The Black Stone

I just read something very useful, something that was just what I needed. I don't feel better, per se, though I feel a little better. I feel at least like I'm on the cusp of feeling better, that I can see what feeling better looks like. And actually, in this case, feeling better means embracing the fact that I don't feel better.

Yeah yeah, I know. Hocus pocus. Voodoo magic and maharishi donganonda propaganda. Really, though.

Lately—and I can't escape this, can't escape writing it down and talking about it—I have been afraid of death. It is hard to describe the level of fear. It is at the same time large and consuming, and also specific and acute. It's a sense of doom. If I sit quietly at night and think about death—which I do—a sense of doom washes over me and I feel petrified, terrified, it makes me cry in a useless way, as if I were crying because the sky is blue or because there is oxygen in the air. There isn't any fear larger than the fear of death because that's the end, and there's no escaping it. That's what is the hardest for me. In life we can fight and claw to get what we want. In life we always have options, we always have the ability to change our lives. No matter how hard I fight and claw and scrape and say No death will come along one day and say quietly, Yes.

I don't feel better. In fact, I feel like every night I open up this box. It's made of paper and it's small, and the only thing keeping it from bursting open is a small toothpick weakly barring it closed. It's not fooling anyone, least of all me. That box can't stay closed too long, and it can be punctured and maimed and it must be treated with the utmost care for it to stay Useful. So the last few nights I've been finding this box which, did I mention?, is conveniently tucked away under many other boxes, much bigger than our little paper box, hidden in the corner under piles of papers and socks and dirty sheets, and all of this is in the very last room on the right that I never visit anyway, tucked away in the last house on the lot of my mind.

You could say this box is Hidden.

Lately though, I've been making the trek to that last house, to that last room, and taking the time to throw off all the trash until I've uncovered my little paper box, and then slowly sliding the toothpick through the paper wedges at the top, and looking inside. It is scary to open the box. I am afraid some black shadowy hand will reach out and grab my face and blind me. Or that I'll be sucked inside by a supernatural vortex and never make it out again. But it does something scarier than that. It does nothing. It just sits there, open, letting me look, and I know that I will have to cover this box again and put it away and know that it still sits there for me, patiently, waiting to be uncovered again.

What is inside the box is a small hard stone. Black, matte. There is no reflection in this stone. You look into it and nothing stares back at you. There is just you looking in, it absorbing the light around it, its blackness weighing heavy in the box, and you left wondering what it means. And looking at it, trying to figure it out—I am made mad.

This morning I woke up and rolled over and picked up a book, Awakening Loving-Kindness by Pema Chödrön (which E.M. gave me for Valentine's Day [thank you, E.M.]), and began reading. I used to read it every day but I hadn't in a while because—of course, hey, it's obvious—I have a handle on my life. Who needs lessons?

But this day I needed a lesson and I must admit it was serendipity. Because it talked about Death, the ultimate terrifying thing that trumps any and all other fears. In the last chapter it talked about being Safe. How we're always trying to do things to maximize safety and comfort. Which I do. Which everyone does, because why wouldn't we? Chödrön said that we can spend all our lives trying to cultivate these zones of safety that are always falling down until we're at the end of our lives and realize what a mistake we've made.

Or, she said, we can leap. We can let all these zones of safety shake down into dust and let ourselves be open to whatever may happen without withdrawing into ourselves and seeking safety. "That's what stirs us and inspires us:" she said, "leaping, being thrown out of the nest, going through the initiation rites, growing up, stepping into something that's uncertain and unknown. From that point of view, death becomes this comfort and this security and this cocoon and this vitamin pill-ness. That's death. Samsara is preferring death to life" (188).

I'm not ending this post with hope because that feels cheap. And I'm not ending it with a revelation because, damn it, this process isn't something you instill in your life immediately after reading a chapter in a book one fine morning. All I will say is that what Chödrön says sounds pretty damn good and I would like to get to that place.

I still have to contend with my black stone. I think I will try relocating it, giving it a better home. In fact, I will give it a home in my pocket. And, better, I'll remove it from its paper house and hold it in my hand, black and smooth and earthy, and let the chalk rub off on my fingers so I don't forget what it is I'm trying to do.