Column by George Sibley
Mountain Life – September 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
I GRUMP AND MUMPFH about this or that so often in this column that you might think I never stop to look around and smell the whatevers. But that’s not really the case, and I need to remind you, as well as myself, why this is a place worthy of all that concern. Like the recent Sunday when my partner Maryo and I went hiking up a high valley here (name suppressed to protect the innocent) – a great day for it: on the hot side, but around noon a little breeze started ricocheting around the valley that kept the bugs at bay, except for half a dozen incredibly slow flies that even I was fast enough to whack before they got a bite. The light cirrus clouds that had relieved that boring perfect blue began to conspire into modest piles, and up toward the pass took on the bruised underbelly that implied afternoon showers, but nothing that was going to dampen our day down in the valley.
But – typical for me – I found my mind wandering to the last time I’d been up there, just me and the border collie that had shared our lives for fourteen years (until a couple years ago when arthritis compounded by a cancer let us give her what we deny ourselves: an easing out of this life).
If you’ve hiked with a dog (especially a border collie), you know the routine. They want to lead, even if they don’t know for sure where you’re going. So they’re out in front a little ways, then they come back to make sure you’re still coming, then back on point, then back to check in, and when day is done, they’ve had two or three times more exercise than you have. But Zoe was in her last year that day up this particular valley, and she’d been content to just kind of plod along with me. That was when I think it began to sink in how worn out she really was.
So I was telling Maryo about this that Sunday, up there in that same valley, and as I was talking, a pure black-and-white butterfly started playing around us, flying on ahead, then back, then out ahead again, then back – just like hiking with the dog. I say “playing,” but I realize that’s anthropomorphizing it a little. I have no idea what it was really doing in butterfly time and space, or if it even knew we were there or had any sense of what we were, any more than we know what or who is really there when a thunderhead piles up five thousand feet tall and throws its shadow over us.
This butterfly did whatever it was doing for maybe a couple of hundred yards along the trail, then we must have moved beyond its terra cognita, and it left us to go on our way and went back on its way.
So what am I trying to say? Am I suggesting that this black-and-white butterfly was actually somehow inhabited by the soul of my dead black-and-white border collie? Well – who could believe anything like that?
BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, what do I believe about the soul of anything? I grew up in a spiritual tradition that asked me to believe, among other strange things, that we humans all have a unique soul, and that if we pledge that soul to this certain god, our soul will live forever in a remote heaven, along with all the others who have pledged themselves to that god.
Even when I was a kid, that was too much to believe. But there was the further fact that even then I was secretly glad it was only once a week that I had to see the most fervent of those who were trying to persuade me to save myself. The thought of spending eternity in their company was pretty rough.
Since then, I have begun to have an even more serious concern on that account. The thought of having to spend eternity in my own company is more than I can take. I generally like being alive, most of the time, and sometimes I do or say something that seems worthy. I am not a bad person. But I am a flawed product: too often impatient with others and myself, too insecure about my own worth, too undisciplined when it comes to really realizing whatever potential I have, too much a skeptic really to believe completely in anything, even myself. That’s just what I am, and the idea that it is worth preserving for eternity. Well, any creator that hard up for company couldn’t be that much of a creator.
But what do I believe in? One thing I believe in is the conservation of matter and energy, and I believe in the interchangeability of matter and energy – that (as it does say in god’s bible somewhere) we do not die but are “changed,” in ways that were not understood until the prophet Einstein explained them. Matter changes to other forms of matter, and some matter changes to energy in quantities expanding by the speed of light squared. This has been sufficiently demonstrated so that even a skeptic like me can accept it.
IN THE NORSE STORIES of Peer Gynt, death pursues the hero as a “buttonmaker,” carrying a melting-pot into which he throws the souls of those who die. There they are all melted together and recombined to come out as new souls. Peer hated that, and fled the buttonmaker, but it sounds pretty good to me. I would hope there is still a little of the border collie in the pot, and maybe something of that butterfly too, not to mention the swallow that flew into our window the other day and departed this world. I’d also hope that when I get to be melted back in, some of me might come back with some of their patience, mindless beauty and grace – maybe even up that valley. I’d just as soon not be a fly there, but you pays your matter, takes your chances, and the pot is never empty.
After we wake up from living
We no longer need to make fire
For the heat we no longer need
In the bright crystal morning ahead.
Unseen but felt we mourn our loss
With those we’ve lost, till we wake up
To our gain, and leave wondering then,
On the back of a deer or a hummingbird.
And we go till we decide we want to stop
In a place we decide we could love enough
To be a while there, a night or a moon or
To maybe be there a tree for a life.
And we’re a tree there, then,
For a long leaf of time, and, if blessed,
Those we loved will come to lie under us,
Or in our branches build nests, or just sing.
Summer here in the Upper Gunnison just undermines all efforts to be serious.
George Sibley teaches at Western State College, where he also organizes two annual conferences when he’s not writing for this and many other publications.
