. . . and joy of not being contained between my hat and my boots.

I was looking for a photograph this morning and came across an image of someone related to my loss. I stared at it for a long time and was shocked at the dissonance I felt. Who was this person? I knew I was supposed to know her, and I guess I do in some way, but in the world of the sacred, she was a stranger, not even a ghost but a faint and failing memory. I continued to stare at her and wonder how people can be so close and so far away from each other at the same time. Were she to appear before me, I would have nothing to say, though we shared a story for many years. The connection is lost because she is lost.

And it is not just she who is a stranger; it is I as well. I see myself in photos from that time and feel the same dissonance. That person is gone and has no relation to me now except through the spider-web of memory that will one day break. This person saw the world so differently, was not an “up with people person,” and moved in a small and tight circle of motion that allowed almost no one in. How odd to have this stranger share my story. How awkward when people who knew him think he is me. How funny when my new friends hear parts of his story that I relate like a third-person narrator. If I could tell the truth as I feel it in the world of the sacred, I would say that I was born that day of my baptism in the Mark Twain National Forest, when I left the old person at the bottom of the stream and emerged as a new person who climbed out of that death and into a new life. I can still feel that new life surging as I dripped water from the stream and the sweat of my body in the Missouri humidity.

Today’s walk in the San Bernardino Mountains was glorious. The air was dry and cool at times, and the mountains were clear and solid in the bright blue sky. As I thought of my encounter with ghosts this morning, I couldn’t help but reflect on the beauty of many selves. It is such a relief not to be saddled with one self for one’s entire life. It is grace itself to be able to be born again, and again, and again after each loss. Each circle of motion a new self flying above and beyond the old one, like Eagle on a Sunday morning. The sacred is the New arising from the Old. Re-generation, re-birth, re-naissance. What a gift. You must die. You must be born again. You must be born again.

From “Song of Myself”

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots.