Going Down

Feelings...

I awoke the other morning in grief, reflecting on the five close men friends who’ve died in the last three years. Sharing with my wife that something felt missing, she reminded me about a sixth guy. Gone, all of them gone from my life.

Moments later, my phone dinged and a friend had just texted me the words below, totally out of the blue, written by a death doula named Kabba:

Grief isn’t a collapse.

It’s a rewiring

deep in the damp machinery of you.

When someone you love disappears,

your mitochondria feel it first.

Those tiny workhorses pause,

stumble, lose their rhythm

like they’ve misplaced their conductor.

So you get the crash—

the heaviness, the fog,

the strange ache under your ribs.

But if you stay present…

if you don’t bolt or go numb…

the body begins rebuilding itself

from the inside out.

Membranes tighten.

Voltage steadies.

Heat returns in small, honest sparks.

Not because grief makes you tougher,

but because it forces a new arrangement—

one where you learn to breathe

without the one you breathed with.

You don’t come back the same.

You return more real.

More inside your own skin.

More alive,

grateful, open.

We’re going to lose each other, one by one, year by year. So, what do we do with the grief? I’m learning how to welcome it, to feel it deeply, not wishing it away, letting my heart be cleansed, hollowed out, ready to be filled with more love to share.

And… seize the day. We don’t know when it’s our turn. Could be tomorrow. Could be 20 years over the horizon. Whatever, life comes at us one moment at a time and either we’re embracing it or missing it. I’m all for the embrace, even when it means welcoming despair and wondering whether the darkness is worth it.

Sure it is. It’s an adventure, a crazy adventure. And just like the best ones, we have no idea how it’s going to end!

I’ve shortened my posts, in response to a few complaints that they were getting too long. So, for those and others, you can stop here. But for those with some remaining interest, here’s the Preface to the sci-fi book I’m writing that I quoted from last week. If you’d like to sample more, let me know and I’ll create a special list to send brief segments to. I’d appreciate your feedback.

PREFACE

How do you tell a true story that hasn’t happened yet and won’t … until you tell it?

And how do you convince readers like you that this particular story won’t … can’t, be fully told, without their/your personal participation?

I’ll do my very best.

There’s a well-known term in live theater: “breaking the fourth wall.” This happens when a performer addresses the audience directly. It’s a device on display in films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and in the TV series Fleabag. I’m doing it right now, talking to you as I write and you read. But I call my version “breaking the fifth wall” because I’m not just addressing you as a reader, I’m inviting you to participate.

Here’s my offer: Help me recount a tale beyond space and time, a self-creating incantation capable of de-spelling humanity from the hypnotic grip of an ancient programming error. Your job will be simple: just read. Specific instructions will be provided from time to time but, for the most part, you’ll read along and wonder where you’re being led (the wondering is important, as you’ll see).

What will dawn on you, sooner or later (sooner, I hope), is that your reading journey is increasingly connecting with your day-to-day activities, in ways that defy conventional explanation. Time will begin to work differently. Whatever happens will be subtle at first, subtle enough for you to easily brush off as mildly interesting or oddly coincidental. But every day (as long as you continue reading) the correlations between what you are discovering on these printed pages and what’s happening in your “real” life will become more obvious and more frequent, and may finally convince you that something fundamental is altering in your personal universe, because of our ongoing shared experience.

It is no accident that you were led to this invitation.

Note: this unique collaboration can produce a sensation I call “quantum vertigo,” a kind of dizziness of the soul. Don’t worry, it’s temporary and, much like being on a boat, you’ll soon get your sea legs and gradually begin to feel more comfortable with this new experience than the old, familiar one.

What will really get you wondering is how this continues even when you take a break from reading. Then, returning later to where you left off, the words will now seem more descriptive of something that happened in your past, whereas before they pointed to something emerging in the present moment to create an unknown future.

It may even feel like the story continued developing without you and you’re now catching up. You’ll wonder if other readers are having a similar experience. That’s a question that, if you’re actually entertaining it seriously in this moment, indicates you’ve anticipated where the next paragraph is heading us.

You may be old enough to remember The Twilight Zone TV series. Program creator Rod Serling provided the opening narration. There were five versions and they all ended with a provocative promise, that the viewer had just crossed over into The Twilight Zone.

I’m no Rod Serling and this isn’t The Twilight Zone. But I am introducing another dimension for your experience, a timeless moment of discovery where words - written and read - will escort us on a journey of discovery, to experiment with what happens when the muse is given full freedom to lead rather than weigh in from the sidelines, when time and “order” are exchanged for quantum magic, and when readers are actors in the story, not spectators in a passive audience.

For I am not the only author of these words, just as you are much more than a mute observer. We are, all of us, players in a grand game of unknown scope and emerging meaning, a game without conventional rules, a story with characters and a plot that develop spontaneously. I’m referring both to the formation of this tale and to our lives.

The line between reality and writing and reading will blur, but ours is not an escape, it’s both a recollection of something ancient, a recovery… of exactly what, we shall soon discover, and the increasingly conscious awareness of a transmission, a quantum code that is constructing a very different future… right now.

“Something wonderful is happening” is much more than the subtitle and theme of this book, it’s the translation of a spell broadcasting throughout the universe. It didn’t originate in English, or any other language, and it’s impossible to identify when it began.

Finding out what it is and what it’s meant to accomplish will be our pre-occupation in these pages. The world building we’ll undertake is of a very different kind than the usual sci-fi fantasies, designed to illuminate poetic, unlikely meanings of our lived experience, seeing the familiar with new eyes.

As you read, the shadow of death is hanging over you, over us all. Imagine that shadow vaporized, because you come to know that you cannot die, that an entirely different “end” to your human life is not only possible but normal; that, in fact there are a buffet of options, each affected by the guidance this book offers (to me as well as to you).

This obviously isn’t the only path forward to a novel next life but it’s the one in hand so let’s make the most of it. I say “us” because I’m traveling the same path, slightly ahead of you, but just as much in the dark for the moment, and – like you - anticipating what shows up as my writing and your reading builds our way forward.

To get us started with the right mindset, I’ll introduce the second of many spells (the first of course is “something wonderful is happening”): “I am the light of the world.”

Feel that for a moment, then, let’s begin.

To be continued…