Allowing

I’m late to the Stranger Things craze. But my daughter is a huge fan, and is now making her second pass through all the episodes while I’m still in season 1. There’s a sequence early on where a kid, Will, goes missing, and the mother, Joyce, is, of course, distraught. She has this very real-to-her experience of knowing Will is still alive, and that knowing comes through some hard-to-believe interactions with lamps and Christmas lights. (The show eludes any brief explanations, so I’ll stop trying here.)

What jumped out at me was Joyce’s conviction of deeply knowing something, while also recognizing her story of how she knows just sounds crazy to others. I’ve been feeling a version of that in the last month, sometimes opting to keep some things to myself with an awareness, and perhaps fear, of sounding to others like I’m having some existential crisis. 

But screw it. I’m gonna try and put words to these experiences, even though they defy words. I’ve got chemo drugs coursing through my veins right now, which could either help or hurt in this effort. We'll see. And I need to try and write these down for myself so I can have it captured somewhere - the intensity of these felt experiences certainly fades for me. As always, I’m sharing it along in the event it stirs something useful in you, raises a good question, or offers the tiniest bit of value for somebody.

Here we go.

These experiences have felt like lightning strikes in some way, known down deep within me, perhaps in my soul. But definitely not as just a thought in my head. And this past weekend felt full of all of that. 

Saturday morning, I woke up, had a nice meditation, and was just feeling pretty good. Chemo recovery has been inconsistent for me, so feeling good for a few days is very much appreciated. My wife and I had a morning appointment at a CANLAW clinic. 

The CANLAW clinic is a beautiful offering to the local cancer community. Volunteer estate lawyers, paralegals, UT Law students, notaries and high school kids run these full-day clinics to help cancer patients and their families get pro bono estate planning services. (Apparently my efforts on LegalZoom were not worth the paper they were printed on.) You get to knock out all the important stuff in one day - will, durable/medical powers of attorney, advanced directives, etc.. We learned a ton, and felt so much more confident having an experienced estate lawyer (a breast cancer survivor too) walk us through it all so generously. 

We took two vehicles to the appointment because one of us needed to get a kid to a tumbling session right after we finished. As I pulled up to the nondescript office building for the clinic, I had the stereo cranked up a bit, deep into a tune from Iron & Wine. My wife pulled up in the parking space next to me, and I looked over to see her flash a smile. 

Then I considered that we were there to make sure we had a court-approved will in the event of my death from cancer. That recognition seemed to tip my inner experience over into something else. The love for and felt connection to my wife, the sunny morning, the music, the help of the volunteers at the clinic, the recognition of creating a will because death is traveling alongside me (and all of us)...it all just converged, flooding through me. I found myself crying, which happens an increasing amount these days. 

But it wasn’t sadness. There’s a word my friend, Kevin, introduced to me many years ago - gestalt. One definition for gestalt is “something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts”. In thinking about that morning, there were the inputs above that fed the experience, but the gestalt of experience was both more and different. (Hopefully I used the word right.)

In that place in me, everyone and everything is connected - I just can feel it and know that truth in my bones. There is no other - only us. It’s this beautiful overwhelm, washing away the things that routinely pull me away from that love-filled connection. I used the metaphor of a lighting strike before as there is this intensity of energy / light / connection / joy / communion (all of it?). If only for a bit, I feel like I know love, like maybe I know God better than I ever have (with God being that divine connection and love). 

I go back to the words of Cynthia Bourgeault in her book Mystical Hope. She describes mystical hope:

It has something to do with presence — not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand… It bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of strength, joy, and satisfaction: an "unbearable lightness of being." But mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward expectations being met, it seems to produce them from within.

That feels pretty close to the right words for me. The play of “unbearable” and “lightness” together speaks well to the non-duality of it all…all the feelings and experiences are just mixed up in there together. Life and death…not life then death. More circular, less linear. I told my wife that it felt like a trip to a new reality (or maybe the actual reality?), and there’s just no going back to the old existence. And, again, trying to use words here just feels woefully inadequate. 

Anyway, this all happened by 10:00am Saturday! The CANLAW clinic and the people in it were so kind and helpful, and we got all the stuff done that morning. 

And then I realized I was late to take my oldest kiddo to a coaching session for tumbling. 

So I hurried out, cursed the traffic on Mopac (busy highway), and got frustrated when my kid was not ready to go despite multiple texts and a conversation on the few steps needed to be ready!! Ahhhh!!!! Did I just completely lose the earth-shattering realization of the morning? It felt like my experience of the human condition in a nutshell. How in the hell do you go from THAT to that? 

I think that’s life though. And maybe what’s mine to do is to re-order my life in ways that I can be in AND move from that communal knowing. And do that more and more.

Thankfully the weekend continued to offer several more of those indescribable moments of deep love and communion. Watching my kid nail multiple back handsprings after working real hard at it for months and months, and then getting to celebrate together with a Reese’s blizzard from DQ. Gathering for dinner and sharing highs and lows with our “homeroom” group from our church - an inter-generational group of beautiful, kind, wise folks we’ve gathered with for 15+ years. My other kid coming to our room just to give my wife and I a hug before she goes to bed. A sermon on Sunday that felt like it was made just for me. Meeting up with our “framily” for lunch and the perfect afternoon hang. 

Sunday evening I was driving back up Hwy 183 to home, on my own again since we needed two separate cars for the events of the day. It’s certainly not a pretty drive, but the whole experience of the weekend just flooded me…again. It did happen to be my favorite time of day when the sun is working toward setting on a weekend, when the world just seems to slow a bit. Again, the song that came on was just the right one…so I cranked it. And I just weeped, again, resting in the beautiful mystery of the inner experience that settled into me. In the past, I think I’ve pushed down that response, so maybe I’m getting better at leaning into it.

I’m aware that the context of my life at this moment accelerates and shapes all of this. And I’m also aware of the ridiculous amount of privilege I carry that affords me some space for all this - I’ve got a warm home, a generous salary, health insurance and long-term disability coverage, as supportive of a community as anyone could dream up, time to write and meditate, to name just a few. And…getting my life disrupted by cancer, and the associated loss in that, has been an important spark. 

My good friend, Chad, has been taking me to chemo lately, and we’ve been going early. There’s a trail nearby, so we just walk and talk for a while before my appointment. It makes for a MUCH better transition, physically and mentally, into the chemo day. Chad is ridiculously smart, well-earned through a lot of curiosity and courage to chase that curiosity. And, perhaps even more important, he combines all those intellectual gifts with deep, kind wisdom. Our conversations always expand my view in ways I certainly couldn’t get to on my own.

At the end of our walk, I tried to share some of my weekend’s experiences with him, best I could. Chad brought his usual self to that conversation too, and together we named what has felt like an important shift that I’m maybe only starting to take in and live. 

Maybe it’s about allowing. 

I, and perhaps you too, can get sucked into the continuous striving for that next thing or clinging to some desired outcome, which also can lead to a lot of resisting anything that seems to get in the way. And I'm not even conscious that is all happening. As much as I don’t want to admit it, Buddhism has me pegged when it argues that this clinging and striving is the root of all our suffering. (Thankfully they offer an alternative path to try out too.)

What if that communal, love-filled, visceral, divine experience…where we are held and whole…what if it’s there all the time? What if I just have to allow it to be true, not chase it? What if I just need to sit in it and not run from it? What if I move from that mysterious knowing, more and more often? What might be possible for me? What might be possible for us? 

What if I’m not crazy but, instead, the closest to sane that I’ve ever been?