Can These Bones Live?
Walking toward "Impossible"
A painter is always looking, but not all are listening.
I glanced right and stopped walking. As the dogs, Kate and Ginger, ranged all around the area, a nearly monochrome arrangement unrolled itself before me like a Chinese scroll being read. This language I couldn’t speak, but I understood it. I wish I hadn’t seen bones at first, but so it was. The fallen tree seemed to me an ancient carcass, and for a few moments, I flashed back to a time before memory.
I saw ruined towers of a forgotten kingdom, stone walls fallen and overgrown, heard the sad wind ask “why”, and wondered at the struggle that brought down this dragon. Where were the people? What happened? A twig snapped and I saw a moccasin-clad Native American walk up the slope, eyes forward, looking for something I could not see. I heard his children murmuring in the distance back and to my left across the gully. I smelled his family’s fires, and as the faint blue smoke drifted, the vision shifted to a valley of bones, desolate and abandoned that all began to shake and float as if they were being remade.
The dogs scouring the ground for scents broke the vision, so after looking at the scene again trying to burn it into my consciousness, I raised my voice and said, “This way”, and we all passed through the gate that’s never closed and made our way back to the house.
LOSS
That was January/February 2018. Kate would be killed a couple of weeks later. Family members on my wife’s side would pass away in the months to come, with fresh hospitalizations as of a couple of weeks ago.
There would be good news this year also, but we seem to reflect upon the losses more as if we let a fire go out, as if we let something slip away. As if we could’ve done something. I could’ve kept the dogs tied or caged. My in-laws could have kept the bodies of their loved ones alive with machines, perhaps. As much as it hurts, we must release our grip on that which we love - even our own lives.
REALIZATION
Love requires freedom. We simply must let things go. We must open the hands that grip this veil of an existence. I had another life. It is gone. Relationships are permanently altered. I buried Kate, and my wife’s family buried two family members. More dying is coming. It seems like an end - a permanent end - or worse, a cycle of ending. It truly looks and feels like we will never again know them or hold them. This seems rational. In our own time, things change beyond recognition, faster and faster, but dying remains. Dying seems to be constant and without end or purpose but hear me:
Love isn’t rational.
Love speaks life.
Love cloaks itself as mercy to break cycles.
So as I, a landscape painter, looked into a scene that had seen abandonment, violence, death, falling, freezing, and the sinking experience of being never seen, never known, I subconsciously made a tiny choice.
Do I paint a pretty picture for myself, bouying me for a short time and just leave it at that, satisfying a small part of a small life, or
do I look into loss that spans human history - what appears to be a conveyor belt of death - and melt into oblivion, sink into the idea that we are just biochemical entities responding to biochemical stimuli and all is for naught? Will I subtly buy into the idea that we are cosmic burps, or
will I see all of this before me - this decay - as being held and walk towards it, even though it seems senseless? Will I step forward out of my little life believing that we are more, our passions are more, the Earth is more, the Cosmos is more? Will I believe the voice that whispers of our lineage and tells us that dying is not the end?
This scene presented me with that choice. “Is this Life? Do we just live and die? Am I any different from this tree, from the cows that made the path, from the path, cold and snow-covered, from the black birds that dart between limbs, or from the leaves?”
A CHOICE TO BELIEVE
My thoughts swirl from age to age. My mind’s eye sees the forgotten poems, love letters, and grand overtures of civilization alongside the earthy, traced and blown glyphs of the never-known, each one a message to the future. I see fires in the night and fearful screams as men make war with whatever is at their disposal. I see humanity building again and again over graves and ash. I see a maw that cannot be closed or satisfied, a stone grinding wheel that slowly turns round and round, pulverizing humanity into cosmic dust. Fallen trees. Dragon bones. Fighting. Smoke. Loss. Will.
We stand at graves and toss flowers, gather at makeshift memorials and light candles, usually blaming a person or a system, as the urge to blame feels like a shout against power, a finger pointed in righteousness. Blame feels like love sometimes. But it isn’t. Love is hard to feel when we sense injustice. Still, we feel like something must be done, and not being accustomed to real action, we … blame. Strange we should feel this if we are just cosmic burps without meaning or purpose outside of ourselves. If we are…
Blame through anger. Pity, mercy, and love through tears.
To look into all of this, into the never-ending grinding wheel of life, into Death itself, and decide to walk towards it is not rational and demonstrates unparalleled freedom. Love looks at the impossible and believes something else. Foolish? Not to me. Stories carry great power, and there is no story greater than the one that whispers, “There is more. Listen. Keep going.”
I look out into the same apparent randomness as anyone else does, but the difference is that I recall a voice that once asked,
“Can these bones live?”
I hear the same voice say, “Talitha kum!”
All of these thoughts bubbled up from a walk in the woods.
