“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.” James Joyce, Dubliners
“I’ll ply the fire with kindling and pull the blankets to my chin/I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and I’ll bolt my wandering in/I’d like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so/But she’s got the urge for going so I guess she’ll have to go.” Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
I was 27 when a friend got me an appointment with a local psychic/counselor. Although I had just completed my dissertation—and was invested both in being and being perceived as a Highly Rational Person—I agreed to go, despite my skepticism, because it was a gift, and because I was unhappy enough to accept just about any potential leg up. As I sat across from the psychic, her study piled with dusty books, she stated specific facts about me that she could not have known, and made detailed predictions, most of which turned out to be weirdly accurate. She also described what she called my “soul-level” entry into incarnation, which, according to her, was as an especially reluctant infant. “All human beings carry some residual desire for our true home when we incarnate,” she claimed, “but you are more deeply marked by such longing than most.”
It’s no coincidence that as October ends, once again, I turn this memory over in my mind. Now with Autumn in full expression, after weeks of lingering back beyond the burnt orange horizon. Soon, I know, this season will steal my warmth, my light, and threaten my easy optimism. And in this hangover following the blinding ebullience of summer, I am tempted to say that the “real” me is returning. That is, the person I have mostly imagined myself to be over the decades, that diffident soul described by the psychic, that somber individual with one foot in the metaphysical, eternal, the spiritual beyond. If my love for summer has never been wholehearted, then, it is because Summer has repeatedly lured me into the empirical world —the scent of warm skin, baking concrete, and tomato leaf—only to leave me here, strung out and achy once the party has ended.
But before I proceed, I want to clarify that the psychic’s description resonated with me only because it reflected what I already suspected to be true about myself. To paraphrase James Joyce, I often felt as if I were living at a little distance from my body. As the psychic said: “Your soul was unsure about taking on this bodily assignment.” The fact that my very first favorite radio song is a melody rooted in a tune meant for old Jewish men, “Those Were the Days,” has confirmed my sense that I was born already aged and wistful. I would have been a toddler when this paean to nostalgia was first released. So even before I’d assimilated the ditties of Captain Kangaroo, I’d absorbed its pathos: “Those were the days my friend. We thought they’d never end. We’d sing and dance forever and a day….Oh, yes, those were the days.” Although my attachment to such a world weary song amused the adults around me, to me it has always felt exactly right that these were some of the first words I ever strung together.
I understand, though, that my inclination to even partially accept that I exist in this incarnation as the continuation of some previous personality is at odds with much that I love about Buddhism. From that point of view, after all, we are effectively reborn, not just at our actual births as wailing infants, but with each day, indeed, with each breath. “Rebirth” in this context, we might say, is more metaphorical than real. And, wow, there is such glorious freedom in knowing that so long as I stay rooted in the present moment I am unconditioned and unmarked, fresh in the face of whatever presents itself next. It’s a far cry from the psychic’s suggestion that some well formed version of me dropped in to this particular lifetime as just one more chapter in a perhaps eternally unfolding story of me.
But even though it is the account of fresh, perpetual re-creation that attracts me most of the time, it’s the psychic’s version that tugs at me when the winds shake the red and gold leaves to the ground. As the days compress and the tree sap grows sluggish, as the earth molders and I zip my jacket up high, I begin to recognize myself, again, as endemically and contentedly nostalgic. As that baby born already an old man. As an alien plunked down only briefly, not long enough even to fully understand this strange mind and body. And so my rebirth into November this year is, once again, as a weary vagabond. For this flickering seasonal moment, I am all the daughters and brothers and husbands and widows from across the ages. I am one tattooed by losses so distant and tender she feels compelled to grieve even though she cannot remember for what or for whom.
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