Life Happens, Apparently

Last night I was in the woods hunting for deer. I didn’t know what to do, but was with a friend who had a bow and arrow. Eventually she killed, cleaned and cooked the deer and the taste was vivid, rich. Then I seemed to wake up.

There was a man in the dream whose face I can clearly see, a black beard and dark eyes and a skull cap, but who I have no recollection of seeing any other time. In the dream it was clear I'd known him for years, we were very close. My friend in the dream is here now, only her outfit has changed. I asked if she remembered deer hunting with me and she does not. But she remembered eating with me the seeming day before. The version of her in my dreams shared a history with me as well, but one that lived only within the world of that dream.

When my friend Lynn was having cancer surgery and I flew back to the States and saw her, there were memories that would pop up randomly, and a feeling of familiarity. The feeling itself seems no more “real” than the feeling I have with certain characters who appear only in dreams, and no more real than characters I know only from movies, TV, and books.

In any apparent moment there is a narrative that seems to be playing out, that has the feeling of continuity, yet there is always a sense that whatever I seem to focus on only exists in the instant it appears. In any given situation, walking in the woods, sitting by Lynn’s bedside, talking to my friend, it always feels like what is perceived is simply part of an unending holograph containing all that has ever appeared, yet is devoid of any actual content. There is no solidity to me, or to any other appearance, beyond appearance itself, and no center or source or edge to whatever seems to be happening. It is like being thrown into the middle of a dance and somehow knowing the choreography but having no memory of ever rehearsing.

No one and no thing seems stable; you turn your head and the world comes and goes; you fall asleep and another apparent world appears; one day presumably the lights go out and the curtains fall and yet it seems that will make no difference whatsoever to what simply is...and is not.

Everywhere I go, people have a narrative of things and events that are personal, that happen to them or, they imagine, to me. Lynn said that when events used to happen she would attach them to a personal history that unfolded in time and space beginning with earliest childhood memories. But when we saw each other before her surgery, she said she had images and thoughts about the past that flashed in sporadic bursts of what we call memory, but also felt like she was born anew each time there was perception, as if she had never experienced any life previous to each ephemeral appearance. We both felt life was a miracle, but we joked when they were taking her into surgery about whether I’d meet her afterwards in recovery or the morgue. Life, death, and all that appears fall like raindrops on the lake, but the lake is simply only ever always this.

Right now, and what now is I cannot even say, there is just an apparent playing out of life that can’t be named or defined. We can say there are senses, thoughts, and emotions, but those words only cut apart what is not even whole or fragmented. Lynn pops up as I write this, and when she does, she is as real, and no more real, than if she was standing next to me “in person.” It is all appearing, I could say, in my mind or brain, but those are also stories trying to explain what is happening. Lynn’s cancer went into remission some time after her surgery and the doctors could not say precisely why. My Uncle died recently and where did the narrative of his life go? Where did it ever exist?

Life happens, yet only this, what is, ever appears, including the story of what it seems to be. Yet the story is also an appearance, and beyond that is simply what is, unknown and unknowable, yet even that makes it sound like some thing that is not known.

In the story of this apparent life, anything may occur, yet it is all appearing unbidden, uncreated, of itself, and yet it contains every joy and sorrow, every transient expression of love, and an infinite expression of appearances that are every thing yet no thing at all. 💓