Big changes are like little deaths

With this newsletter, we take a wide swing away from the usual subject matter of Delaware Currents and into the transition that I’m experiencing as Delaware Currents closes up shop. If this is news to you, have a read of this for more backstory.

Anyone who’s ever gone through a significant transition — and who hasn’t? — might be like me: bouncing around, processing emotional highs and lows and open to whatever the universe throws at you.

This morning, in the car doing errands, I was listening to Fresh Air, the National Public Radio show (based in Philly, YAY!) 

Terry Gross, the host, was interviewing the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro about his latest release, Frankenstein.

And man, oh man, did he hit a nerve.

He, (like me) was terrified of death when he was a child. Listen in, for his reasons — and if we ever have coffee — I can regale you with mine!

But what hit me is his view now: He describes himself as a “groupie for death.”

WHAT?

Married to that, he’s also “interested in the allure — and torment — of everlasting life.”

“I’m a huge fan of death,” he says. “I think it’s the metronome of our existence…

“Without rhythm, there is no melody, you know? It is the metronome of death that makes us value the compass of beautiful music.”

I had to use this newsletter to write that all out to help me think my way through that thought.

And while I’m borrowing other people’s thoughts to help me with this little death, here’s something that Faith Zerbe, water watch director for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, appended to the end of her automatic response to emails while she is away.

Wild Geese – by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Back to del Toro, who said that during a time of great pain in his life, he resented the sunrise, because it didn’t care about his pain. Eventually he realized that he had it backward.

“I realized that it was my pain that didn’t care about the sun and that I needed to change that, that I needed to accept it. I needed to understand that the rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know?”

May you have room for sunrise.

Thanks for coming along on this strange trip.

Meg