Day 7

Who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscovered country from whose bournNo traveler returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?

William Shakespeare

My boss’s candle died last night. I presided over its death. He gave it to me for Christmas and it has burned almost every night since, lighting my evenings all the way from the first of January until now. It seems strangely fitting that it should die now, in this time away from time, as I begin to discover who I am in this world and as the world of the every day recedes to the place of insignificant curiosity. I have found no solution to my problem and yet it feels as though the hold work has on me is loosening. The ties are becoming worn and frayed, decaying through disuse. As the month progresses, no doubt fear will return and once again hold me strongly in its grip. But for right now, I allow those ties to wear and fray. I allow them to fall uselessly to the ground.

And yet I mourn the passing of this beautiful candle. It was a short but wide pillar, about 10cm in diameter and of really beautiful quality. I’ve never had such a large candle before. I usually use the inevitable tea lights for my burner and my Himalayan salt “lamp”. I also use standard table candles with my old-fashioned candle holder – the kind with a saucer and a ring to put your finger through. I love to carry that candle holder around in the dark and discover what night is when electric light, and the ability to pretend that it is always day, are taken away.

But those candles did not prepare me for the beauty of this one. It took me a little while to fully appreciate it, until I began to notice the deep, reflective puddle and murky depths revealed as the candle burned. I could stare and stare into those reflections, watching flame and reflection simultaneously, so that it became hard to determine what “real” meant. Which was the real flame? Which the reflection? What is fire? What is this thing that has no substance and yet exists so vibrantly and forcefully?

As it burned, it changed. A deep well slowly emerged and I enjoyed watching the orange glow flickering around the edges and hinting at a flame I could no longer see. The well was not even or predictable. It changed over time, charting new courses through the skeleton of the outer walls, creating tide marks and channels. Parts of the cavern walls remained solid, while others slowly disintegrated, carving out great holes in the smooth, silky exterior. Wax dripped not outside the candle, but inwards, down into the caldera. It did not entirely disintegrate, however, but formed rivulets of stalactites, like a still-motion waterfall. Large droplets formed and re-solidified at the “water’s” edge of the caldera, like so many small animals come to the waterhole at sunset to drink.

And the more the candle burned, the more unique it became. It started as a perfect cylinder, smoothed and shaped with such exactness that it was beautifully impersonal, like a mannequin made up to the point where it has become a mask, no longer distinguishable as a person. No doubt thousands upon thousands of other such candles exist, or existed, all of them, to the naked eye, identical. But I am willing to bet that not one of them looks the same as it burns. The conditions in which each is kept and the length of time it is allowed to burn at one go, no doubt influence each and every one differently. And the small intrinsic quirks, irrelevant to the eye, ensure that no two are the same.

As my candle burned, it revealed to me its soul. Over time it became more and more itself, a living work of art that could not be created by design. We created its journey together; I chose the timing, frequency and duration of its lighting, and it responded by carving itself more firmly into being.

Until finally, in recent days, after three months, the little metal disk that held the wick became visible in the molten puddle, glowing red in the reflected flame. And I knew its final days had arrived. Last night, when I lit it, it seemed to burn as usual for a little while. Then the flickering glow faded. I leapt up from my seat, thinking it had already gone out, but it hadn’t. Instead, the flame had become small and so I kept vigil. Tinier and tinier the flame became, and oh – so bravely persistent! I thought it would finally just fade out of existence. But no. This candle, to quote Dylan Thomas, would not go gentle into that good night, but would rage, rage against the dying of the light! At the point where I thought it was done, it flared suddenly into life again and the flame leapt higher than ever for some considerable time. I danced to my own internal drumbeats, then sat, meditating upon it, and still it burned. Gradually, the blue base of the flame became brighter and more beautiful, slowly creeping up and taking over yet more and more of the outer surface, until there was at least as much neon, cobalt blue as there was white. It was very beautiful.

I watched and watched until my eyes drooped with weariness. I knew that if I blew it out, it would not be worth the re-lighting, and anyway, that would seem like disrespect to this beautiful creature. Its swan song was this night, and I would be with it. I waited and waited, wanting it to reach its end naturally, but it would not. It sputtered and flared, bursting into life and dying back into a blue glow once again, before again rising in white hope. Finally, I knew I could not keep my eyes open any longer and I did not feel safe to let it burn unguarded, despite its imminent demise. I also did not want to be asleep when its time came. And so, lovingly and reverently, I took the initiative. I did not sit and passively watch any longer but made a choice. The life of this candle, and of my connection to work, was over. I reached over and gently blew it out.

And so I have been thinking about death. Not in any morbid way, but in a more cosmic, philosophical sense. It seems particularly important to me, somehow, that it was only through the process of burning, and thus of giving out its life and moving close and closer to death, that my candle was able to become itself. As long as it remained perfect and untouched, it remained an inanimate, mass-produced object. It was in the act of being consumed that it became alive, became real. Like the Velveteen rabbit.

And like Anita Moorjani. I have been reading her book, Dying to be me. Even though her story is very far removed from mine, I could not help but relate to the title and to feel the chill tingle down my spine. I needed – need – to know what she learned as Truth for herself. Wayne Dyer’s introduction warns that the reader might be challenged in their beliefs about the meaning of life, death and God. I almost stopped reading at that point, not because I was afraid to be challenged, but because the grandiose writing style annoyed me. Fortunately I waited and let Anita Moorjani speak for herself. Anyway, what I did not expect was to have my own beliefs, if they can be called such, not challenged, but affirmed. I am still sufficiently close to my atheistic roots to feel a high degree of scepticism toward things “supernatural”. If I believe, it is because I prefer the person I am when I do so. I prefer the life I live now. And if there truly is no purpose, no hereafter, and I have only one shot at this, then I choose to believe and to have the most beautiful and wonder-filled life I can. Besides, I do not believe in order to have hope for the future. I believe because I truly want the world to be alive with magic and with fairies. For me, all that can be conceived is real. And thus, from the time Gandalf and my ever-favourite Samwise Gamgee first walked onto the page of the Lord of the rings, they existed. They live within and as part of me, within and as part of the fabric of the universe. It is my small act of defiance against logic and reason to choose magic. It is my one weapon against the grey, plastic bureaucracy that creeps like Botox under my skin, paralysing the life it finds there. I believe, and thus, the world is alive and full of Fae. As Wolf Peach Wilds might say, I have told the universe into existence. So mote it be.

Even if I did not choose magic, I would choose to recognise the life within everything around me. I could not choose otherwise, any more than I could choose not to hear the insistent drumming of the universe deep within my bones and heart. My pantheism is not a choice but a natural description for what I perceive and see and know. This world, for me, is not dead, but fully alive in ways I cannot begin to comprehend. That is one reason I have never felt able to become a witch. I love the witches I know, but I cannot be one, because my mind cannot get past its objection to imposing intention onto other objects. The idea of “charging” objects, for example, fills me with dismay and gives me the shivers. I know it doesn’t mean to witches what it means in my mind, and indeed, the witches I know have a deeper and more reverent connection to the world around them than I will probably ever have. But since, for me, every object is filled with its own life and energy, its own purpose, and, if you like, intent, then I cannot imagine attempting to impose my will upon it.

Okay, yes, I am a hypocrite. Of course I am, or I would not be able to function in the world. I sit on my chair every morning without asking its permission. I sleep in my bed, walk across grass, eat my food, and function as though the world around me was essentially inanimate, a plaything for my benefit. I love, for example, the energy that comes from my beautiful, vintage chair and its even more ancient forest roots, and yet I treat it as simply an object. If I didn’t, I couldn’t live. So I put up shields and pretend that I am not imposing my will upon another. But I cannot seem to make myself want to learn the commonly agreed “values” or spiritual “purposes” of things, as though they can be learned by rote and easily understood. Even more strongly I cannot want to imbue them with my intention. I feel rather more like a co-conspirator. Everything, to me, has its own purpose, its own unique being and expression in life. It is not simply a representation of an homogenous group of like objects. A piece of Quartz, for me, is not simply Quartz, with recognised properties. Each piece has its own unique story and identity. When the “causes and conditions” are right, to follow the Buddhist idea, we collaborate. Sometimes intentionally and consciously, sometimes otherwise.

Think about it. Think of the times you find yourself spontaneously smiling at a stranger or pausing to pick up rubbish from the footpath. Or perhaps you automatically swerve to avoid squashing an ant. Who knows what larger purpose you may serve without ever knowing? For you, all that has passed is a brief moment of simply being “you”, with no thought to anything higher. But for all that, you may unwittingly have conspired with the universe to make something important happen. It is my preference, therefore, to greet each “object” and life form in my path with respect, as a completely independent entity whose path has crossed with mine. I greet it as an unknown stranger, choosing to make no more assumptions than I can help about its nature. In the process, we may learn something of each other. We may even become friends. And who knows? We may even work together.

Anita Moorjani appears to have had a somewhat similar discovery (minus all my fanciful imaginings). In her near death experience, she discovered a realm of complete non-judgement and love so deep and unconditional that it cannot be named in conventional terms. She discovered oneness and an intricate web of connection linking all life. All of it. The sceptic in me sees a similarity between her experience of expansiveness and Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience of operating almost entirely from her right brain hemisphere after her stroke (My stroke of insight). A near death experience is, of course, not an experience of actual, beyond-recovery death and it may well be that it is simply the brain’s random firing or neurons as it becomes starved of oxygen. That does not, of course, explain Moorjani’s ability to “see”, “hear” and “experience” conversations taking place well away from her physical body while she was in a coma (incidents later verified by the people she witnessed), nor does it explain her full, speedy and spontaneous remission from end-stage cancer. It does not explain how organs that had shut down came to function again. And even Jill Bolte Taylor, the scientist, seems to have emotionally imbued her own neurological experience with a deeper, spiritual significance, not only for herself but for the world. It would seem that even scientists might choose the world of magic, given a choice. In the case of Moorjani, whatever she experienced took her to a place of deep love and compassion and a sense of the intricate interconnectedness of everything.

Moorjani described her experience of God in the “other realm” as “not a being but a state of being” – a realisation of oneness and belonging to divinity, which encompasses all that is, both physical and not physical. For me, this leaves many questions about why there would be such a thing as a “purpose” to each individual’s life and a reason to “go back” to embodied existence (as Moorjani chose to do, believing that it was important). If God is a state of being, of which we are all a cherished part, regardless of our accomplishments in life, then who is creating our purpose? For what reason? Why would we choose an embodied existence when it is not necessary? Why is there a need for the cycle of birth and death? I tend to think of God as the universe, learning to know itself through the web of life – through the living experience of all that is, from the wind in the trees to the deepest vacuum of space among the singing stars. But how would this God have conscious intent – how could its individual components be externally given direction and purpose? All I can imagine is that every atom of life is both itself and yet part of something greater. In the same way that my body is the discrete unit of “me” but also a collection of vast universes of individual life forms, so everything must be itself and at the same time, whether consciously or not, part of a bigger body, and a bigger, and a bigger. And so we would each sit with the illusion of individual entity and awareness, while at the same time forming part of a higher consciousness – the “purpose” or “direction”. Leaving me once more with the infinitely unknowable, “Why?”

Annika Garratt, the beautiful Sea Priestess, has been talking about pantheism as well, answering viewer questions about how and where the personification of deity fits within a pantheistic construct. Essentially, using the example of Hinduism, she brought the question to the level at which we are all divine expressions of the greater whole. The Hindu gods are like great, archetypal people, dealing with the struggles, challenges, temptations and triumphs of existence within the great Brahman or ultimate divinity. Deity is the expression of divinity within the individual, a recognition that even as we are separate, we are One, part of the All That Is. And our struggles, our falls and risings, are the struggles, falls and risings of The Divine. Personified deity, within a pantheistic construct, is about knowing and embracing the paradox of separateness and unity, and embracing the divine, heroic and epic journey we each undertake as part of the evolution of Life.

“Each journey starts with a single step”, my beautiful Sacred rebel oracle card tells me. How I would love to believe that I was on an heroic quest as part of the unfolding of the story of the universe. And in a way, given what I choose to believe, I suppose that must be true. But if so, as I contemplate the zombie world I so long to escape and the dream world I so long to inhabit, I cannot decide whether my journey is more horror movie or slapstick comedy.