All the Life We Cannot See

Living near the edge with gratitude...

The tears come, unexpected, unbidden. I'm not in pain or even sorrow, but they arise and take me, and their message is mysterious, poignant and comes from somewhere else entirely beyond me. I am a few days home from the hospital. Sudden diagnosis, judicious and prolonged surgery, a week of feeling claustrophobic and encased in a world where watching paint dry would have more meaning and excitement than I was capable of feeling. Returned to my home where nothing seemed real and every breath, every heartbeat thundered in my ears, I felt the sting of tears.

At first I thought I was just grateful to be alive, that these feelings came from some existential moments that let me see that everyday life was not the whole of life. I would weep at the merest of emotions. Feelings ran too deep to control. I shed tears even when I felt well, when my body would cease to remind me that it could torment me in ever new and strange ways. When I had no reason to explain them. But then, the lack of reason was precisely what I was experiencing. I could stand in a pool of sunshine and feel its power and aliveness and that would bring the tears. Song fragments proved heartbreaking, and stories of human kindness were overwhelming. I wondered how much longer I could bear this ineffable state.

I needn't have worried. It didn't last much longer. By the end of the first week, I could no longer rely on them to appear. Six weeks after that they're not here at all. These sensations were not so much altered states as enhanced ones. They were showing me how much more to life was all around me.

I had been too close to the veil.

That’s the place where we are mostly in this world but the other side is tantalizingly close. That place we cannot access ourselves, but are often guided to when the right conditions arise. Some people liken it to a near-death experience. But I wasn't near death and nothing that was happening was so existentially dire as to move me closer to that edge.

It was something else entirely.

It was a gift, plain and simple. A gift that let me see and more importantly, feel the emotions that I can't always access on my own. I knew for that brief time that the world we inhabit, the world we think we understand is filled with more power and grace than our ordinary selves could possibly encompass. We live in a very small part of ourselves.

I am almost fully back to ordinary life, to what W.B. Yeats called "mere daylight hours." The life everyone over the age of 10 and under the age of 70 belongs to. Where magic and meaning no longer reside, and we live out our lives dutifully and with some strong sense of being burdened. It is nearly impossible to engage with the supranatural while one is carrying a mortgage. The demands of the ordinary world are ever present, and only those who withdraw from it completely can hope to find some relief from those pressures. Children, jobs, health, king and country - each of these and more represent a world filled with specific and unyielding responsibilities. You can see why I treated the tears as a gift. For those brief days I was privy to another world, one of wonder and gratitude for the hidden treasures underneath what we know.

But I couldn’t stay there. It's not a habitable home. It is ephemeral and too rough for our human filters. The filters that our brains provide to protect us from the too-much-noise that surrounds us, the too-much-data that overwhelms our senses, the too-much-of-everything, and these protections keep us able to function on a day-to-day basis. We cannot be human and survive being too close to the veil for too long.

I wanted it to end but I didn’t want to leave. The intensity and the wonder were so overwhelming and yet so exquisite as to leave me speechless. Ordinary life felt so small in comparison. Was there any way to revisit this state and still survive?

Oddly enough, the answer was my childhood. There had been similar times that I can still recall, when the world was so much larger than the day-to-day. When I would get full of worry or lost in my everyday life of chores and duties, and I couldn’t access those moments on my own, I would find them in my children’s books, my fairy tale books.

Fairy tales as we know them are remnants of ancient knowledge, shared through the millennia, until at last collectors, in the last few centuries transcribed them into a fixed and frozen state. They are pale reflections of what they once held, but they are all we have left of what we humans once knew about a life different from the one on this side of the veil. They, in their truncated state allow us to visit where we cannot stay.

Stories are the most human part of us, the part that needs to understand what is happening and what it might possibly mean. We tell stories when we get back from a harrowing trip to the grocery store and when we nearly die in the hospital. We tell stories of our romantic rejections and our global failings. We tell stories about everything. Because that's how we learn, how we process, how we come to grips.

Fairy tales are one of those kinds of stories. In a mirrored world, characters live as we do in ordinary conditions full of hardship and pain. But they also live where magic reigns, where meaning is always possible and betterment is an added extra bonus. Where landscapes full of golden forests, glass mountains and seven-league boots allow us to see our world through new eyes, ones not limited by our human filters. Where characters can feel, and experience different sensations, different possibilities. Where grace is always present in ever expanding ways.

Like the tears, fairy tales are a gift. They let us visit those worlds while safely residing in the one we are built for. It is truly right and proper that we encounter them just as most of us are beginning to depart from the transcendental world of childhood, and emerge into adulthood and all the dreariness and glory that that implies.

We can’t have life next to the veil. We are not built for it. But we can visit it fleetingly, in small doses through our fairy tales. Those ordinary stories crudely composed, without artifice or guile contain a very special knowledge – they let us see that we can be momentarily touched by the magic and poignancy that belongs in that interstitial place.

We can be reminded of all the life we cannot see.