We'll Have Plenty of Time Together

We'll Have Plenty of Time Together

I didn't go to church today,
I trust Mother Divine will understand. 
The sun was shining in a cloudless sky
on daffodil shoots the height of my hand.
She knows, She knows how brief my play,
how short this spell of soft spring weather.
She knows when I am gone from here
we'll have plenty of time together.

After "I Didn't Go to Church Today" by Ogden Nash

I Didn't Go to Church Today

by Ogden Nash

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.

From The Best of Ogden Nash (c) 2007 Ivan R. Dee

          Ogden, I didn't go to church today either. No swirling surf in Iowa, but after the long winter, the daffodils are daringly poking green shoots up through last year's decaying leaf litter and the sun is perfectly warm for a long walk in the woods. 

          Ever since our 17-year-old kitty Pepper died, I have been having unexpected episodes of feeling my mortality, like a sudden electric jolt that stops me in mid-step. It's not the end of the body that shocks me into a momentary panic so much as the piercing knowledge that the sense of self that lives in my mind will all too soon be gone forever. 
          This existential angst is an old, familiar feeling that commenced at age 13. It felt like I was falling into a black hole, to be extinguished, eradicated, annihilated, forever and ever, even though the rest of the world might go on without end. I was utterly terrorized by the thought that "I" am just a brief blip in time, and nothing I heard in church about the immortality of the soul consoled me for the eternal loss of this particular mortal self. 
          Now, as the years advance and the moment of termination approaches, I do have more of a belief in the soul, but it seems like a sort of hazy cloud, a ubiquitous field without much distinct personality, at least not this personality, which will never ever be replicated. 
          Because I have such a keen sense of my time being limited, I feel an urgency to experience as much as I possibly can of this amazing world with this unique mind-body. So I spend as much time as possible in nature, adoring her ephemeral creation in a seemingly endless cycle of recycling into ever-new variations of old material.
          Perhaps when the body stops, this life will just seem like a dimly remembered dream, slipping away without any great sense of loss as the higher self entertains entrancing new possibilities. 
          Pepper, you whose body is now nourishing the roots of a Sassafras tree, how is it?