The Mystery
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.” — Bill Richards
It is January, 2006.
I am standing on the edge of a cliff, trying to get up the nerve to jump.
This is what I know for sure.
The wind is howling cold.
My heart is pumping so hard it makes my ears ring.
The ledge I am standing on is called The Saddle.
On the other side of the continent, in a different country, my firm is having a big partner’s meeting. I was supposed to attend. I just made partner, after decades of hard work. But instead I’m here, standing on the edge of this crevasse, stomping my skis, shaking my poles, trying to get up the nerve to go over the edge.
It is the biggest drop I have ever dared. My skis jut out over the edge of the cliff. No gradual entry. And once I go, there’s no turning back. It’s a narrow chute, steep and intimidating, with no bail-out option. It’s not for beginners.
It is a leap of faith.
The Wiggle Tail
I figure we all came from somewhere, and we’re all going to somewhere.
Duane Brownlow was dying, and he knew it. The bad cells were rising in his bloodstream like floodwaters. “I would like to live long enough to have grandkids who come running up and hug me around the neck,” he said to me, knowing he would have no such thing.
I see it all around the world. Every new life, when you think about it, comes from a death. Think about your own life. Once upon a time you were just a little wiggle tail sperm. And you were totally happy being a wiggle tail! You had all your wiggly friends, you were swimming around, life was great. You weren’t thinking, gee, I wonder what’s going to happen next, you were just living your life.
Then one day you get shot out of a cannon, boom, and you race along, and you find an egg, and you latch onto the egg. And your life as a wiggle tail ends, because you become something new, you latch onto the egg. And that’s like a death. That’s a death to a new life.
Duane Brownlow married his childhood sweetheart, the girl he had loved since he was 14 and she was 12. He had only a junior high school education, but grew up to be a successful contractor. He told me of his dreams to build his own entire town one day. It would be called Appletown, he said, but he said it wistfully, because he knew that he would never see Appletown. The clock was ticking down.
And then you’re a baby, and you’re hanging out in the womb, and you’re warm, and you’re safe, and you’re loved, and this feels like the whole world. And when it’s time to be born, and you’re getting pushed out, you don’t want to go. You’re kicking and screaming, it’s bright out there, it’s cold out there, and you’re thinking, I don’t want to go out there! I want to stay here, where I’m safe!
The left side of his face tilted to one side, like it had slid halfway to the next life, and snagged on the way. He walked with a cane because of nerve damage from a stroke, caused by a cataclysmic medical error. The same error had shut down his kidneys, so he needed dialysis three times a week. A medical mistake had nearly killed him. No. It had killed him. He just didn’t have a date for the death certificate yet.
And then you’re born. You’re born, and once again, it’s like a death. It’s like a death into a new life. You give up the life you had in the womb, and you come here, into all the world.
It was thirty years ago when Duane Brownlow told me this story. The grandchildren he never met are grown now, some married themselves. There’s been an entire life span without him. We only met one time, but thirty years later, I still remember every word of Duane’s story. It changes me still, every time I tell it.
Now, I figure, I’m like a baby. I’m kicking and screaming. I want to stay here, in the safety of this life, in this womb. I don’t want to go.
But then, I look up, into the stars, and all the universe, and we have no idea what is out there, we have no idea what happens next, but I think of all I once was, and what I might become, and I think,
Maybe I’m just a wiggle tail now.
In scientific terms, this is known as recapitulation theory, the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” that the development of an individual in a species replicates the evolution of that species as a whole.
But this is my favorite part: we don’t know what happens next. What happens after this life? What happens after this stage of humanity? We can only trace the story as far as we have lived it — to this point in our life, to this point in our evolution as a species. What comes next? It’s a mystery.
The Bus
When I meet Helen Runholt, my future mother-in-law, she is nearing the end of her life. She is nearly blind, moves with a walker, and is inching towards the dementia that will ruin her enjoyment of our wedding day. I will always be so grateful that Steve and I went out to the Black Hills that October, because I will always feel like I got to meet her before the dementia started to chew away at her vibrant, funny, sharp self.
When I enter her home for the first time, she takes me into her bedroom. In one corner is a flowered armchair settee, under a window overlooking the plains east of Rapid City. There is a picture of Jesus on one side, and a portrait of George W. Bush on the other. Beside the chair is a simple brown tray with one book on it. Helen sits down, nodding for me to stand behind her so I can see.
“This is my prayer book,” she says, her thick arthritic fingers thumbing carefully through the pages. It is big and overflowing like a baby book, stuffed with a mixture of pinned photographs, newspaper articles, church newsletters, and her own careful cursive, every word perfectly enunciated with a hand that had clearly been trying not to shake The book is filled with names of missionaries, friends, the daughter of her waitress from the Red Lobster last night, all people who had requested or she thought needed her prayers. Every morning she sits down with George and Jesus watching over her, and she runs her hands down the lines of the page like a rosary, saying the names out loud and offering them up in prayer.
As a devout Baptist, she would probably be shocked to realize that she is providing a perfect example of the Buddhist practice of tonglen, the origin of all good in the world: a willingness to breathe in the pain of others, and offer yourself forward in hope.
Helen had a good and peaceful death, a few years later. Youngest son finally married off, body and brain winding down, her work complete, she was ready to go, and she was absolutely confident that Jesus would come to get her. She was like someone waiting for an overdue bus, just impatient, “Why is Jesus taking so long?”
I was touched by her certainty. My own faith about what comes after was not so strong.
“Do you have that kind of faith?” I asked Mom, during the last year of her life.
“What kind of faith?” Mom asked.
“Like Helen’s. The kind of faith where you really believe something comes after,” I said. “The kind of faith that makes you not afraid.”
I tried to make the question sound academic, but of course, we knew that on some level I was asking Mom to reassure me, Will everything turn out all right? Is God going to be there for you? How is this going to end?
Mom looked at me, steady. “Yes, I do,” she said. “I have seen enough, in my work, to know that this is not the end.”
“What do you think it will be?” I asked. “What do you think will happen, after?”
“I think God will be waiting for me,” she said, her eyes soft. “I think He will tell me job well done. And I think He will have more work for me to do.”
The Mystery
This is a thing that happens when your favorite person dies. Death suddenly becomes the best chance you have for a reunion. Knowing you won’t find them in this life, you start to wonder about the other ones. I could write an entire substack year about all the research I have done seeking an answer to the mystery of this and every story:
What happens next?
To be alive in 2024 is to live in what can feel like a time of endings. The end of Democracy. (It’s not impossible to imagine, sadly.) The end of capitalism. Maybe, we fear, the end of an easily inhabitable climate. We are living in a time that is filled with endings, and all the uncertainty that implies. I’m a storyteller, always searching for an answer to the universal question: what happens next?
I’ve read scientific studies, and memoirs by psychics. I’ve found the greatest solace in strange places, like math, and physics. I’ve read the research on psilocybin (and tried it myself). I’ve learned about Buddhism, and taken up yoga, and meditation. I’ve studied the natural world, the only omniscient narrator. For the past ten years, I’ve searched constantly for an answer to the question, what happens next?
And this is the best answer I’ve found. It’s an answer that has given me a startling amount of peace.
What happens next?
It’s a mystery.
Does it sound like a riddle? Like a question? It is those things, but there’s an answer, too. There’s a faith, even.
What happens next?
It’s a mystery.
Hidden in there is the answer. The whole answer. An answer that encompasses everything Helen believed, and Mom, and Duane. Everything that scientists have discovered. Everything that nature has displayed. Everything.
The Beginning
Eighteen years ago, I stood on the edge of a cliff and I launched myself into the unknown. I didn’t know it then, but looking back, I can trace that leap as a starting point, a launch into the rest of my life.
By standing on the edge of a mountain instead of in a boardroom in New York City, I declared that I was ready for a different life. The consequences were more far reaching than I had ever imagined; turns out capitalism doesn’t like it when you declare that other things matter more. And there are plot twists waiting, down the mountain, that will tear my heart in half.
Life is filled with endings.
But it is just as filled with new beginnings.
I look back, eighteen years later, and I can still feel the humming exhilaration when I planted my poles and launched myself over the edge.
If I could go back to the Robyn standing on the edge of that cliff, about to jump, what would I say to her? What wisdom would I offer? How would I give her strength to face everything that is coming, the wondrous and the terrible?
Nothing.
Not one single thing.
I’d just smile and I’d look at me, jaws clamped, legs shaking, ready to make the leap, so nervous, but also somehow, deep inside, finally, ready.
I wouldn’t say a word, but I would think to myself, with fondness and love, You have no idea what happens next.
In January 2006 I stood on a mountaintop and I shoved myself off the cliff. It’s been eighteen years. I’ve traveled so far.
So have you. We’ve come some of this way together.
What happens next?
It’s a mystery.
But here is one thing I do know: next week we reach the sea.
It'so easy to feel ourselves on the mountain ledge with you! Not because of how you carefully paint the details, or because we have attentively followed the journey with you thusfar. But because your words so often (magically) parallel the deeply-rooted memories of our own lives. And on a conscious level, we read along with your story, while a few layers in, we graze alongside our own.
I am like your mother in law and mom. I too am waiting for Jesus to meet me. ❤️