devoted bones,
Long bleached and polished by the winds of this Sahara,
Relive at Your command,
Rise and unfold the flowers of their everlasting spring.
Wordsworth-MICHAEL ANGELO IN REPLY TO THE PASSAGE UPON HIS STATUE OF NIGHT
SLEEPING
'Night Speaks'
GRATEFUL is Sleep, my life in stone bound fast;
More grateful still: while wrong and shame shall last,
On me can Time no happier state bestow
Than to be left unconscious of the woe.
Ah then, lest you awaken me, speak low.
Grateful is Sleep, more grateful still to be
Of marble; for while shameless wrong and woe
Prevail, 'tis best to neither hear nor see.
Then wake me not, I pray you. Hush, speak low.
Come, gentle Sleep, Death's image tho' thou art,
Come share my couch, nor speedily depart;
How sweet thus living without life to lie,
Thus without death how sweet it is to die.
🙏💕
Very sorry to hear of Judith's passing.
Please look after yourself.
You have been a wonderful husband to her.