THIS IS IT!!!

on endings, beginnings, transitions, and fear of life

I remember driving around Deer Isle alone, tires just inches away from the moss mounded forest floors that lined the windy dirt back roads. Pillowy green stone tops so fluffy, I nearly crashed while imagining sleeping on them. In that instant, a lifetime of knowing hit me in the deepest way and made me nearly crash again: every moment contains everything and nothing at the same time, and to know this is to know the infinitude of being fully alive. Both “THIS IS IT!!!!” and “This is it?”

After putting the kids to bed, I walked outside to sing to the robins in last light. You know—that blue that can’t possibly be captured in true form other than a pair of willing eyes. That deep, reverent, evening bright blue that happens on the brink of night at the dimmest part of day. Nothing feels like this blue. I closed my eyes, breathed in each gust of wind, and let clean night air fill the soft cavity of my body. It was salty, signaling low tide. The small seas of my eyes overflowed, and tears streamed down my face carrying a kind of gratitude that happens daily when you recognize that each moment contains everything and nothing at the same time. The cacophony of peepers reached the heavens and echoed back down again. Night fell onto the patio softly in a layer most of the world doesn’t go slow enough to notice. White magnolia petals turned brown in the cold and fell too.

The clematis begins to curl from unremarkable branch buds around the same time every year, arms like the elbows of the universe. The air begins to rain in a salty haze you might miss, wetting the petals of narcissus bulbs so they become too heavy and fall. How they rest on the earth as if they are born with the permission to do so. They don’t have language to apologize for resting. Baby birds call in the thicket across the street. The rain pings the metal of a copper chain that reaches from the roof of my porch to the stacks of stones piled below it. Ping, ping, ping. Stacks of stones piled playfully by the children I grew in the soft cavity of my body. Stacks of stones piled cleanly by the man who loves me as much as he loves each stone when he places it.

My eyes turn to an old crabapple tree that has been dying over the last six years. To think that a tree could take so long to die. Somehow each year it draws energy from places I cannot see to produce green leaves in the spring and pink and white flowers that delight my senses and turn into crowns for my children. No matter how many times I touch the bark with my hands and thank it with my heart open, I still never know if it understands. Maybe the thought is enough. I trust the energy of Love so that is how I send my thoughts to the tree, and everything else for that matter. There are so many ways to love the world: in a wheelbarrow, in a thicket across the street, in a hollowed-out tunnel inside the sick bark of a tree, in the dry spot of a fresh shingle beneath a curved roof, under a mushroom grown at the base of an oak. In a pile of leaves forgotten for an entire season. How they make a dark and fertile home for earthworms that are already navigating new life no one can see.

One day this tree will not bud. It will let the briny rain flood its roots to make them soft and softer again so they may transform into something useful for the next generation of life. In that moment it doesn’t bud, it will see everything and nothing at the same time and feel the infinitude of what it is to be fully alive. This past November, my beloved grandmother passed away on her terms surrounded by family. I couldn’t be there which was difficult and real, but for good reason. Later, I’d hear that the last thing she communicated to my mother was not a word but an expression. She looked up, shrugged her shoulders and smirked as if to say, “This is it?” and died shortly after. Her life was vibrant, charismatic, spontaneous, loving, full of peaks and valleys. It ended on a high note, laughing and crying about memories lived, embodying the infinitude of what it means to be fully alive. She visits me all the time now and is quite happy to be everywhere at once.

Noticing has brought me deeper into relationship with life. By slowing down and being quiet, I have learned to listen. I hear myself clearer now. I hear my grandmother. I hear the wind, the stones, the trees, the presence of everything. Light, no surprise to me, has the strongest voice. All of it comes through the energy of Love. When Mimi was dying, my mom called me and asked if I could go get my grandfather from the sky. She knew my recent discovery that other realms stay open for me, that the veil between here and everywhere grows thinner every day. I shrugged, “THIS IS IT!!” and left my studio of light where I had been working and walked upstairs to sit on my bed where I had recently woken from a dream with his voice in my head telling me to call Mimi (who was still alive at the time). “Tell her I’m on my way, tell her I am on my way” I heard him say. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, and saw a clam floating in my mind’s eye. A beam of light split the clam open. I saw still water with little threads of flow on top of it and felt like I was floating. Ultimate peace would be Mimi’s experience transitioning from her body. Then, he showed me a comet with a fuchsia and green tail coming in fast—that was him. The comet met the energy of her on water and sort of sparked as they combined, bouncing back up to the sky in union. Together, they reached a threshold that I couldn’t see, but as soon as they met it, they exploded and became everything. It was fantastic. The final experience I had was in the perspective of Mimi post-explosion into everything. She was a child again, sliding down a white slide in absolute glee. What a way to return to All There Is. For the next five hours, I heard her voice talking to me, only it was a younger voice. “Oh, Chris, I wish you could see this. It’s absolutely…” And she couldn’t describe it with words. She told me it was beyond her wildest imagination. As time went on, her voice got farther away, as if she was speaking to me through a long tunnel coated in wax.

I love to think about the time between her shrug to my mother, between the “This is it?” and what I heard of her experience when she reached infinitude again. “THIS IS IT!!!!!!!!!” It is a shift worth mentioning because I sense a great fear in people lately, of death yes, but perhaps even more concerning to me, I sense a fear of life.

I love participating in this world as someone who is awake and alive and knows it. And, like Mimi, I hope to let the world fold me into something new when it is my time to be folded back in. Fear does not belong in the holy space between now and then. Only Love does.