Dew Drops Sparkling On Eternity

Howling with gratitude and joy

This is a short and sweet contemplation of life and death and being lost and how there are always roads back. Thank you all so much for reading The Crow and for your kindness and encouragemnt. For that I am genuinely grateful.

Credit: Jonathan Foster

1.

The sun fell so low on the horizon that the dark tree trunks created a winking zoetrope, flickering the dog and I as we scampered through the gloaming forest at a brutal and brittle -17°C. I began to realise that something was awry. I didn’t want the word lost to gain purchase, but it was there in the back of my mind, elbowing its way toward my consciousness.

At -17°C the atmosphere feels solid, and exposed skin cells freeze. Even a gentle breeze is a menace, dragging the temperature down further and penetrating the outer layers of clothing. The human body generates an average temperature of 37°C. Prolonged exposure to cold means the body begins using up its stored energy and slowly the body temperature lowers. The colder the temperature the quicker the body goes into hypothermia. Naked, at 0°C, death comes in about 12 minutes. Properly clothed at -17°C, death emerges from the shadows of your mind, like a flirtatious stranger slowly making their way in your direction. There might be time to get away. There might not. How long it takes for death to sidle up beside you depends on a number of factors that moments earlier meant nothing, and moments later mean everything.

The winter solstice is upon us and the sun sets at 14:50ish, a minute or two either way. By 15:00 it’s pitch dark and the temperature will drop, heading toward -25°C, emboldening and hastening death’s amorous attention toward any foolish sparkles of life roaming through the rapidly darkening forest.

The dog closes in and walks beside me, instinctively aware that we have become vulnerable. I can feel my heartbeat pump blood as a dram of adrenaline hits my brain. The unconscious begins to throw a back room tantrum and the only way to manage the situation is to consciously keep panic at bay. Breath. Breath again. Deep slow breathes. Think. Calm. Thoughts. The subconscious explodes another panic-dynamite that sets off an avalanche of both useful and ridiculous thoughts. I begin to sweat, which will chill me faster as the cold penetrates my layers. My heart beats in my temples. So this is what it’s like.

I can’t backtrack because it’ll be too dark to see by the time I’m quarter way. I need to forge on. I can’t be too far off course. It’s 14:28 so I’ve got 20 minutes of adequate light. I stop in my tracks and look in all directions, encouraging myself to stay calm, to stay relaxed. I say it out loud. “Take it easy.” I circle on the spot and take in a 360° panorama. I’m suddenly awash with embarrassment. Such an absurd and pointless death. To die mere kilometres from people in bathtubs or eating late lunches, laughing or arguing or making promises they’ll never keep. They’ll carve It Was His Own Fault on my gravestone. The Man Was An Idiot. They’d be right. So I started to do what anyone would do in my position. I started laughing.

2.

The universe appears to have Big Banged into existence around 14 billion years ago. Microscopic organisms appeared 3.5 billion years ago. Multi-cellular life started 2.1 billion. Fungi at 570 million years. Then the Cambrian Explosion exploded at 538 million years ago. Mammals kicked off at 300 million years and hominids at about 8 million years ago leading to the evolution of our human ancestors at about 6 million years. Around 300,000 years ago the Homo lineage appeared and Homo Sapiens began behavioural modernity at about 80,000 years ago. There’s about 7.5 billion years left until the sun explodes and engulfs the solar system and in about 100 trillion years the universe will disappear completely leaving nothing but darkness. From one point of view at least.

My portion of allocated time here on Earth is indescribably insignificant. I haven’t existed, and won’t exist, for such incomprehensible long periods of time I can’t even begin to grasp the enormity of it all. All I intuitively understand is that in the Great Writhing Mass, not being alive is the default. And life, that astounding awakened pattern of experience, the nothing that becomes everything and twinkles like dew drops on eternity, seems to be the default too, for a fleeting moment. There is no fairness. No fairy stories. Just the brutality and darkness of the universe and then, as if out of nowhere, infinitesimally small flickerings of life appear like flowering fungi taking the form of, amongst other things, the dog and I, standing in a snowy forest and laughing in the face of death as the sun sets in the great darkness.

But it’s not a great darkness because we twinkling dew drops are everything. As I stood in the gloaming and the deep, wild, cold forest bared its fangs, it was the small and seemingly trivial happenings that danced through my mind. Not the stagey billboard events, or special purchases or competitive triumphs over others. Instead it was the modest kindnesses, the gentle thoughtfulness, the trust and vulnerability, the forgiving and the tender acceptance, it was these seemingly small intimate behaviours that blossomed and bloomed. There were no great speeches partitioning the world into rights and wrongs, into us’s and them’s, there were instead words left unsaid without judgement and discrimination. And I understood all this despair and all these lines drawn as a pitiful defense for the anxious and fearful who dare not listen and pay attention but instead demand their fear be heard. I felt the power of simple kind human love and the embarrassment of a pointless death fell away because in the warmth of love there is no pointlessness.

So I stood and laughed and was strangely awash in gratitude for having sparkled for but a moment in this realm of possibility. And my laughter inspired the dog who began to suddenly howl with ancestral verve. The two of us lost in the world and lost in ourselves laughing and howling in the joy of the moment as we realised a terrifying truth: that we are nothing yet we are everything, that we did not come into this world but came out of it, like waves on an ocean, that we were made by the world and we make the world and that life and death are but the price each pays for the other. We saw there are no kings and there are no queens. There are but concepts and rituals invented by mortal humans. And like a sky above us, there is certain death, forever there, forever shining upon us and below this sky we have nothing but that we make ourselves. And the world we make through love is always a stronger and more gentle world than the one we make though fear.

3.

It was then that a crow appeared on a glowing orange pine branch in the meagre light, and tilted its head in curiosity at two fools howling and laughing. Could it be one of the resident crows from the frozen meadow that opened onto the path toward the edge of the forest and the road? I had often fed those crows, much to the dog’s consternation, as we made our frequent hikes across that open ground. The crows took to sweeping in and flying low over my shoulder to alight in my path and beseech me with their demands. They had observed my occasional offerings to the dog, who they contemptuously swooped and tagged as he sauntered about, and they wanted in on the goods. Eventually a gang of crows would wander along around us or umbrella above us as they tumbled and barrelled through the air to retrieve the dog treats I casually flung toward them.

As I looked at the crow and he looked back at us, inquisitive and hungry, I took out a dog treat and the crow rose a little on his haunches, preparing to take flight and I realised that he knew the game. And then, as if the world relaunched itself in my mind I realised that I wasn’t lost, that I’d never been lost, but that I’d lost my bearings only, that I’d failed to see what was always all around me and in a great whoosh familiarity returned and I was found again. I was only a few hundred meters from the meadow and from there it was but a short hike toward the road and back home. And then embarrassment returned as I felt a shame at having fallen into this ridiculous illusion of fear and trepidation.

I reached into the bag of dog treats and threw one into the dimming sky where death no longer seemed to shine and a great black bird with wings like hands swooped through the air to retrieve a little sustenance thrown in gratitude and love. When I got home my wife was relaxing on the sofa reading. “How was it?” she asked but I didn’t answer, instead I sat beside her, the cold still emanating from my chilled layers, and wrapped my arms around her warmth and said “Thank you darling,” to which she smiled and said nothing and I smiled and said nothing more.