Letting Go

I haven't written for a year. 

I had planned a huge writing project surrounding my reading about the metaphysical. But I resisted and resisted writing. 

It's difficult to engage and to process. It's easier (for me) to simply act. For me action is literally physical. I run. I work in the garden. I fold laundry and unload the dishwasher. I listen to books as I work and then list what I've read to chart the reading I've accumulated. I add to my daylily database. I take pictures of my garden to prove to myself that I am productive. I shovel manure at the animal sanctuary and think to myself, "I have done something."

I think about learning to meditate, but don't.

I think about doing yoga, but don't.

I think about writing, but don't. 

Today is the day that changes. Today I begin. Last night I was in crisis, but now I can see a glimmer --a rising sun on the very tip of the horizon. This sun needs to be coaxed to fully rise, and I need to be the power, the force, the life that enables it to rise. It is not the light of the world--but the light I need to cast onto my child, who needs me, and whom I haven't yet successfully helped.

A couple weeks after Jack died I listened to Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander. I’m not sure how I found the book, although I think I might have been searching Audible for books on death and dying and it came up on the feed. Alexander, the author, is a neurosurgeon who, after experiencing near death when he succumbed to acute bacterial meningoencephalitis, emerged from a coma “knowing” what happens when one dies. 

That Alexander was trained as a neurosurgeon and was not a believer in God or an afterlife prior to his experience appealed to me. His epiphany derived from a direct experience: he believed one thing, then “died,” and now believed something else. No one knows what happens when we die--we are all alive, and hence cannot know. But if anyone might have a good idea, it seemed to me to be a person who was extremely well-educated in terms of the brain, the home of consciousness, and who also came so close to dying that for a period of time he was, in fact, declared to be dead. 

Alexander’s central premise is that when we die our consciousness does not. In fact, our consciousness travels, for lack of better descriptors, to Heaven. 

Alexander summarizes his near death experience here. (It’s not a long summary.) 

Could it be true that consciousness ultimately exists outside of the brain and outlives the material body? The possibility thrilled(s) me; I felt an incredible joy and peace when I allowed myself to truly entertain it. 

Red flags did fly up. The book is tidy and crafted--packaged for an eager and hopeful audience, and ultimately it made Alexander buckets of money. For this reason I did some research, reasoning the book must have been debunked somewhere, and I was right. The book has many detractors, but I found most impressive an article written by Luke Dittrich in 2013 and published in Esquire. This article takes down Alexander (his person as much as his account) step by painful step, unraveling the beautiful tapestry woven together in Alexander’s autobiographical account. The article was as well-crafted and tidy as Alexander’s book; its structure even mirrors the structure Alexander used to appeal to its audience.

Still, the Esquire article didn’t prevent me from finding the book enlightening. I had been talking to Jack in my thoughts, asking him whether any of Alexander’s experience was true, and when I did talk to Jack, I became flooded with positive thoughts--a warmth and a knowing that freed me from the constant, nagging anxiety about my own mortality that I had been experiencing. It was a great feeling to be freed, and I did not want to let it go. 

I wondered, is this what faith is like? Is this what those with faith feel--why they cling so hopefully and with such dedication to their religion of choice? If so, I now understood why. What a relief to not feel that with every second I’m advancing toward annihilation, that in fact, the time my consciousness has to live and grow is maybe…. infinite! 

Holding this type of faith, I could now see, would free me from my constant anxiety that I wasn’t doing enough to maximize the small amount of time my consciousness has on this planet. The sense that I have failed to do anything of memorable import in my life became less tragic. Who cares? If my consciousness lives on, I don’t have to leave footprints on this earth. I don’t have to be so memorable that the world does not forget I lived, if, in actuality, this life is but a mere blip on the timeline of my existence.

And so, this is where my reading journey began. Maybe Alexander’s experience can be burnt to the ground with a little investigative work on Dittrich’s part. But does that mean that Alexander didn’t experience anything at all? I find a more likely scenario that he woke from that coma knowing something--and knowing he wanted to share what he knew. Certainly his becoming so profoundly ill wasn’t premeditated, and his curiousity about near death experience following his own near death experience makes complete sense. It also makes sense that he wanted to package his experience in a way that his telling of it would make an impact and reach the common public. I don’t blame or shame him for this, but it means that his book cannot become a Bible of sorts, if you know what I mean. (Or maybe that’s exactly what it is...)

Here’s what I did in response to reading Alexander’s book:I read more.

And more.

And more.

I also continued to talk with Jack.

My next entries will continue with what I learned.

Get Back JoJo

     The title of this blog is Get Back JoJo. It's taken from the Beatles song "Get Back." The Beatles were the first rock group I loved. I discovered them in fourth grade after learning about the murder of John Lennon. I remember being at the Maine Mall with my good friend, Yvetta. There was a huge display of all things John Lennon erected in response to his death and in honor of his life. I asked my parents about it, and my father, who owned a turntable and three Beatles albums--Sergeant Pepper's, Abbey Road and Let it Be--introduced me to them. 

    These were not the only albums I listened to as a kid. I also loved Vivaldi's Four Seasons and a narrated version of Prokoviev's Peter and the Wolf. It would be a few more years before my older sister began bringing other rock albums into the house and I was exposed to the current early 80's music--most memorably the J Giles Band, Loverboy, Reo Speedwagon, Air Supply and Billy Joel. BJ became my next rock love, but for many years the Beatles were the only rock band I knew well, and I memorized every line from every song on those three albums until they became imprinted on my soul.

    I don't know to whom McCartney is referring when he sings get back JoJo, although some believe it is a reference to Yoko Ono, and Paul's annoyance at her ever-presence. I use the line because for me it's always conjured nostalgia--for my past, for things I loved or lost or have forgotten, and it's also a call to return to myself--the passionate self that, among other things, listened obsessively to those three albums at the age of ten and committed them to the bank of who I was and would become. Writing about my interests, both current and the ones I wish to retrieve from the past, is one of those lost and forgotten things, and so it's a "getting back." 

    For a long time I kept a blog on my triathlon training. After that I kept a blog on my gardening, although it never took off because I found it hard to write about a subject I suspected few people cared about other than in sweeping terms: gardens are pretty--gardens are peaceful. Writing about which daylily cultivars were hardy in zone 6, however, seemed to hold less interest among most of my peers. 

    My intention with this blog is to write about whatever I feel like on a given day--whether that is training, gardening, reading or any other random interest. Not confining it to one subject will, I hope, free me up to write on most days, which is the goal.

    One new interest may take center stage for a bit. My father-in-law, Jack, passed away on May 20th of this year. Since then I have been on a reading binge involving anything metaphysical. The list of books I've read since his death is posted to the right of this blog. It ranges from New Age classics like The Seth Materials, to total pop New Age (The Happy Medium) to totally out-there New Age (Dolores Cannon) to the academic (Great Minds of Western Philosophy) to canonical works like Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul. All of this reading shares a common focus on trying to understand and find meaning in life and death. Some books are laughably easy to dismiss, some not so much--and interestingly, to me, those books I found resonated mostly deeply were often not the ones deemed most worthy of consideration by intellectually elite standards.

    Jack lived with us for five years prior to his death, and during that time I got to know him very well. I also spent all of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 watching his decline--slowly, but most assuredly, dying. This caused me to contemplate mortality more than one normally might at the age of fifty, while raising teenaged children and going about the business of mid-life. In fact, I would say I became downright obsessed with death--contemplating and fearing my own death--but also trying to establish how to come to terms with death in a way that allowed me to truly live while I am actually living. The question became, What is it to truly live? and also What do I believe about dying that will enable me to truly live? I couldn't simply push dying from my mind; it sat next to me at the dinner table, staring at me, as Jack did for the final months of his life, reminding me of its inevitability and demanding I recognize it and find a place for it in my thinking. I could not repress its inevitablity because it was so ever present in its reminder. 

    After Jack died I began this reading spree, and also decided to partake of some of what I read. I met with a Jungian therapist for many months, I had a reading with several different mediums, I met with a practitioner of past life regression, I spoke with a psychic who "read my colors," I began recording my dreams in a dream journal, I met with a woman trained by Micheal Newton who attempted to perform hypnosis on me, and I took an online class to learn how to read Tarot cards. My approach was to include anything about which I was curious and not to eliminate anything out of fear I would appear gullible or unintelligent. I tried very hard to keep an open mind to every possibility, both when meeting or speaking with people and also when reading. My hope was that by doing all of this I would come to a place of peace about my purpose in life and also my death.

    For the next few months I plan to write about my reading and my experiences with this subject matter so I can both process it myself, and also so you might become engaged and talk with me about your ideas. I hope it will be a fun and engaging task to re-experience my reading and my dips into the "psychic" realm and relate them to you. 

Also, here is a photo of daylily blooming in my garden today. It's called Midnight at Tiffany's. :)