Here is a photo of a dying zinnia.

October 2023 - I always get sad this time of year when all my zinnias begin to dry up. The look so “bad.” Until I get close and look at each of them individually. The thing about dying zinnias, is that even though they look dead, they are actually filled with the most life they’ve ever had, as they now are finalizing the production of their seeds.

I am now in the habit of harvesting my dried zinnias around this time of year. They sit in a giant paper bag in my basement, all winter, offering sweet hospitality to various spiders that enjoy taking up residence in my home.

Then in March, I take out the brown paper bag, and once or twice a month for the next three months, or so, I tear apart these dried zinnia heads and scatter their old dead petals all over my garden beds. Their dried petals now each hold fully-formed, mature zinnia seeds. And my garden has more and more zinnias and more and more butterflies every year.

But it takes their death this year to create new life for next year…

 4/13/23

- - -

Last night I awoke in the midst of a terrible nightmare. I lay in bed, unable to return to sleep due to the unsettled state of my soul.

Finally, after some time, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Or more like my own mind...

Since my sleeping imagination was the culprit for the dreadful feeling, I decided to hold it accountable for its wrong-doings. So I sentenced it to time in my waking mind. I didn’t give it a specific amount of time. It only had to restore my soul from this eerie sense of slow apocalyptic doom into a place where I could fall asleep again. Then it could be free to wander through the lands of my sleep once more.

- - -

I was on a cliff looking down into a slow moving river. At least, I thought I was. Yes, this looked like the perfect place to bring my family.

The gentle breeze took the bottom seam of my light gray dress and tickled my ankles just a bit. I didn’t notice. What I did notice was a bright white log floating down the river. Was it a log? Why was the end of it all black? What kind of tree had this been? I squinted. The log seemed to be wrapped, very tightly, in white cloth all the way around multiple times. Like some kind of mummy, except this mummy had a lot more cloth than normal. And it was wrapped so tightly, there was no way the cloth was ever coming off, except perhaps when it finally came time to decay. The end that was pointing downstream had what seemed to be a giant black plastic bag wrapped all around it. And it was taped with black duct tape, I suppose so as not to detach from the cloth.

What a strange sight. Why would someone do this? I squinted harder, looking over every inch of the log, hoping for more clues. Then, as I noticed the small break in fabric at the top of the log, I made eye contact... with my own eyes. They were squinting from inside the gap between the folds of the cloth right back up at me.

My consciousness was no longer inside the me on the cliff. I was now aware of my own floating on the river. I squinted one last time to try and make out the girl in the gray dress on the cliff, but she was gone.

Now the only thing in sight were my feet all wrapped up in the black trash bag, bobbing up and down in the water. I could also see some branches here and a wall of rocks there, as I passed them, but for the most part, the only thing consistently in sight was the slow forward progress of my bundled-up feet.

I wasn’t scared. I just didn’t understand how I got here. The last thing I could remember was planning a nice day at the creek with my husband and two small daughters. My husband. Where was he? Where were my daughters? Then instead of asking “where”, a thought came into my mind saying in more of a statement tone than question, “do they exist?” And then the conversation was over.

My aimless journey continued. I had begun to somewhat enjoy the forced relaxation and casual intake of nature, when a sense of dark omen crept into the depths of my heart, without any warning. There were no cues to any of my five physical senses. This was an alert to the sense of my soul. I suppose in some stories, it would be described as a premonition.

(In a movie, this is when a few high strings would break the silence by tip-toeing into the soundtrack, as if they know exactly what is about to happen, but they’re tip-toeing behind you, and they’re not going to tell you...)

I kept floating without any support from my physical senses on the subject of my premonition, but then my ears joined sides with my soul.

As far as I could tell, the river seemed to have come to a place with tall rocky walls on either side. To my left on the top of the wall came a voice now. It was the voice of a child. Not a small child, this was probably a ten or eleven year old. I couldn’t tell if he were a boy or a girl. I don’t believe the child saw me, or acknowledged that I was a person. The lack of response made me believe that he or she was all alone. The voice said, in a quiet and shivering note of fear blended with terror, “I haven’t heard any vomiting coming from the school in days now.”

And I floated on. What did that mean? Why was the child afraid? Isn’t it good to stop vomiting? But I wish I hadn’t asked. And very soon I wished I was anywhere other than this place.

Suddenly I heard the sound of something giant sliding down the rock wall on my left. Before I could wonder what it was, it crashed right into my feet, sending me into a slow spin. Within my spinning, I was able to see that it was another white log. Like me. But without the black garbage bag, and their head was uncovered, revealing their face. We both spun for a moment, bringing us at eye level with one another. Before I was able to hope for a moment of solidarity, I saw that their eyes were dead. There was no question.

The ominous feeling I had been marinating in transformed into shock and horror as cortisol broke down the doors of my heart to charge through every molecule of my being. But I couldn’t fight. Or fly. I was in absolutely no control of my body.

I’m sorry to have to tell you this next part, but immediately after this moment, the spin angled my eyesight right at the top of the rock wall ahead of me, where I could see maybe ten more of these corpses sliding down the wall into the water downstream. No one was there to push them. They were just mysteriously sliding, right at the exact time I was floating past. I'll never understand why or where they came from. One thing I did know for certain was that every one of them was dead. This wasn’t a fear or an assumption, it was a knowledge that just belonged to me. At the time I didn’t realize that there was actually something for me to be thankful for. But now that I recount the experience I am glad to say that they did not travel down the river with me. Each one slid across to the other bank and gathered all together, much like a cluster of actual logs, out of the reaches of the current.

I did have to pass by them, though. Which was so dreadful, I don’t even know how to express it. Maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t know why I would want anyone to understand or feel the way that I felt in that moment. Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and not get into too much detail about what I witnessed or how it all made me feel, for your sake. Isn’t that nice? I could choose to force you to not look away from the horror that was my nightmare, leaving you feeling a discomforting tickle in your heart for the rest of the day, or I could choose to move past this part, and perhaps leave it to be just a slightly less interesting story. I’m going to choose that. I’m sure you’ll get plenty of discomforting heart-tickles from that serial killer show you’ll be binging later tonight. Or maybe you’ll choose not to finish watching it, for the sake of your beautiful heart that beats and lives for you.

Anyway, after passing this horrific scene, I was officially terrified for the future of this strange world that I had found myself in, and I couldn’t shake the sense of impending doom. Gross and decaying doom.

I floated for a long while. I have no idea how long.

After some time, a new sound came from my feet. I looked down. They had brushed up onto a small sandy shore. The rest of me was still floating in the water, but I wasn’t headed downstream anymore. I was barely parked on the shore.

I have a habit of assuming the absolute worst possible scenarios. So of course I had started to believe that the child and I were the only people left in the world. I hoped and prayed that he or she would come find me and pull me ashore. As I prayed, I began to fall asleep. I woke to the sounds of a different child crying for her mommy. This one was probably about two or three and I knew it was a girl... somehow. I think I knew this girl.

Then someone was pulling my feet. I looked down to see a pair of hands with dirt under all the fingernails, and a gray ankle-length dress. The toddler was still crying... somewhere.

With my gray dress rustling, I crouched over my bundled up log-self and said, “hey, I know we don’t feel great right now, but our daughter is crying so I’ll be right back and then we can fix all of this, okay?”

I turned, grabbed a small branch on a tree, pulled it down and the tree zipped open like a sweatshirt. The screams from the child poured out of the tree into the strange river world. I turned to see my log-self again and said, “I know, I promise I’ll be back soon. I can’t really take it either.”

I stepped through the tree and into my bedroom. The tree automatically zipped up behind me and was gone.

I went into the other room and lay next to my child, holding her hand. She said, “I’m scared of the dark mommy.” I said, “I know sweetheart, me too. But we are the light and we can shine the darkness away.”

After she was asleep again, I reluctantly returned to my room. I didn’t know if I could fall asleep again. I couldn’t shake the vision of the corpses in the river. I lay in bed for a while. Then I went and got my paintbrush and paints. I painted a door on the wall in my room. I opened it and returned to the side of my log-self.

Her eyes were dead now, like the corpses in the river.
I said, “okay I’m back. Sorry about that. Everything is going to be fine now, but I’ll need your help.”

I took out my paints and began. First I painted a sweet cupcake yellow dress onto the white fabric. Then legs, arms, a neck, hands - all of it. In one of her hands I painted two paintbrushes and in the other two sets of paints. I painted my face onto the fabric, right on top of where my actual face was. I said, “it looks good.” And at that, the painting on the cloth transformed into reality, and all the white cloth fell to the ground around the living artist who now lay near a beautiful river on a lovely day. Now the log-me was a cheerful yellow-dress-me. She took the garbage bag off her feet and the cutest little white sandals were there. I don’t know whose imagination they came from. Not mine. But I loved them.

“Thanks!” she said. “What now?”

“Now we go find the others.”

“The dead ones?”

“They aren’t dead, they’re only sleeping.”

We returned to that dreadful place. But the ominous feeling did not come with us this time. Only hope and joy and cheer. They followed behind us like cherry blossom petals flowing in the breeze. Were they following us, or were they the ones guiding?

We painted the most beautiful clothes on our new friends. After each one was “good” they were restored. The work quickly became very light as we were all helping.

At the very end, the child appeared. It was a boy. He said, “I think all of the kids in my school are dead and I’m all alone.” Then he saw the transformation of the last sleeping corpse. She was a beautiful ten-year-old girl wearing a long blue lacy dress and little white sandals to match mine.

She said, “here, I have an extra paintbrush. Let’s go to your school, I would love to meet your friends.”

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

John 1:5

“We all come from [brokenness]. Things that have come together are taken apart. You can’t put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing you can do. You take two things that belong together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things. That’s the way the work has to go. So that the made thing becomes a kind of earnest — of your faith in, and your affection for, the great coherence that we miss and would like to have again.” - Wendell Berry