Fennel Tea and The Aether

Breathing The Air of the Gods

The past year of my life has been a whirlwind.

The cool Christians would call it “disruptive” - interrupting the normal comings and goings of how things normally went down. Disturbances to the method of operations.

I don’t tend to use such language.

To me it feels like heaven and hell got thrown into a blender and I’ve been force fed to cocktail. Strained over ice. Served in a copper cup.

And without going into the details of my metaphorical heaven and hell, this is something we all experience. The paradoxical juxtapositions of great joy and sorrow.

And how do we manage day to day in the midst of that ?

How do we just go on living, normally, when normal has been obliterated ?

What I’m trying to say is this :

Sometimes in life we experience these moments of transcendent joy - finding love, having a kid, the job of our dreams, and anything else that fills us to the brim.

And then we also experience these moments of devilish sorrow - losing a loved one, sickness, breakups, and any other sorrowful suffering that drains the very colour from our faces.

And often, as I look at life, those moments overlap.

We experience them both, at the same time.

Heaven and Hell.

And the normalcy, the ordinary, no longer exists.

Learning From the Sages

It’s not secret that literature and poetry are central to my life - from Chaucer to Chesterton, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Dostoevsky - authors, of all kinds, have shaped how I think and feel and interpret the world around me.

And here’s one thing I’ve learned :

There are no normal moments.

I used to think there were, but that’s mostly because I didn’t have eyes to see the Wonder, the Beauty, the Magic. It wasn’t until, as is the case with everything, great joy and great pain exorcised the proverbial scales from my eyes.

I could see clearly.

For two reasons.

Beauty showed me what life could, should be.

Sorrow showed me what life was never intended to be.

And then all moments made sense.

All moments became sacred, signposts towards Fullness; and the overlap of those moments, the heavens and hells, became “thin places”. Places where the life to come seemed to reach into my own life.

Why ?

Because I was looking at the same moment from both sides.

You’re Gonna Carry That Weight

Currently I’m on the ( knocks on wood ) the up and up from the hell of a myriad of medical emergencies. There are still vestigial remains of the nightmares, though - and that’s how it tends to be with all great suffering.

I still get the flutter in my throat and the subsequent physiological response of a tightening chest and pounding heart. Wondering if I’ll bleed again.

I take all sorts of pills and vitamins every day.

I drink fennel tea, litres of it, a day.

And even though they remind me of stale scent of Death’s Doorstep - they also remind me of my current joy - a heaven. My wife and son, my job, my friends and family, and deepest of all, the comfort of my God.

And when I breathe in now I make it an act of rebellion against Death.

I breathe in the Aether.

That’s the element the ancient Greeks believed the Gods enjoyed. Pure, fresh, clear sky, not the air of mere mortals.

I inhale the horizon.

Normalcy has given way to the infinite joy in sacred moments.

The joy and death I’ve confronted, we have all confronted, will always change our experience. Sometimes for good, sometimes, not.

And I know the choice to be ours.

And so, for those of you in the overlap, for those wading through the abyss of deepest sorrow and greatest delights, breathe in the Aether.

Inhale the air of God.

And accept the invitation to see life clearly.

It won’t eradicate your pain.

But it will set you free from being enslaved to it.