Two years ago, I was fighting to survive in a never ending flood of loss. It was eight years since Mom had died, two years after COVID reminded us how fragile our entire society truly is, one year since the Insurrection made us realize our Democracy could end, six months since the doctor put me on medication for high blood pressure, a reminder: your own life is heading towards one final destination.
I was lost in a spin cycle of grief. Not for Mom, not even for me. For everything. For all of it.
I knew there was a different way to live. I’d been to the shack in the woods. I’d learned about cocoons, and seasons. I’d stood in the forest during a pandemic, and looked at trees, and felt a sense of peace.
I knew hope was out there. I just couldn’t hold onto it. It was like trying to catch water in your hands, a palmful of peace, but I couldn’t hold it for long.
I’d worked so hard on how to build a better narrative, but this was a story I couldn’t change: the inevitable sense that somehow everything was coming to an end, and I was helpless to stop it.
I was living in a toggle between two conditions: deeply afraid, or working hard not to be.
In my journal on January 19, 2022, I wrote:
I have just been lost in a spin cycle of grief, regret, MISSING things, mourning all that we have lost. (My grief) has overtaken me, I feel such immense loss for all that is gone, such emptiness. I am in a mindset of dread and I can’t get out of it. Help, help, help, help, help.
And then.
And then.
And then.
Mary And Me Solve Life
Friday, February 11, 2022 was the last day of a week at the beach. I was walking home on the sand with Huck, who after six days chasing balls across miles of sand was finally tired, maybe for the first time since we adopted him. I was, I should note, a bit high on Mary Oliver at the time. I’d been mainlining Mary for months; she’s still the author who writes in the voice that I imagine closest to the one trees would use, if trees decided to take up English.
So. I was feeling existential dread that I was trying to ward off with poetry, and I decided to maybe connect with Mom. To get her attention, I started singing Amazing Grace.
I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see…
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to heal and grace will lead me home…
When we’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise then when we’ve first begun.
And I stopped singing this song I had sung 10,000 times, and thought, wait, this is about DEATH?
And what is it really trying to say?
I stood on the edge of the ocean, and thought, How would Mary consider this ocean?
Is this wave afraid to crash? and the answer was and always has been so incredibly simple.
Of course not. It knows it will only return to the sea.
And I stood there and I thought, life is a wave, but what if we are water?
That thought hit me so hard, honestly, like a flash of sunlight, that I took a picture of Huck to capture the moment. Does he look here like a dog whose owner just solved life? Because that was how I felt.
Huck! Life is a wave, but we ourselves are WATER!!
I went home to Steve, in fact, and announced to him that, a) Amazing Grace is a song about death, and b) I have solved life, with a handy assist from the spirit of Mary Oliver.
Steve said he really thought Amazing Grace was about slavery, but he made space for my interpretation, and he went all in on my theory about water. He grew up fundamentalist, he’s used to people speaking in tongues. Also, he kindly did not point out to me that eternal life is hardly an original Castellani concept.
Flash forward two years, and I think it’s a funny story, but I keep finding it everywhere. A few months after my oceanfront epiphany, I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s book No Death, No Fear, and realized the monk had long ago understood the truth of this metaphor.
“A wave in her ignorance is subject to the fear of birth and death, high, low, more or less beautiful, and the jealousy of others. But if a wave is able to touch her true nature, the nature of water, and know that she is water, then all her fear and jealousy will vanish.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Writing this substack, with all respect to Thich Nhat Hanh, I decided that really, life is more like a river than a wave. Water on its way to the ocean travels through so many different kinds of landscapes, with tributaries and rapids and droughts and lakes and what can be a better metaphor for our life right now than the reality that sometimes we flow through Yellowstone and sometimes we’re trapped in the sewers?
This week I discovered that a mathematician philosopher wrote my thesis statement decades ago.
“An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
— Bertrand Russell
Bertrand and the Buddhist, telling my story. So where does that leave us?
Where I always said we would end the story.
Standing, as promised, where the river finds sea.
Where all the world’s water will one day be.
Journey’s End. And Also..
When Steve and I arrived at Oak Island this week, we got up early on the first morning to watch the sun come up. We followed it as we always do, mesmerized, because it’s always the same sun, but it’s never the same sunrise. This one, for instance, was filled with purple.
Steve said, as the sun started to shimmy at the edge of the sky, “You know, people used to look at the horizon and think it was the end of the world.”
And I said, “We still do.”
That’s always been the curse of humanity. Doomed to think that the world ends, just because that’s as far as we can see.
Ten years ago today, Mom went over the horizon none of us can see past.
What happens next? And where? And how long will it last?
I can’t say. It’s a mystery. No one standing on this shore has seen what will happen in the life that comes after this one, or in the day that comes after this one. At best, we are all just reading messages in a bottle.
But that doesn’t bother me as it once did.
Of course, sometimes it’s scary. The world right now is incredibly unsettling. But… don’t try to look into the future, for a moment. Just look around.
This year, the Webb Space Telescope showed us that what we once thought were stars are, in fact, entirely different galaxies. A glimpse inside an electron microscope, like the picture of the neural stem cells I shared last week, reminds us: there are mysteries inside our own bodies that we can barely understand.
Consider the world around you. As every fractal in nature reminds us, there is no such thing as an ending, only the close of one cycle that begins another.
Tiny sets of patterns repeat in ever-expanding circles: the veins on a leaf look the same as the bark on the tree looks the same as the shape of the branches looks the same as the surrounding forest.
The same is true of snowflakes and lightning bolts, and also our lungs and our nervous system. They are all made up of fractals and every single fractal replicates the same pattern, tells the same story, again and again, from its first cell to its final dissolution.
Every story we tell is a fractal, that we tell again and again and again.
It is this story, with a beginning and an ending fast approaching.
It is the story of every day you live, from the eyes fluttering open, through a hopeful or chaotic beginning, a series of setbacks and joys, tiny or triumphant, to the reconciliation and the return to unconsciousness of sleep.
It is the story of your year at school, your first (or only) marriage, your career.
And yes. Your life. Your life is a fractal, your life is a wave, your life is a river, your life is a series of stories that you tell again and again, fractals expanding outward, until you crash and die.
And then?
And then?
And then?
The Fate of Water
We are all of us, always, standing on the edge of a horizon that we can’t see past. None of us has seen tomorrow, no one can know what will happen after this season, after this election, after this life.
To be alive in 2024, to be alive ever, is to live with the deep awareness that one day, all of this will end.
What happens next? It’s a mystery.
And.
Something has changed in me, since that walk on the beach two years ago. A small shift. But it matters.
I have stopped wishing to go back. I have stopped longing for the past of my life with Mom, because I have started to have faith in the future of my life with Mom.
I no longer believe our story is over.
I no longer believe any story is ever truly over.
I believe our story is just beginning. In so many ways.
When Mom was my age, she was just starting the sweet spot of her career, the best part of her life. I like to imagine that there are great adventures still ahead for me. Maybe my best work, like Mom’s, is yet to come.
I am ready to move forward, creating hope, but also noticing hope, because what is hope if not the river you see?
But it’s not just about that. It’s not just about me.
Consider, for a moment, the water here at the edge of the sea.
The water that I see on the edge of this ocean has been places I can’t even imagine. The water that swirls at my feet and sinks into the sand was likely here during ancient Rome. Water travels to the depths of the sea, to a place with wonders no human eye can see. It changes form, rises from sea to sky, and soars across the heavens on a cloud, soaring over wide open plains and great lakes. It falls on a thirsty prairie, and city sidewalks. It trickles from a the earth to a mountain spring. It flows into forests.
All of this happens to water when the river reaches the sea.
Why should it be any less wondrous for you or for me?
One only needs to fear the end of the day if one does not believe there will be another. But there has always been another day. Another sunset. Another wave. Nature recycles and returns and recreates everything.
And who are we? We are part of nature.
We’re trees, digging roots deep, offering shelter and peace, part of the forest long after we fall.
We’re fire, burning bright and hot, it goes out but never gone for good.
We’re waves, rising, cresting and crashing into the sea.
It is 9:21 am, January 25, 2024, on this rainy day by the ocean, I’m sitting at a table looking out. Ten years almost to the moment since Mom died, I can barely spot the difference between the sea and the sky.
Did I do it? Did I create hope? Did I notice enough hope? Well? Do I feel hope?
Yes. I do. Right now, just on schedule, just as promised, this is not a story, this is a report live from the field: I feel hope.
Not just for me, but for you. For all of us.
In the face of all the terrible things here right now, and all the terrible things about to come (because inevitably they will), why do I still feel hope for the future?
Why do I still feel hope for what comes next?
What happens next? It’s a mystery.
I can’t say what will happen, or how it will be. But I believe I know who we are.
I believe we are part of the world. Like trees, and plants, and water.
And I believe that like water, we always will be
moving forward,
changing form,
on our way to the sea.
A few weeks ago, I wrote in my journal to Mom. I don’t miss you now and then. I miss you all the time.
And she answered me, so clear I could almost hear her voice, I’m not with you now and then. I’m with you all the time.
I’ve stopped wishing to go back to Mom, or back to anything, because I don’t think we have lost anything, Not for good.
I have learned, for the first time, instead of looking to the past, to feel hope about the future. It’s the third kind of hope I found this year. The hope I created, with science and storytelling. The hope I noticed, in the natural world all around me.
And the hope I feel, today, right now, for all of us, it’s a hope that says, just the same way that Mom and I were together here in this life, once, we will be together, in some way, in some mysterious unimaginable way, again.
It’s a hope that says, whatever we go through together, we have always been able to turn our tragedies into our transformations, that is the point of every story, and it is also the story of the entire world, every minute up to now.
Nothing lasts forever. Not even death. Together somehow we will always go on.
This is the story that’s true now, to me.
This is the river I’ve decided to see.
And here's me hoping there would be Sharks.
Thank you
Thank you for
Thank you for the
Thank you for the journey
Gorgeous! Thanks for taking us along for the ride.