Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you. --D. H. Lawrence
It is grey. The sky is grey, the water lapping at my tiny, becalmed boat is grey and the fog in front of my eyes is so thick it is impossible to see where I am going. As to the fog behind--well, I didn’t want to go back there anyway. I can’t go back. When did everything lose its definition? And when, in this waking nightmare, did I lose my oars?
Every good story begins at an end. It may have been surprising - a lost job, illness or a sudden event. It may have been suspected, "irreconcilable differences," or the growing awareness that you have crumpled inside, despite an apparently "successful" life. But it is an end. All seasons end.
I wonder what time it is, or even what day? I cannot stand what I do anymore, there is nothing here for me. But how did I get here, what was it? Something that ended me here.
We call it a "midlife crises," or more thoughtfully stated, the "Middle Passage." We of the Age of Cynicism toss the term "midlife crises" lightly, along with jokes about office dalliances and fading vitality even as we look about the worn furniture of our own lives and wonder "is this all there is?"
The timing, midlife or later, doesn’t really matter, the tide is upon you when the structure of the everyday - routine, people and objects - suddenly seem strange, grey and utterly disagreeable. The material world and your position in it seem to be dissolving and you wonder if you are going mad. Modern day living calls for therapy, something to fix us, patch it up and set us right.
Those of an earlier age called it something different. The Irish story that refers to a deep, oceanic voyage to the Otherworld is called an "immrama." These are the Celtic wonder tales in the western sea to mysterious strange islands. Some scholars believe these tales to be the remains of a "Celtic Book of the Dead," a navigational tool for the souls of those passing on. This may be so, but I believe that the immrama tales more importantly offer a compass for the souls of the living.
I thought I saw something or did I feel something? That is why I came this way. I’m alone, even when I’m surrounded by people. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll make a break, start something new, anything to change how I feel.
The imram begins today, as it did a thousand years ago, with a day slightly different. Something divine beckons or throws us out -- an unseen turn of events, an affair or a quiet, unsettling voice that pushes us on.
Once adrift, like the heroes of old, we wonder what to do-- what power can we call down to rescue us from our growing estrangement from the mainland? Rather than face the disintegration of the end, we force false beginnings. We may try a new job, a new relationship, alcohol or therapy. We may set goals and enforce routines, anything to regain control and halt the grey fog that encroaches from all sides.
But the petty structure of the world’s illusions cannot hold against the rising of the dark oceanic swell of life. Thrash as we will, we are swept far beyond the pale, committed to the sea and the Otherworldly forces that govern it.
I’m losing it. I feel like I’m bumping into stumps and dark trees in the water. I can’t see. Something is swimming down there, but it’s dark, I can’t see. I keep waiting but it is still dark, there is no dawn. No one is coming, I’m lost. Somebody help me, please somebody help.
There is a reason that the midlife experience is called a "crises" or a "passage." It is a disorienting journey into death and disintegration. It is not a condition that can be resolved by an external action -- a divorce, a job plan, a holiday. It is an internal condition -- the requirement at midlife to finally meet one’s Self, the Other that carries the calling to which we were born. Before that fateful meeting can occur, however, the first life, the life built on childhood conditioning and expectations must die. Not change, not accommodate, not compromise -- die.
Dissolution is necessary to break up the old habits that govern our roles and behaviors. Room must be made for a new way of thinking, for change and a new identity.
To someone experiencing this dissolution, life can become emotionally and physically frightening. Thinking becomes spacious, disconnected and befuddled, tasks are not easily accomplished, external events occur that seem to be connected to one’s growing anxiety. The universe seems to be collapsing and with it, the tacit agreement with life that if one acts a certain way, that everything will turn out reasonably well.
We see in nature the very cycle we experience as humans. Despite the pretty colours and the crisp breeze, autumn marks the time of disintegration. Rarely do we respect autumn for what it actually is, the Fall - a spinning decomposition into darkness and death for all things that live. It is easy for me to write that an old identity must die, but it is painfully difficult to live it.
I give up, some part of me has died. I’m nothing. If I don’t move I can’t be knocked down. I’ll sit. I’m safe if I sit. Paralyzed. I’ll wait. Nothing will happen if I don’t try anything. I’m safe in the dark, no one can see me.
With the descent into winter, we go fallow. Like a caterpillar in its chrysalis we have literally dissolved into our own elements. As Robert Frost writes, one is "lost enough to find yourself."
When one is lost at sea, it is at the moment when one accepts that the one’s former life is irretrievably gone that the wind picks up every so slightly. With the acceptance of loss, one’s load becomes lighter and the currach floats more gently on the waves. All Otherworldly experiences are initiatory and our voyageur now begins the "lonely pioneering of the soul," responsible for navigating their own course through transition.
What was that!? It can’t be, I dealt with that a long time ago, that has to be over. God help me, I’m as scared now as I was when I was then, why did that happen to me? How is it possible that it’s still here?? Why does it have to come back?
Because our traveler accepted the death of what was, he is no longer bogged down, anchored in one spot. He is more easily able to pilot the liminal ocean of the Otherworld.
Having surrendered physical and emotional integration, our voyageur begins to encounter the mysterious islands and fabled monsters that lie in the unconscious sea. Guided only by instinct now, each successive island visited will represent a place or a condition that has laid long forgotten in memory.
The more frightening of the monsters of the immrama tales are those events and fears that hold a special terror for our explorer, having been cast out to sea as long ago as childhood. One by one, the lonely coracle encounters these sometimes fearsome, sometimes friendly places. To some islands we go ashore, to some we wisely pass by. This is the task of this time of death, this time between dreams, to take a hard look at the dragons and set them and ourselves free.
To some voyageurs, as in the immrama tales, the islands will prove too tempting or too devastating and they will be wrecked forever on those shores, their journey abandoned. But to those who sail on, the paradoxical review of their own nature will show them who they were, who they no longer are and provide clues as to who they might become.
I can breathe out here. I can’t see where I’m going, but now that I think of it, it isn’t really so bad. I’m still kicking. I seem to be able to get around and that’s okay. It is so dark though, why can’t it ever be light? It feels like there is a way though, it seems crazy, like there’s a path and I just have to follow it, like I already know what to do in some weird way, I just have to follow it.
No longer lonely, the solitary voyageur glides on. Eschewing social convention and rigid expectations, our traveler accepts instinct as the only true guide.
From her dark ocean journey, the voyageur will bring back insight to create, to act upon and to share with others. A new world will be found when it is time. Those who have made the passage will not turn back. They know the world they left no longer serves them and should they try, they, like Neachtan or Oisin, will crumble to dust.
Having traveled through the Fall and through deathly winter, the small boat broaches a new season, spring. The Celtic spring begins on Imbolg, February 2 and in this season all who have truly traveled the route of death will be reborn. Not reformed, not adjusted, but born again into a uniquely mysterious life that stretches before them. Every good story ends with a beginning and all seasons begin again.
The fog is thinning a bit, what is that? I can see a dim shoreline, looks like a different country. I’ve made it somewhere. I can say no more of the adventure as I’ve not heard it myself. But it looks like good ground underfoot and a sun somewhere above so I’ve got to press on, into this strange, new land.