Alone, and Yet...

Alone, and Yet...

   There's something about being alone, although in this case, I was alone in a different sense since I was with company. Out in a remote area (but in a house, complete with all the amenities), it was a refreshing change, as if camping in luxury.  Okay, it's not the wild adventure of Dame Ellen MacArthur who sailed solo around the world (her fascinating TED talk is well worth watching...truly, your jaw will drop as she runs into rough waters, waves breaking over her mast, the waters icy cold, and the closest help available --and she's not joking-- is the International Space Station), but as someone who is somewhat used to routine, that is, checking emails and such (even watching TED talks), this was a nice break.  For out here (we were in a somewhat sparse part of Wyoming, the picture a bit hazy from nearby forest fires but you get the idea), what we did, morning, noon and night, was talk.

   It's a lost art of sorts, that of talking, and of course much depends on the crowd you are with, whether meeting in a cafe or out together on a four-day getaway.  Will you all get along?  Of course couples ask this all the time, especially if going on a vacation with another couple.  Now throw in yet another couple, and another, and you begin to see that the ruffles might appear.  Does everyone eat the same, have the same views, have the same likes and dislikes...hot or cold, loud or soft, jazz or rap, dogs or no dogs? Not that sameness is what you're after, but more of a commonality...

   Getting away also gives one a time to do things one wouldn't usually do, from quiet time in the morning to making do with what food and conveniences are around you.  But in this case, most of our nights --with no television and no Internet-- were spent talking.  Politics, the fires burning in the nearby states of Idaho and California,, the beautiful scenery in this part of Wyoming despite the hazy and smoky air (from the fires), family backgrounds, how everyone originally met, health, and of course, growing older (one couple was just a week away from celebrating their 50th anniversary and his 79th birthday.  Knock wood, he said, he had never had a surgery (other than having his tonsils out as a child) and was still more or less fit as a fiddle (he joined us on may of our hikes and downed as much wine as any of us).  It was refreshing to say the least.  But inevitably, the subject emerged of living, and of life, and of life's end.  What, if anything, was next?

   In her new book, After This, grief counselor, Claire Bidwell Smith, writes that many psychics and mediums seem to narrow their clients' questions down to two common ones: 1) asking if their loved ones are okay, and 2) that they miss them and they loved them.  But the bigger question is where do they (the deceased) go?  And how do they (the mediums) communicate with them?  In an interview with the author, one medium, the now famous (and expensive) John Edwards, said, "Where is the Internet?  It exists, right?  We use it every day.  But we can't see it.  We can't put our arms around it. This is just one plane of a multidimensional universe...our sense of time, of space, it's different.  Where they are, those things don't matter."

   One can somewhat visualize that vague concept when thinking of our sensors and satellites, their measured spectrums unimaginable to us, from infrared to thermal to atomic, sensors measuring gamma rays and other invisible particles, unimaginable temperatures and conceptualized visions. They all exist, but do they?  The instruments (the mediums) say they do...but then, all we have is their word for it, don't we?

   The well-known Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, after writing her book On Death and Dying, wondered in her later life about near death experiences says Bidwell Smith, undergoing her own near-death experience through medical therapy, and having an out of body experience from it.  In her view, physical life here on earth is similar to a school, "...where we are tested, where we are put through the tumbler.  And it is our choice, and no one else's choice, whether we come out of the tumbler crushed or polished...you do not need  to go to India, you do not need LSD or mescaline or psilocybin in order to change your life.  You do not need to do anything except be responsible for your choices."

   This discussion of what we know or didn't know reminded me of an earlier piece I had read about vitamin A and how a deficiency of such can cause night blindness...and the result is not pretty.  Here's how Catherine Price describes it in her excellent read (really), Vitamania: At first, night blindness will only occur after a few days spent in bright sunlight.  Then it will occur after sundown every day, regardless of how overcast the weather is.  Left untreated, it will eventually be accompanied by dry eye, a condition in which the eyes can't produce enough of the lubricating mucus that protects them and keeps them moist;  as a result, the eye's surface becomes keratinized, like skin.  With no mucus, and with these skin like cells on the surface, the cornea --which is the transparent coating of the front of the eye-- becomes rough and dry, and develops worn spots called corneal ulcers.  If still not treated, these ulcers can penetrate the eye, causing a hole through which the inside of the eye leaks out.  Or, even more severely, the cornea may melt away entirely, destroying the eye and causing permanent blindness.  This final stage can take less than a day.

   What I found fascinating about all of this was that our body stores vitamin A for close to a year, gradually using it up until it runs out, exemplified by the pigment in our eyes called rhodospin.  A bright flash from a camera and the few seconds it takes your eyes to lose the white haze in front of your eye and return to normal color...that's a chunk of your vitamin A reserves being used to replenish the pigment and the mucosa linings around our organs.  A person with a shortage of vitamin A can have it replenished within a few days.  In her book, author Price cites a saying by Thomas Moore: It may be an inspiring thought...that Man's knowledge of the existence of the stars and the vast universe which appears in the heavens each night, comes in the first place from the stimulation by the light rays of delicately poised molecules of vitamin A.

   And so it may be the same case with what other things, other spectrums, other wavelengths or other dimensions, things that we cannot yet see.  Perhaps, unlike with mediums and psychics, the rest of us are simply lacking a small something, a deficiency of a tiny thing or element or viewpoint that would allow us to cure our "blindness."  Perhaps, as with the late discovery of vitamins, this is something we will discover in later years; and, as with the discovery of the importance of vitamins (remember, for the most part, vitamins were only accepted in the general science world in 1920), we will discover the importance of something equally valuable...that of seeing beyond this life, beyond our humanity, beyond the universe, and finding our connection with everything, including time.