How To Bring Yourself Back To Life

What if you could close your eyes and everything would get really quiet, but not the scary quiet like the middle of the night when you fling the covers off, when you panic your child is not breathing, when the ceiling presses into your chest and it’s all you can do to find a light, any light, a lamp, a flashlight, the light from a computer screen. The quiet of the moon, like last weekend on Vashon Island when you stood by the water and watched the yellow moon set as an old man, had to be ninety, explained the difference between waxing and waning, and a deer ran behind you, a woman yelling, “Get out of here!” before turning to you and saying how they were just rats with legs. That part wasn’t quiet but the sucked in breath as we all stood looking at the sliver of the moon, the lapping of the water, the hoof beat of deer (not that I could hear any of it with my deaf ears but this is a fairy tale, you see, so please, if you will, imagine that kind of moonquiet).

So, what if you could get that kind of quiet by simply closing your eyes?

This is a story of quiet. In a land far away, where there is no, or at least less social media and phones and selfies and likes and shares and influencers and fake news, and Trump, there is no Trump, all you have to do is do what you say you are going to do. A mermaid lives in this far away land and she teaches its inhabitants how to come back to life. She told us that for long stretches at a time she was dead, she forgot how to swim, or that she deserved to swim, but that she resuscitated herself by remembering. Through remembering.

She will ask of you what do you need to do to bring yourself back to life and if you are willing to not only answer but to tell the truth, tits to the wind, and then do the things you say (life is so simple there, really) you will find that you have that kind of quiet, that the world falls away as it draws closer and instead of feeling like you don’t matter, or that you are not part of the world, you start to realize, in this far away quiet space, that you are matter, that you are the world as much as you are in it.