Everything

I had a nightmare at age seven about a terrible illness that manifested as holes all over my hands and threatened to spread. In the dream my hands were in my lap as I watched the holes appear. Instead of seeing through the holes to the jeans on the other side, there was a deep, swirling darkness.

Later that year I stumbled though a field near my parents house and into a cave. As I entered the cave it began to spin. I looked toward the exit and it became a swirl.

My childhood mind often returned to explore the concept of emptiness and, to be more precise, nothingness. Though my life was just beginning I could not stop thinking about what would happen when I stopped thinking. If there was no more me and therefore no more thoughts, what was there?

I learned in elementary school about black holes. It’s what happens when a star dies, they said. One moment it is alive and full of energy and then it isn’t. Sometimes, they said, it happes so gradually as to barely be detectable. Other times, bang, supernova. The star collapses. The radiant and expansive becomes small and dense. Energy contracts, sinks inward and creates the hole.

I thought about nothingness and, sometimes, I became the nothingness. I’d snap out of it and tell myself not to do it again. I wondered why I went there and if it was normal. Did other kids go there, too?

As a teenager I took LSD in a school bus that was converted into a home. It was cold and clear as I stared at the night sky, amused by shooting stars and the movement of the galaxy. The stars were brighter than anything I’d ever seen and around them was the darkest of darkness. I looked at my hands. Like the sky, they would not stop shifting and changing. The lights in the sky flickered and the lines on my palms reached beyond my hands. The next day, at school and sleep deprived, I watched small black ants crawl over the chairs in my home room. As they moved they got larger and larger until they merged in to one black mass. I went to the bathroom, threw up and returned to see normal chairs and no more ants.

I don’t remember my own birth or what it felt like to experience light for the first time. But I do remember those of my children. It was pure alchemy. The ripped open is turned inside out to transformed one into two. Fear and pain mixed with love and hope and nothing became everything.