Flowering 

My cousin and lifelong friend Ron Christiansen (Counterintuitive), the core of the blogger community that we started years ago when blogging was still a thing, along with my nephew, the son of HH, another member of our blogger community, have, as they say, gone home. It’s been a summer of grief, to say the least. Along with my nephew, Ron was one one of the few people with whom I could share uncensored my interests in revolutionary theory, art, philosophy, spirituality and so on—the types of subject matters I used to write about on this blog. I offered tribute and shared some of the conversations I liked to have with my nephew on Facebook, and I would like now, on this platform, with the community he was the heart and soul of, to respond in my way to the eulogies that were given at Ron’s memorial and (by way of responding to his son Seth’s challenge) share not only what my cousin’s friendship has meant to me but moreso how his ongoing presence continues to shape my thoughts and actions.

Like many others, I enjoyed talking with Ron because Ron always took a sincere interest in what others have to say. So long as there was a measure of sincerity in your expression, Ron listened, really listened, and then responded with his own heartfelt sincerity. And the conversation deepened. In the past couple years, as his illness worsened, so too did the frequency and quality of our discussions, but even so my appreciation for his friendship continued to deepen, and it deepens now even further with the news of his passing. It wasn’t until I received news of his death, while wrestling with his absence, that I began to understand just how much his friendship, the most long-lasting of my life, means to me, what a treasure it is, a treasure so rich that I think it might survive his death and maybe mine as well, rich enough to lead into ever deeper and more sincere forms of conversation or communion in the future. Ron loved to go hiking, another of the many passions we shared, and so I thought it fitting to honor his memory by taking a hike and then writing about it, continuing our journey in friendship beyond the grave, in other words, and hopefully doing some necessary healing along the way. 

Something I have observed on previous hikes, which came back to me with increased gravity as I hiked in Ron’s honor, is how entangled life and death appear in the forest, as compared, say, to the city, where the dead are sheltered away, hidden underground in cemeteries or disappeared in waste treatment centers or disguised by marketing ploys and packaging or concealed by an exterminator’s traps. In the forest, the dead trees mingle with the living ones, stand side by side, feed on each other—relate and communicate. Where the dead bodies end and the living ones begin isn’t easy to tell. Is the dead soil not part of the living plant? The living mushrooms seem to not only owe their existence to the dead treestumps they grow out of but the bodies of both actively join with one another, become assemblages of living and dead matter. In the forest, It’s clear, as thinker Bayo Akomolafe says, that life and death are not enemies or opposites at all; rather, death is what life does. Death is the doing of life.

 If you spend any time in the forest, or if you’ve spent time with your own aging body, you understand that this process of life doing death involves a very pronounced and unstoppable softening. Modernity may encourage us to perform solidity, but the flux and flow beneath it always slips through the cracks, as inevitably as reality. So while I hiked yesterday, I tried to pay attention to the softening of things, to the way things become more not less expressive as they near death, as they loosen their performed solidity in what a shallow mind might interpret as failure or weakness—in their softening, I mean. In their fragility—when even the smallest breath will scatter a plant's seeds into motion and its essence is most easily received and experienced, when the soft crumbled wood of the pine tree and the moistened ground soil are impossible to distinguish, when the dead are metabolized within the bodies of the living—it is in losing themselves that their essences are best expressed and understood. In death and dying, things become more perfect speakers and listeners. In a star’s failure, it shines brighter than it ever has and communicates itself across the galaxies to become the seeds of every human and every other life form ever borne—its failure is its message.

Had someone asked me at the beginning of the summer about my longest lasting friendships, I would not have considered my friendship with Ron. I thought of him as my beloved cousin, less than as a friend. But in my grief, Ron spoke to me of our friendship, and, through my continuing grief, he continues to speak to me. As he did with this blog, he has sent to me yet another invitation for conversation. I have, it seems, been asked to take a journey. Life, Ron is telling me, is not what I thought it was. I am not who I thought I was. Grief, he is telling me, is not something to be solved or psychiatrized away—it’s to be lived through and more and more deeply experienced, even surrendered to. Grief invites us to undo ourselves.

When I started this blog, I don’t remember what I had in mind with the title (Myself Undone), but now I see it as a reflection of the journey of life, of the dying that life does. But if dying is what life does, then it stands to reason that life too is what death does. Death doesn’t resist or attack life; it gives birth to it. Death is a prerequisite for the new, a Spring of new tidings, a flowering. 

I’ve been reading a lot from the early Christian and Sufi mystics lately, but I haven’t forgotten my old Zen Buddhist practice, either. After both my nephew’s and my cousin’s deaths, I went back to meditation. And in both instances, I had what I would describe as a spiritual breakthrough. It started out with a day of extreme heaviness, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t push it off me. It was too thick, too solid. And so, as the heaviness deepened, what else could I do? I quit trying to get away from it. I softened, that is. I melted down my resistance and let it all in, let the grief take hold of me, and I followed it into the darkness, let it take me right down to the bottom where there was nothing but black temperatureless, odorless nothing. And that’s when both of them came back to me, as real as if our bodies were side by side. Not as image or ghostly visitation, but as presence. And I knew what I had to do. I had to bless them. If old age has taught me anything, it’s taught me that everything that exists has two qualities: everything is broken, and everything is holy. And so I offered both my nephew and my cousin my blessings and my thanks for the blessings they have given me. And I broke down in joyful tears.

There is a continuity in the discontinued, light in the dark, life that is inextricably part of death. This isn’t supernatural thinking; it’s factual. Watch a flower dying, the softening that takes over, and tell me if you don’t see just another form of blossom. Isn’t that what Autumn is? Another kind of blossoming? In the Buddhist tradition, one often speaks of the spiritual life as a process of ‘dying before you die,’ which I believe is what grief is calling us to do. Perhaps something similar is referenced in the Sufi Path of Light, which culminates in witnessing the flash of the Black Light, or the Midnight Sun, a luminous blackness wherein all lights and colors are swallowed into the bewilderment of the divine essence. Beyond the light of existence is the Black light of non-existence, the essence and ground of the former. “At the furthest edge of mystical experience,” the teachings tell us, “light and darkness merge into something that transcends both.” In Tibetan Buddhism, it’s known as the “clear light of the void,” or, in the Christian tradition, Dionysius the Areopagite calls it the “dazzling darkness.” Others have described it as the blindness that comes from proximity to the divine sun. 

To me, the implications are clear. Ron isn’t asking me to look away. The spiritual life is asking us to move not away but toward death, in whatever direction that takes us. Death is what life does. Our grief is an invitation. It’s telling us that it’s time to leave home. Take a journey. Get lost. Join with the others who are lost. Delve into the unsettled ground, fall into the black hole where being and essence give way, where nothing has been settled, where everything is undone, and all that exists is pure possibility. In Whitehead’s process cosmology, God is depicted as pure unpolluted potentiality who, in his desire to know Himself, creates all the possibilities that have been and are yet to come. So be like God, grief tells us, and let go of yourself. Become undone. Out of the complete obliteration of everything comes Grief’s promise, that out of the black hole of the death of everything, something new will emerge, a possibility that could not have emerged in the world of existence and history as we know it, but a new possibility altogether, waking up between that realm of the impossible now and the new possible of the future.

Initially, when I began writing this blog entry, I titled it Final Blog, thinking that one last blog might be a good way to honor the relationship I had with my friend and cousin. I thought I’d say goodbye, in other words. After all, I haven’t written an entry in years anyway, so why not bring some closure to things by saying adios to the person most responsible for what I’ve written here? But now I think I’ll go an entirely different direction. Rather than end the blog here, I think I’ll start it up again. I might just be writing into the void (or, better-put perhaps, the Black Light or the Dazzling Darkness), or maybe I’ll find new readers and a new community, but whatever the case, it’s due to Ron’s continuing presence in my life that I’ve decided to keep this blog going, either here on Blogger or elsewhere.

After Ron’s memorial, I had a dream. He spoke to me again, I believe, but in the language of dream and metaphor that we perhaps still share. In my dream he told me that in his later life he felt as if he had become a slave, and that, as a slave, he had been made to trod the same path everyday and each day the path became more trodden, more fixed and familiar, and all he wished to do was get off that path and put an end to his enslavement, his mental illness. This isn’t far from the way he described his depression to me in the last weeks of his life, how the anhedonia had made it impossible to take pleasure from any action or intention or to feel as if anything new or better were on the horizon, how it had taken over his life. But then, in the dream, he expressed to me a need to end his enslavement by whatever means possible, and so he did. As a result, my blogger friends and I, in an effort to better understand what had happened to him, decided to revisit the path that he had taken, to learn something about his suffering so that we might make better sense of how he felt in those final years and to better understand why he ended his life the way he did. Once we arrived at the beginning of the path, at the trailhead, we were met by his family and others who had similar intentions. The path, however, was no longer walkable. Now that it was no longer in use, seeds had sprung from the untrodden soil and the entire pathway was overgrown with flowers.