IN A DREAM, I’M FLYING above thick heavy storm clouds at dawn into a zone of sunlight with streaks of blue sky and wispy clouds high above. I see a heavy blanket of cloud stretching below me, and under that all of life on earth gyrates. I feel like I’m floating through the non-corporeal mind, floating after death, away from earth, from body, from sensory awareness. After the momentary shivers and terrors comes a sense of freedom. I don’t want to return to the storm below. Aloft, all is white, an antarctic vista as far as I can see, white but with dimension: puffs here and there, sinkholes, hills, occasional tints of pale blue smeared across endless pastures of smooth white.
Slowly I become aware that I am in my mother’s mind as she was dying seven years ago today, in a hospital I know well, in her mind that had stopped holding on to earth and let itself float, float up through clouds beyond the body, to a realm of sky with blue striations, slowly rising and feeling no senses, no action or activity, yet an awareness of a self floating up out of the self, through the gates of the brain. As her mind began floating away beyond anything like thought, word, or want, a granular white fog moved in, obscuring even the clouds.
Then I realize I am looking at the marbling of the body, the flesh and fluids, seeing from inside the tissues. Looking down, I can feel the body beneath the broken clouds of consciousness, the body with its flowing channels and pastures, its microbial cities and swamps, and dense neural pathways. Then an array of clouds obscures the body, hovering thickly in white ridges and dark gray anvils. We fly right into one surging cloud, become immersed in it, and fly out the other side. Wispier clouds swim across the emptiness like small thought-fish.
Floating somewhere between the body and the mind, I spot a long waterway stretching from north to south, irrigating the lands all around it. Through a hole in the cloud floor I see a wide winding river and miles upon miles of farm fields. Then slowly floating even higher, we enter an area of blue sky and pure yellow sunlight with stray clouds above, and curving all around the bowl of the horizon. The clouds move closer, and I climb knowing that when I pass through them I will enter pure air, pure starlight. It is not so bad parting with the earth. There is great relief.
Life is teeming, anonymous, and disposable. Some religions encourage a loss of self, in essence a glimpse of death during life, with a welcome escape from the struggles of identity. Still, I’m fearful. One is always too young and unready, too polite, too dignified for such radical decay. In this dream the sun blurs the horizon with gold, night and day meet in one quadrant of loss, an indivisible quiet. A heavy white blanket lies below and cloud banks press on the trigger points of morning. Soon we sink between layers in a whiteout bleak as noon on a glacier. Finally, through a long gray coma of clouds, we descend.
I wake up slowly, consciously, trying to remember the softness of my mother’s beautiful pale skin, the exact pitch of her upbeat voice, what she looked like as a slender young woman, her changing hairstyles over the years, and as many happy memories of being with her as possible. Not a lot of those memory-twigs exist, unfortunately, and I could use some to nest in now. Marcia died three years after my father Sam. A sense of mourning has been shadowing me for days, the way it sometimes does as her birthday approaches. I’ve no desire to visit her grave because I believe she’s not really there but has rejoined pure energy, once again a shimmer of atoms at dawn. The locals don’t say “passed away” but “passed,” which sounds a bit more mystical, as in “passed to the other side” or “passed through the veil.”
I sense her in the atomic mother-brightening dawn that’s glowing chestnut with platinum geysers. I wish our time together had been more intimate, that I’d known more of her dreams and sorrows, understood her better, and that she’d felt known by me. No use fretting over lost possibilities. I hear real peace comes from loving one’s fate, not just accepting it, because life is as it is and how one responds is what yields happiness or discontent. Loving your fate without trying to fix it, without asking the universe to be anything it’s not, is easier to phrase than to feel, except as desire, and, ironically, the desire itself contradicts the lesson. I find it a state of grace hard to reach. Like trying to frame problems as invitations, not challenges. These fine adjustments echo through the halls of morning.
In Tibetan monasteries, one learns to practice a “death meditation” at dawn. Upon waking, instead of joining others for sitting meditation and chores, one lies in bed with eyes closed, and says to oneself: I’m going to die tonight. What shall I do with the rest of my time? This isn’t meant to be a rare occurrence in the otherwise smoothly slathered hours of one’s life, but a regular practice over months or years—because it might be true of any day, and certainly will be true one day. Cuddled up with my loving dear? Looking at photographs of my mother? Strolling down the street and feeling the sensations of being alive and in motion? Admiring the beauty of the natural world from sunrise to sunset? Writing a poem? Doing good for the loved ones and others who remain on earth? I begin to appreciate and schedule my allotted hours to what matters most, and that’s a tonic to carry into waking life.
The birds start choiring early on, as if they’re dragging the sun up to please the Aborigines who dream it with song. A flock of starlings flies over like a pack of noisy children. Yellow-white crystals of sunrise give whatever they strike a brilliant blue luminescence, and it’s as if my mother left her awe everywhere for me to find, especially today, lit by the luminol of dawn.