I'm a little concerned about coming home and having nothing to say.
I have nothing certain to offer after all of this except the life I already live.
In one sense, what I've been doing has been no big deal. My life hasn't been any different than yours, except that I've been dissecting cadavers. Seriously. I eat and sleep and pee and shower and floss and go places and go home and interact with other people along the way, processing this life as it unfolds and exposes me at every turn without knowing where it's going. Isn't that what you've been doing?
And I'll come home in a couple days, and continue to do the exact same thing. Except I won't be dissecting cadavers. The end.
I don't say these things to diminish the gift I've been given the past three weeks. I'm beyond grateful for this opportunity and everything that's gone in to making it happen, from every direction.
We're getting closer to there being no body on the table. Today we eviscerated Rose's abdominal and thoracic cavities, leaving an unmistakeable emptiness. Liberating her viscera and lifting them up and out of her to be placed on our nearby prep table, I distinctly saw that I didn't know where Rose was. She wasn't the organs we removed, and she wasn't the skeleton and nerve tree and muscle remnants still on the workbench. It's interesting how we've called her Rose to love her and acknowledge her, and yet in naming her we've perpetuated the biggest story of all: that Rose was even here to begin with.
And so in another sense, what I've been doing has been utterly remarkable. Rose is revealing, in the most miraculous, eloquent way, that there is no body, just as there is no thing. That all the somebodies and somethings we tell stories about are cases of mistaken identities. They're the stuff of dreams that we mistake for the Beloved, and yet they're the Beloved dancing all the while.
And when that is seen, what more is there to say?
That doesn't mean I won't write, or I won't have stories to tell. But if you see me and ask me what I learned in California? I'll likely tell you, "Nothing." And I'll mean precisely that.
