marketing products for the mass consumption of middle America.
But I don’t know what the purpose might be.
Maybe I will find out someday.
Maybe my son will find out.
And what about that world that I glimpsed, that I almost entered? I think about it often. What was it? Heaven? Hell? Nirvana? Was it the place mystics and gurus see when they meditate for so long that they supposedly lose all sense of individual self? Or was it another dimension, existing concurrently with our own? I have read and reread “The Great God Pan,” and somehow I can’t buy that interpretation.
But I can’t offer an alternate theory.
Whatever it is, whether its origin is mystical or scientific, the existence of that glimpsed world somehow set to rest any anxieties I might have had about death and the afterlife. I don’t know that I was ever really bothered or worried about what might happen after death, but I must have been concerned at some level because I feel lighter now, more at ease. I don’t know if there is something after death — no one can know for certain — but I’m pretty sure there is, and it does not frighten me.
We still live here in Mendocino, by the ocean. In the mornings I write, while Jane watches Philipe and works in her garden.
We spend the afternoons together.
It is a good life, and we are happy, but I sense even now that we may eventually want more. I think sometimes of what James told me in Thompson, about there being a country of the Ignored, a land across the sea, an island or a peninsula where people like us live free and peacefully in a sovereign nation of our own.
And I think that it would be nice to raise children there.
And I stare at the water and I think to myself that someday, perhaps, I will learn to sail.
