the dharma blog

His mouth stayed still, but his eyes grinned a little through his glassless glasses. “I told ya twice I had to tell ya somethin’. Now I’m tellin’ ya: See, every person in the world has their Garden Angel, and every Garden Angel has their person.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And every person thinks their Angel is just their shadow and every Angel in the Garden World thinks their person is just their shadow.”

“Hold on a minute! Garden World? What’s this about a Garden World?”

“Sure, the Garden World - where the Garden Angels live. We live in our world and they live in theirs. But if we learn the right things and they learn the right things, then finally we get to be each other’s friend and go back and forth to both worlds wide awake forever, which is funner than you can shake a stick at.”

Wonderfully confounded, I thought I’d better confuse him before he lost me completely: “But Bill Bob, if our shadow is on the ground, then we should be able to dig a hole and get into the Garden World whether we did the right things and met our friend and all that or not. Now you and me have both dug enough holes to know there’s no world down there, right?”

“Wrong!” he said, disgusted and utterly unconfused. “Listen, ya big dummy: I told ya already, you are your Garden Angel’s shadow, and he’s yours. You think you’re standing up. He thinks you’re lying flat. He thinks he’s standing up. You think he’s lying flat. Look at your light-knight now…”

I looked at my shadow: it was sitting on the closed bedroom door. Bill Bob said, “Go out that door you’re in the hallway, not the Garden World. You don’t get into the Garden World by walking there.”

Again I mumbled, ”I guess you got a point.”

I went out to Stillwater Tuesday night to see my parents. It was a gorgeous evening, just as June should be. Maybe 80 degrees and the long, soft light of the approaching summer solstice. We had pizza and talked. It was pretty obvious that they were both tired so I left around 8:30. I had time to kill so I headed for the river, I thought it would be good to see it for a while.

The wayside rest where I meant to park and walk down to the river was closed, so I drove along a road that ran along the top of the bluffs a half-mile from the river instead. It’s a beautiful road through rolling upland. There are some small farms and some big, new mansions, such is the nature of the county of my youth. The fields are small, carved out of the woodlands which still border them. At this time of year, the stands of deciduous trees form solid green walls around the fields.

A big thunderhead had passed over us earlier without dropping any rain. Now it receded to the east. The rest of the sky was cloudless and that one big cloud was smeared lazily and glowed with the reflected light of the sun setting on the other side of the horizon. I couldn’t help but seeing the world as one of Monet’s paintings of the water gardens. When I saw water – the river, small lakes and ponds, puddles along fields – it looked like Monet’s water, soft and silvery, at the very center of the lush, rich landscape which only existed because of it.

Bill Bob said, “The trouble with people and with Garden Angels is they just don’t know they’re twins.” (This obviously struck him as a regrettable state of affairs.) “We think we’re growing bigger and older. They think they’re growing younger and smaller. We think we’re…”

“Hold it!” I cried. “They think they’re getting younger and smaller?”

He nodded, very solemn now, eyes riveted on the quivering flame. He said, “You see, Gussy, garden Angels come from the ground, like carrots, into their world. That’s one reason they’re called Garden Angels. When they first come out of the ground into the Garden World they’re very old, or hurt, or sick, or crippled or sad, but the other Angels help them out and they get better bit by bit, and they’re real happy to be there in that world because it’s all so pretty and nice, like the nicest garden in this world ‘cept the whole place there is like that, and everybody’s so friendly and there’s nothing to make ya scared or hurt nowhere like in our world. It’s such a wonderful place to be that the longer those broken ol’ Angels live there the younger and smaller they grow and the friendlier and happier they get, so the ones who have lived there the longest are the kids and babies. And the very longest ones are tiny, and so bright and happy they look like flames burning up out of gladness - like that one!” He pointed at the dreefee: a bubble of pitch had ignited inside it and was sending out a minuscule but brilliant white torch that glistened and hummed as it burned…but after a time it consumed itself and vanished, so I asked,

“What happens to the oldest, smallest little babies when they burn all the way out? Is that the end of them?”

“No,” he said. “They don’t ever burn out. Sometimes they burn up. But most often they just get so bright and small that nobody can see them anymore, and they disappear out of the Garden World and enter our world and we trade places.”

“We what?”

“We trade worlds with our twin: we go there and our twin comes here. See, all the time our twin is growing younger and happier, we’re growing older and more crippleder, till finally we die, and pass through our shadows, and get buried in our ground. Then we journey up and up through a long, black tunnel till we reach the Garden Angel ground, and then we sprout up through it like carrots, and there we are, Garden Angels now, not people - but the big, crooked, sad, new sort of Angels that haven’t been there long. And our twin, who has disappeared in a little bright speck to small to see, passes through his shadow and comes here and gets in a lady’s stomach and turns into a baby. So it’s really not our world or their world. We trade back and forth. Both worlds belong to both of us. We’re twins. The shadows we pass through are each other, us and our twins, swapping places…”

I drove slowly. A mile from where I turned onto the road, it turned to gravel. I drove a little slower yet. I saw no other cars but just drove and looked at the landscape under the dwindling light of dusk. It is a road such as that that opens up my mind to let me think about the big things. I thought of death. Thoughts of death usually come just before I fall asleep. Often, I chase them from my mind. It is no time to let myself plunge into such thoughts, I tell myself.

But, surrounded by the overwhelming quantity of life of a June evening, I could let myself think of death. It’s not such a big thing anyway. It’s only as big as something that is inevitable can be. All the thinking in the world isn’t going to change it. We will all die. Perhaps that’s where the thinking should stop. Acknowledgement. Acceptance. We should look at death and get on living.

But, that’s not the human way. Just as inevitable as death is our own wondering about it. What it is to die. What it means. What comes after.

I’m undecided on all of it and I’m okay with that. I’m young and hopefully have a while to observe and to think. And that’s what I did as I drove on Tuesday night: I thought about it. I remembered back to a conversation Rosie and I had last fall when we were hiking along the Superior Hiking Trail. It was a beautiful late autumn day. The skies were gray and the woods were utterly quiet. The trail wound up and down through a beautiful forest, past cliffs of granite, down along damp creeks. We had been hiking in silence for a while when Rosie said to me, “If there is a heaven, I don’t know how it could be better than this.”

We talked about it for a while then, trying to decide how you could improve on the joy of living in this world. Sure, life is imperfect and often difficult. But we could’t see how removing anything painful from the world would actually be an improvement. Ever since then, I’ve frequently wondered what heaven could be like. More and more, I find myself thinking that it’s probably just like this world.

In David James Duncan’s wonderful novel, “The River Why,” which the dialogue I’m interspersing throughout this post is from, the protagonist’s younger brother presents an idea of death that has stuck with me, if for no other reason than the inherent beauty of its perpetual cycle of life, death and rebirth.

Tuesday night, driving through the dusk, revisiting memories and hopes, stunned by the silence the land lay under, the beautiful shades of green, the sky and the clouds, the peace, one thought came to my mind: “I want to come back.”

In some form, I’m hoping for reincarnation. I don’t need eternal pleasure in some fantastic heaven, I just want to come back. See if I can skip some of the mistakes I’ve made this time through. Hopefully just enjoy the infinite beauty of this world that I’ve experienced so far, and some of that which I never will in this lifetime.

Another recent train of thought is also present here: simply that of Earth as a closed system. All the water, all the carbon, all the matter that composes life here is already here. I wonder if all the mysterious matter of consciousness and humanity is already accounted for as well. And that when it evaporates from its current form, it is merely reconstituted in another.

Incomplete ponderings, for sure. But soon enough I ran out of gravel road and headed home.

“One more question?” I begged.

“OK,” he mumbled.

“Why don’t some things have shadows?”

“Some things don’t need Garden Angels.”

“But why?”

“That’s two questions,” he grumbled, alert even in his sleep.

“Please. No more, I promise. Why don’t some things need Garden Angels?”

He smiled, sighed, and kept his eyes shut tight. “Dummy,” he said, turning away toward the shadows. “Some things never die.”

And he was asleep…And I saw that to die here was to begin to live there, which meant we never died, which meant there was nothing anywhere to be very much afraid of.

~ from “The River Why” (excerpts from pages 113-126) by David James Duncan