-Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

I cannot convince myself of an afterlife. The great belief that suffering will pass onto bliss and reunion eludes me. I’m not sure why—upbringing, rationalism, or simply a lack of imagination. I have certainly tried to find faith, though, through mystics, genuflection, and speaking to the open air.

I have had odd religious experiences this year. After reading The Upanishads at home one morning, a man at the grocery store came up to me in the middle of his shopping and asked if he could pray for me. He told me Krishna was the devil. A few months later, a woman on the street said she sensed something divine in my spirit and wanted to pray for me.

I have also been moved by Christian art: Mary holding Jesus, Bulgakov’s retelling of Pontius Pilate; a man embedded with a cruciform nailing himself to a tree that burns him to death everyday; Abraham binding Isaac.

As it stands, I remain unconvinced.

Where I have landed, in the meantime, is monism—a sort of compatibilism for the afterlife—which posits that all of reality derives from one substance.

The tradition is thousands of years old. Indian texts speak of the Brahman, Thales argues that everything derives from water, Spinoza says that God/Nature is the only substance of the universe. The theory satisfies my rational side through the advancements of modern science. Quantum mechanics suggest that subatomic particles are interchangeable: a negative substance turned positive can immediately change the charge of a paired particle at inconceivable distances.

This theory allows an afterlife. A person continues to exist after death by returning to the single substance—the water, the sun, you. Or maybe by way of eternal recurrence, where, given the infinitude of time, this Substance will repeat this exact instantiation of the World forever (this, of course, can also be a terrifying thought, as the pains one suffers will repeat for eternity).

I am also attracted to this theory for its fundamental connection to nature. Emerson, the American Idealist, captures the essence of the thought beautifully:

“[In nature] I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

-Emerson, Nature

So death, in the meantime, is something like Nature. I am the son, after all, of Emerson, Berry, Whitman, Thoreau. I will continue to look for a faith that better protects my ego in this life and what comes after, but for now, I await my return to humus and the cosmos.

I spoke with a friend about the framed sheet of handwritten music that was left between the walls by the home’s previous owner. I told her about the two women who stopped me at the top of the driveway and told me they were the previous owners of our house.

My friend said it is “the” house, not “my” house, “our” house, or “their” house.

I wondered if I, like the previous owners, had a memory for every part of the house. I watch, standing by the hearth, as a child leans his hand on the stove pipe. I lay on the kitchen’s linoleum, straining to see if the dog is asleep in the nook of the bench. I peer down the basement steps, relieved to see the intruder is just my brother.

There is a great heaviness to home. A weighted blanket, one can fall deep into its memories; so inviting to pull the cover over one’s head. But the heaviness is borne just as it is welcomed.

When even a bowl holds an argument and a slammed door recalls a death, how can one become anything but the house? So bundled up in it that one cannot become beyond it.

The weight starts at home, but travels outward—to town, to state. One always carries home. Home is a heaviness, and unless one steps out of it, one becomes only its shadow.

My mom has never been the type to hang the little wood signs that read “Live. Laugh. Love.” Empty spaces are instead covered with Wendell Berry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her all-time favorite, though, is “nevertheless, she persisted.” She writes it, magnetizes it, and puts it in her email signature.

Another staple of our house is cinnamon-sugar toast. It’s exactly what it sounds like: bread, butter, and cinnamon-sugar sprinkled on top.

A few days ago, with no food in the house, my mom made herself some. Since then, I’ve heard strange conversations around the house:

“Something’s wrong with the cinnamon.”

“Erik, you have to start using a different knife, you’re getting garlic and onions all over the butter.”

As supreme leader, my mom would banish all aromatic veggies. This morning, my dad—the brunt of her smell complaints—said she had garlic breath.

Over lunch my mom told me, “Don’t eat any of that cinnamon-sugar, something’s wrong with it.”

I finally put it together that, a few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I made a Cajun dinner. I had leftover seasoning, so I put it in a small glass bowl and put it with the rest of the spices.

My mom has been dousing her buttered bread with cajun seasoning. She just kept on eating it. She’d eat two slices at a time and complain about a burning mouth and an aching stomach.

That is the vignette I’ve always wanted for my mom. She’ll stay on the line for hours to reach a representative; go to physical therapy a day after surgery so she can hold her granddaughter; drive hours to console a friend who’s having a bad day.

Nevertheless if it’s bread, butter, and cajun seasoning, she persists.

In a recurring dream of my late brother, he tells a joke and I begin to cry.
My siblings turn to me, confused.

The last time the dream came to me, I knew that it is where I’ll be when I die.

The house will smell of cinnamon and woodsmoke.
Autumn will swirl down from the tired trees.

My aunts and uncles will laugh at each other’s expense,
My grandpa will curse the football game,
My nieces and nephews will catch up in the kitchen.

My mom will be at the head of the table and my dad will sit on the stairs with the dog.

When I close my eyes for the last time, my brother will tell a joke and, as in a solo,
I will step out of time.

and tells me to guess who.

I feel my sister’s cool hands

but someone else speaks.

He stands in the kitchen

a month after his death.

Sunlight against his back

he laughs at my tears.

The last time I see him

I ask him to stay.

I think I say I love you

as he walks out the door.

Dry-rotted and opaque

fleeting and confused.

I’m not my memories.

I can’t be.

In college, I had debilitating panic attacks. I worked through them by picturing the stream by my apartment, clear water meandering toward the Potomac. I imagined that nameless current, moving among smooth rocks and colorful sands for centuries longer than I’ve existed, flowing through time and panic.

Apparently, the “blue mind” is a studied phenomenon: survey respondents report a greater sense of well-being and calmness when living near a body of water. While my schoolwork has taught me to be skeptical of studies, I think that the blue mind holds value without empirical data.

When I was in middle school, my brother told me that he could never live somewhere that is landlocked. I thought that was silly. Why limit yourself? A few years later, stuck in Denver and surrounded by mountains, I realized I couldn’t either.

I walk to my neighborhood pier every day. I sit on my brother’s bench, dangle my feet in the water, close my eyes and let the wind tousle my hair. Often, I feel in a state of flow, as though I’m immaterial. Sometimes, I’m submerged in memories: laughing as I watch my cousin hand over $8 to my brother, who jumped in and retrieved a bag floating downstream; crying as I pike a catfish that swallowed my fishing lure; panting as I fight the current in a deflating dinghy.

There’s a book in which a group of scientists goes to a planet that is made entirely of water. The ocean presents the researchers with living forms of their repressed memories. One character is tormented by a dead lover, another confronts a towering version of his childhood self.

Our sea, too, can project the parts of ourselves we can’t normally find. I wade into the South River, the Yukon, the Nile—into self, repression, and loss.

If I could convince you to love the sea, I could convince you to love it all.

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I recently started going to the gym. There’s a man who’s often there when I am. He looks like he’d speak with an Irish brogue -- shock-blue eyes and bright orange flecks in his graying, close-shaven hair. He benches with two 45-pound plates on each end of the bar until I lose count of his sets and reps.

He never wears earbuds when he’s working out. Today I asked him if he could check my deadlifting form. He told me he doesn’t deadlift, that he’s worried about hurting himself and that he’ll get to them eventually. We went back to doing our separate workouts.

After his next set, he told me he’s finally getting into online shopping. We talked about how easy it is to return things through Amazon. I told him my cousin would buy Xboxes at Best Buy and return them the day before the return window closed. He told me that he didn’t like not being able to try stuff on before he bought it.

We kept talking between sets: about my phone that only does talk and text, the gym only having one squat rack, how nice it is to have an apartment with a pool. Somehow we got to conspiracy theories. He told me that he has a long history of substance use and that when he was using, the cops released him over and over so that they could use him to catch other people. He said he recently lost his mom, dad, and brother and he worried that his past was the cause. I listened and asked questions in a way that I had been unable to when my brother was alive.

I said he might’ve known my brother, Chad. After eight years, it was the first time I told a stranger -- not an amorphous application board or a therapist -- that my brother died. I showed the man a picture of Chad and me. Whether he did or not, he said he remembered Chad. We talked about Narcotics Anonymous, halfway houses, about grief and healing. He told me that people with use disorders are the kindest people in the world, too sensitive and broken to function in the society created for us.

I told him that I was going to school to study bioethics. He said that many people who use find sobriety by giving themselves to God, but that we need a more holistic approach. We must’ve talked for 45 minutes. At the end of the our conversation, I told him how glad I was that he was doing well.

It wasn’t until he shook my hand with a wide, toothy smile that I realized I had been talking to my brother.

I am drawn to the connection between this idea and jazz. I listen to it frequently, but I never want to learn more about what is going on, the chord changes and arpeggios, what I hesitate to call rules, as they are so frequently broken. There are never lyrics, no guidelines for how one should feel. Sometimes the musicians groan, but I doubt that they are aware of this. The music comes as it does, improvised, pure, nothing lost to the barriers of language.

By this non-defining, I feel love intensely and almost all the time. I feel it when my mom props open the door to her office, when my niece plays with a broken Game Boy, when my girlfriend pulls a La Croix from her purse at the dog park. I feel it among strangers, when I struggle with a woman at the grocery store to separate two shopping carts, when the postal service clerk laughs and tells me the return label says UPS and not USPS, when a car with too many “student driver” stickers goes past.

Language is the house of being, but there must be more outside. Say I love you and say it never.

“No.”

“So you’re vegan?”

“Yes.”

He went on to tell me about the horrors of malnutrition and asked if I was getting all of the essential amino acids. I asked if he could tell me how many there are.

He said he’d be happy to discuss ethics with me any time. Maybe I didn’t feel a need to defend myself, or a desire to persuade my psychiatrist, maybe I was afraid about losing a conversation-turned-debate, but I let the topic die.

Here are my simplest arguments for not eating meat. The only presupposition is that one should not cause unnecessary suffering.

I like the taste of meat.

Is 15 minutes of sensory pleasure worth the life of something?

Animals are below us on the food chain, we can eat them—we’ve even evolved to do so (e.g., canine teeth))—so I’m not wrong in doing so.

Does might equal right? There was a time when we needed to eat animals to survive, but in the 21st century (and likely if you’re reading this) it’s a choice.

For some people it’s not a choice.

If a group of people needs to eat animals to survive, so be it.

It is difficult to become vegan / I don’t feel like being vegan.

If you saw a child face down, drowning in a puddle, would you go into the puddle and pull them out, even though it meant ruining your shoes? It’s true we can only care about so much, but to care about sentient things at such little personal cost should be a baseline.

It has never been easier to be vegan. There are replacements for many animal products, many of which are indistinguishable in taste from the real thing.

My choice to not eat meat will not bring any greater change.

Likely it won’t, but what if everyone said that? Why try to make any positive change? Humans have a rich history of change.

I cannot get proper nutrition from eating plants.

Yes you can. Two examples as I’m not inclined to make an exhaustive list: protein - there are many sources of protein not from animals. Amino acids are found in all foods, hence cows growing muscles and functioning while living off grains or grass. micronutrients - You are likely lacking micronutrients anyway, so take a multivitamin. Cereals and plant milks are often fortified.

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." - Emerson

"The question is not can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer?” -Bentham