I woke up between 3:30 and 4 because I could not breathe, and while I was using the nebulizer, my thoughts went here and there, and perhaps what I came up with will be of interest.
I thought, how did I come to live in such deep faith? I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I find it striking, and I cannot believe I am wrong in this faith.
I was re-reading Teresa Crater’s Under the Stone Paw (a novel I edited and helped publish when I was still at Hampton Roads), and came to Dr. Abernathy telling Anne LeClair that the sun affects our consciousness. I jumped to thoughts about people’s fears of sunspots, solar flares, CME’s, etc. I don’t share those fears. I believe that the sun manifests life in the same way everything else does. Call it God, call it All That Is, call it whatever you are comfortable calling it. Where is room for fear of mishaps?
The test, I suppose, comes when you can’t breathe, can’t assume that the next easy breath will come on schedule. You have to get that next breath; you do what you need to, what you can do, but you know that ultimately it is not in your power to command, any more than you can keep the mysterious processes of the body functioning. We are always dependent upon life to maintain itself. And when we die, well, is that somehow a tragedy, an accident, an avoidable outcome?
Whatever produced in me this deep faith in life (regardless of the evidence; sometimes in the teeth of the evidence), I am grateful for it. It makes everything easier, even possible. The other day I noted that my good friend Jon seems to have moved beyond anger at various things he cannot command. I was very glad to see that. After all, what good does anger do us? It’s like fear, “the little death, the mind killer,” to quote Dune.
A while later, I thought, we are groups of strands, each with its own imperatives and its own will. That puts a different light on the saying that “It is better to be whole than good.” That saying recognizes that it is better to realize that we are many things, than to believe that we are one thing with which we can identify.
We aren’t simple, good, unitary, because we can’t be. We can only live our multiple, good-and-bad-mixed community lives as best we can, choosing as we go which strands we want to encourage and assist. And since this is always going to be sort of a messy process, the more faith you can bring to it, the better. The joker in the deck, though, is that trust in life doesn’t seem to come on command. You have to live it in faith before you can live it from experience.
Worth the effort of enticing it to come live with you, though!