Like Catching Fish with Her Hands

Nonfiction, Wally Swist

To immerse ourselves in light, to be backlit by light, to see the light – all of this is part of our nature, this yearning to bathe ourselves in and amid light: dawn, dusk, moonlight.  We delight in basking in sunlight.  It feels good on our shoulders.  One might even say light leads us, leads us to things.  We make discoveries with and within light.  When we find love, we often refer to the feeling as lighting up our lives.  If we experience a eureka moment, the notion of a light bulb going off above our heads is sometimes what we might picture in our minds.

Once I was speaking passionately to my partner, Tevis, more than twenty years ago, early in our relationship—or at the very least speaking intently.  As I was doing this, I stroked her cat, Zoe, who had grown quite comfortable with me.  We were eating omelets for breakfast when the most unusual occurrence manifested.  A light that I only saw in my peripheral vision flashes above my head.  Zoe leapt from my lap, Tevis pushed back her chair from the oval piece of marble that served as our table, and we were left in a heightened sense of astonishment.  Psycho-spiritual occurrences were prevalent in our lives upon meeting.  They existed beforehand to us separately.  However, our sense experiences continued to increase over the years.

What I have only begun to learn – and humility is always a nascent practice since I believe it can never be practiced enough due to just our considering what the practice of modesty truly is —  is that we come to know light through our experience of darkness, we become aware of the stars in the sky due to the darkness of the night sky, we possibly arrive at becoming more human by practicing compassion for others as well as ourselves.  The light can lead us, teach us, and encourage us.

If we curate a practice, be it creative or spiritual, and we can’t possibly dismiss practice, we often and normally think of in conjunction with athletic practice, we may arrive at some modicum of achievement.  If we take on spiritual practice, with rigor, whether it be simply passage meditation, as advocated by the late teacher of meditation, Eknath Easwaran, or devoting ourselves to inner prayer, in time, just maybe we can experience a spiritual breakthrough, one in which we feel augmented, or perhaps even changed.  If such spiritual rigor is practiced selflessly enough, we might even experience such a change of awareness that it is a consciousness-altering event, one that is unmistakable, unshakeable, epiphanal.

In reading about such epiphanies, although an awakening experience is really beyond a mere epiphany, most practitioners never really think it will occur to them and if it does occur, then life will be made not only different but also beyond our wildest dreams.  A friend whom I knew had a satori, a Zen awakening experience, through quite rigorous meditation, described the event as a circle.  He relayed that at first he experienced what was apparently rapid success in acquiring what at least felt like an expanded awareness but as his practice continued on the way to an enlightenment of enough magnitude that his Zen master became so envious that he placed his letters describing the experience under lock and key, he described that he was merely part way around the circle, that his true awareness of enlightenment was in completing the circle – only in which the wood was the true wood.

What was on the other side of awakening, or an experience of enlightenment, was only “the wood” of the moment, was only our awareness of our reality at hand, whatever it was, was only the light of the day itself, be it brash or sublime or incandescent.  So, one may think, all of this rigor for nothing.  However, that isn’t the case at all.

When we come up one side of the mountain to experience the other side of what we haven’t yet seen, that includes experiencing both the light and the dark.  It isn’t only light.  There wouldn’t actually be light if it weren’t for darkness.  There can never be pleasure without pain – although we can nearly always experience delight.  No matter what condition we find ourselves in, delight is within reach of our possibilities of experience, even if we are in a dark place, we can delight in what is simple and what is real.  Sometimes in such situations, we can nearly unconsciously discover what I term finding the numinous in the commonplace, a phrase I coined a few decades ago in my creative practice conjoining itself with my forays into the natural world.  There were openings into consciousness I discovered that provided an experience of deep time, of expanding the now moment, of the inherent connection of all things.  Through these experiences, I found what Buddhism and Taoism teach as the interconnection of life itself.  In the interconnection of life itself, we find freedom.  In finding freedom, we discover the non-egoic, a different way of living, a new way of seeing, an expansive consciousness.

But what does that mean?  Does that mean we have no more troubles, that nothing will ever bother us again, or that we handle challenges the way Superman throws villains over one shoulder and then another?  What it means is that we have come full circle; in completing the circle, we can see the true wood again, as if we were seeing it for the first time.  In doing so, we aren’t necessarily ecstatic, but we will more than likely feel delight, and we may have become aware that there is only another circle to begin, another level of consciousness, that an awakening isn’t the end of seeing the light but only another beginning of seeing it, again, as if again for the first time.

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The starting point of this particular journey is with the crazy-making disease of Alzheimer’s itself.  This is not necessarily my own journey as a caregiver at all.  Tevis retired nearly a decade ago from a prominent job as a curator of a prestigious library's special collections.  Her mother kept her tied to her apron strings all of her life.  In fact, although Tevis and I have known each other for nearly a quarter century, her mother successfully kept us apart until she died seven years ago.  Although Tevis and I lived together twenty-five years ago, her mother broke us apart and kept us apart.  After her mother died, and after Tevis’s loyal caregiving for her, we came together like a confluence of two rivers.  I had come to know something was wrong with Tevis.  We would see each other both before and after her retirement.  We would usually break up again before the holidays since her mother had invented a lie about me when it was she who had lied about me.  I had intuited something was wrong with Tevis right after she retired.  I only wish I had the patience then, and not necessarily the lack of patience I have now, to have stood with her those years ago.  

Her family had always interfered with her private decisions, even when she was well into her fifties.  So, my caregiver’s journey begins well ahead and well behind that of the reader’s journey.  My journey with Tevis posits its beginning in both this life and a previous life.  We never had a “conventional relationship.”  There were always psycho-spiritual events in our lives together, always.  However, I’m not writing here about whether a reader believes in visitations, angelic orbs, or the inexplicable appearances of blue lights. I’m only attempting to address the extremely painful and terrible tragedy that so many are now experiencing in coping with Alzheimer’s: both sufferers and caregivers.

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Immersion by hot Floridian seawater or by Scandinavian ice club dipping makes no difference in climate but in intensity.  Alzheimer’s is a disease of intensity: becoming immersed in the abyss of what sufferers experience and the rawness of what caregivers also feel in their care of a loved one. The struggle is felt both corporeally and spiritually.

The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is actually rather slow in taking shape, in my experience.  I guided Tevis through at least eight different health care providers before we fortuitously found Dr. Amanda Mullen.  She has made a huge difference.  She has “diagnosed” Tevis with Alzheimer’s, but she is a “brain change” therapist.  “Brain change” is yet another phrase for “Alzheimer’s,” whose visage changes like mercury.  The true “diagnosis’ will be this month when Tevis has an MRI, which Dr. Mullen has been wanting her to have for some time, since she believes Tevis may have physiological augmentation to her brain, specifically to her amygdala.  Upon the MRI and her verbal assessment by a well-respected Alzheimer’s expert, Tevis’s condition will then be finally documented after some years.  What this means is that she may very well be recommended to go to a “memory loss center,” as opposed to an “assisted living facility,” which, as Dr. Mullen asserts, she will no longer qualify for since she can no longer do things on her own.

Immersion can be slow, and it can be quick.  Actually, immersion is both at once, I believe.  I do understand that flashbacks can be useful in depicting many elements of this story, but actually, what I build here is what I have also practiced: “finding the luminous in the commonplace.”  Living in the moment also contains “flashbacks.” I must also relay that what is attempted to be depicted here about the disease of Alzheimer’s is essential but that what I have offered about both the challenge that Tevis and I have experienced from both the perspective of Alzheimer’s the disease and her family, especially a mother whose grip on her was cruel as it was unrelenting, aside from my own connection with Tevis, rips apart the so called plot of this story even before the disease of Alzheimer’s develops fully.

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This process, one of rigor and of practice, opens one to what I call “Christness,” which deepens our sense of humility, which extends our compassion in ways we never before imagined.  We gain a kind of control, not in having power over another, but in gaining control over ourselves, by degrees.  The third chakra is often described as a center of power, located at our solar plexus, but when it is optimally inflected inwardly in having control over ourselves, instead of an authoritarian control over others, our spiritual lives begin to grow exponentially.

However, Christness is not merely concerned with growth of any kind, except in its opening the heart, which is the fourth chakra, to the power of compassion.  If Christness basks, it basks in compassion – active compassion.  Active compassion is a form of active loving.  Active loving can be thought of as a plumbline drawn throughout the practice of the presence of God, especially in the knowing that living in such a way doesn’t and won’t ensure happiness, or the surface living of only wanting to just experience joy.  Active loving is hard work.  It is the practice of daily ardor.  Active loving that takes heart and fervent rigor.

In speaking with a friend about immersion, control, and practice, I thought about light, compassion, and active loving, then wrote the following poem, regarding what it must feel like for my partner to experience her memory loss, the confusion brought about by her Alzheimer’s disease, her sense of being abandoned by the world – how trying to remember what she can no longer remember might just be like trying to catch fish with her hands.

Christness

Its suchness can be found

in wandering the empty

streets just before the dawn.

Luminosity isn’t something

that we think of as being

hidden, but its depths can be.

What it is that releases it

is compassion, as in listening

to your partner’s confabulation,

or the story her mind has

made up, about going to visit

the elderly woman who lives

in the yellow house at the head

of the street, the one who leaves

the front porch light on,

or in how your partner struggles

to remember now, how that

for her is like trying to catch fish

with her hands, her mind aswirl

and the iridescent water

rocking and rocking around her.

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Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press). Poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Healing Muse, Montreal Review, North American Review, Pensive, Poetry London, Rattle, Upstreet and Your Impossible Voice. Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yuseff Komunyakaa as co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition.  He was also the winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize in 2018 for A Bird Who Seems to Know Me. Books of nonfiction include Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (Brooklyn, NY:  The Operating System, 2018), On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (New York & Lisbon: Adelaide Books, 2018), and A Writer’s Statements on Beauty: New and Selected Essays and Reviews (Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts, 2022).