The Question

The Question

Psalm 8:4: “What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?”

She wondered about that. “Yeah, what?” What, why, who…? All of the existential questions about meaning, asked, as the Psalmist did, under the stars in the Dark Sky desert. Thinking about the death of her child. Why? A useless and unserving question since there is no answer. But it must be asked. It seems impossible that it could not be asked, even though asking will never bring comfort. Who are You? What am I? Why am I? The heavens remained silent. Her fists were clenched, her tears flowing, and she hurled her anguish and rage at, nothing.

Hoist the pack. Settle the weight on the shoulders. Cinch the waist strap. It’s heavy. Nearly half her weight. Despite reading many articles on “going light” she hadn’t managed it. They say that people pack their fears. “Probably true, among other things”, she mutters. She begins walking again. Each soft rustle, and each step, the crunching gravel, thunderous in the dark and silence. The rhythm suspends the world, and she sinks away into her thoughts.

“Who gives a shit? No answer will heal this sorrow. Caring hurts so much and I cannot not care. I have joy. I see beauty. There is light. And I live in them alongside this immense dark hole, or perhaps vice-a-versa. Is this a trial? A trial of what? I refuse to prove anything to the face of silence.”

A classic type A, every problem is a test to overcome, or so she'd always thought. “This cannot, can never be overcome, not ever. Perhaps I’m headed the wrong way, and I must turn around. If you are lost, you are supposed to sit still, where you are. It’s hard to find a moving target even if it’s only you searching for yourself. But where is here? Is this chaos not the thing to be tamed, structured, organized into the limits of human perception. Perhaps, this annihilation, this loss of who I have thought I am, is the healing.“ Perhaps... That is the sticking point. As soon as she searches for that answer, the ‘perhaps’, it all falls apart, again. And again.

She has never asked why she should be happy, or satisfied, when things moved in the direction she set and accomplishments were called out before they occurred so that intention was clear. Tenaciousness won the day. Beat back, beat down the roadblocks human or otherwise! But now? This wall demands a different attention. This mountain will not be removed by any strength of will, or plan, or machinery. This falling into un-solution, this place between the certainties, this home beyond her will, seems the only move left.

She remembers, from somewhere, probably during another midnight sojourn only with teenage friends, sneaking out, and sharing a joint under these same sidereal constellations, feeling a universe so big that of course one could never know certainty. Somehow, that lonely wonder in the mystery of place which could not be explained felt whole and, weirdly, safe. Where had she left that childish perception for a more “mature” control?

She opens her fingers, takes a breath, and chooses to let go of her beliefs. They float off like a child’s balloon. She doesn’t cry after them, though there is fear in letting loose what was once held with a kind of certainty. “Goodbye”.

She takes a breath. Shuts her eyes. And begins to sob with heaving locomotive thrusts. She weeps for her love, lost and gone. She weeps for all she had ever held as her lodestar. She weeps for lost tomorrows. For the rightness of an ordered world gone in a holocaust, now only ashes. And again, another, shuddering but deep, inhalation. She eases off her pack. A deliberate undertaking. First the hip belt, then the right shoulder strap, then the left, and swung it down and set it on the ground.

On her knees, still with tears, she lifts her hands to, to what? She doesn’t know. And she spreads her fingers wide, her arms out, let go, let go of any hope she had ever held. The stars stood as they had always been, at least within the context of human experience. The desert offered no words of consolation. She curled up and slept in absolute hopelessness and an exhausted despair.

She awoke, still in the deep night. Somewhere she had lost her pack, filled with sustenance, warmth, and security. But she did not feel insecure. For the first time since she was a child she felt gravity falling away. Nothing was recognizable though all was familiar. Nothing could be known, or was it known as no thing?

Here was something. Not something to be grasped and held, but to release the unholdable. To not answer the unanswerable and she wondered how she could have ever thought there would be healing in hope. She was lonely. Tired. Wrung out. Afraid. Uncertain. Hurting. Joyful, Amazed. At peace. These were always the path of life. These were not sidetracks to be blocked off on the way to the real task. These are the path, the task. She knew that she could never move beyond their bounds, back into the past, or into the nonexistent future. “This doesn’t need to be fixed, or explained, or bargained with, submitted to, or obeyed. It just needs to be lived.”

She went back to the Psalm. She thought about the questions asked. Breathing deeply, slowly, she let the questions float away. “I don’t know”, she said out loud. “This universe is beyond my ability to stuff into the pocket of my experience.“

There was no place to hide, no shelter from the inner storm. The fear was there. Tears of sorrow still fell. Joy in the beauty of this world brought different tears. It was all very curious for she felt sheltered. The blows still fell but she could let them fall. It was as though another carried her in protective arms and took the sting from them upon itself. She couldn’t explain it and that was her freedom.

Everything was beyond her ability to comprehend fully. Mystery created sacrament, expressing it all in numinous transcendence. “I am the absurd paradox of the blind seeing, the lame leaping, those finding strength in weakness, the things which are not but which are made to be as though they are. I do not need to seek them.” And again, she took a deep slow breath. Let it out with her eyes closed, smelling the sage, feeling the stones, spreading her fingers and lifting her hands, and she let herself go.

This would not be the last time she would need to recenter. It was everyday. She met her adult with her childish wonder at work, in the grocery store, on the weekend runs, or even while holding her children. She opened her hands, spread her fingers, and let that adult go off with a gentle push.

Just then, the sun began to rise. She faced it with uncertainty and joy, with fear and with courage. And without the pack, she began to run.