The bottom of it

I have laid back on this couch and looked up out that window for nearly 20 years. Kim's stain-glass flower brings her same still presence to grace the room. My eye follows the trees, which are very tall, some being several houses away, as the tops sway in the late afternoon breezes. I think often about Shirley, our next door neighbor and original owner of her 1951 house. Some of the trees I see through this window are in her backyard.

Now in her early nineties, Shirley's children persuaded her to move to an assisted-care facility not too far away, and an adult grandson lives in the house for now. I looked at the trees and thought of Shirley and a question would come to mind: Having lived next door since my house had been built, did she recall if anyone had ever died here before we moved in? I never have asked her. She does not know that Kim has passed away in this house.

My question was about ghosts. Much stuff in the house is just as Kim left it, even cigarette butts in the ashtray, ephemera written or in the interrupted process of things being moved about. Museum-like. I do not sense Kim's soul in the house. I could be wrong about her soul or some spiritual awareness being here, but if so it is not focused on influencing me, it must be looking at a landscape I cannot see that does not contain me.

My belief is that she is elsewhere now and back in this world, with all of her memories lost -- without exception -- in the bardo of becoming. She has actually moved on and all that remains is her karma, fluxing anew. For me this is like being cast off on a wayside planet, certain knowledge of no contact again, out of her shipping lanes, yet full of my memories and achingly present with these new ones. The light through the window brings the world to the dark of my soul in descent.


As I began my drop into this darkness, others came to me immediately and expressed compassion. Compassion is the signpost that signals a turn to the open air and the ground above. The furious waving and jumping of those on the beach to the drowning one might turn his despair to hope, and energy appears from nowhere to strain again for the breath. But the power of this fall has its own force to propel my soaking debris on down, and I will lean into the drift for the frightening gift of this downward delivery or to sink unsure and alone.

In spiritual matters, and especially in the 12-Step programs, we speak of hitting bottom. In the programs we share our experience of the descent and the landings from which our arms and legs no longer work and fractured face cannot see to go on. When the bottom is reached I have nothing. What I came to see in my life as what I am, it cannot arrive at the lower depths with its forms intact because its materials shift out of phase, flop out like coins slipped from a pocket. Lost connections at the molecular level, the stuff of me turns to mists that mingle with other materials as they fall away. I am less than dead, not food for anything but the incidental weeds. At the bottom I am lost of my conceit, prime stuff lost of will. This is surrender to the Great Power.

Here, at the bottom it is quiet but for the ringing of blood in my ears. I have only to listen in the quiet as I sort the seeds into separate piles. These are memories of the joys, the sadnesses, the faces, the loves, the reality of the pains rutted into my soul. Is this work the right work, is the gift of the descent in this burden?

I still see the trees through the window, blowing in the breezes.