A Reluctant Dig
I’ve always been ashamed of the ground. What’s beneath is never clean, but it always tells a truth.
I was away on an excavation when I learned about my Father’s death. It was sudden. I was in a cave somewhere in South America, living my life recklessly and joyfully. How disgusting was I?
He was suffering, he never told me, he only encouraged me to indulge in this perishable experience of life. So I ran with it and embraced the digging. I found out about his death right before I entered the cave. I had two choices, go into the cave or turn around and face the eventual demise of everything I’ve ever known. A life without my Father awaited me, and yet the cave seemed oddly scarier.
I began the repel into the darkness. My team at my side. It was a short excavation, we were mining a rare calcite crystal.
My Dad bought me crystals when I was little. He saw the magic in my eyes when holding them in the light. I memorized their origins and often it led me to believing that they had powers. If Nikola Tesla believed it, why couldn’t I?
In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being.”
– Nikola Tesla
He wasn’t the kind of Dad to break my reality, he watered it and let it grow. So as I started to repel, I placed my hand on my first section of the rock wall, and I lost time.
I was thrown back into my childhood backyard. I was digging a mud pit for my barbie. The mud was so soothing and smelled intoxicating. A perfect form of entertainment for Barbie. I was concentrating on the mud and my stomach began to feel tingles inside, I was happy. With a gasp of air, I came back to the rock wall and shook my head and continued on with the dig. Now I know why the cave was scarier this time around. I can’t escape my past. It’s all down below with every touch of the wall. I will remember my childhood and the beautiful life that I had with my Dad.
I began to slowly cry.
Crying during an excavation is not ideal. So the tears just fell like rain drops from the sky, and I let them journey down my face and into the nape of my neck. Letting go of the fear of remembering. All that happened before this day of reckoning.
Hours had passed and I finished the dig and began the climb up. I had one more step to take before I made it out, when I slipped. It happened so quickly that all I thought of was how I might get to see my Dad again if I died.
The morbidity and selfishness of that is shocking. But he was a love of my life and facing his departure wasn’t anything I cared to experience. Digging and adventures yes, endings and goodbyes, no thank you.
I felt a hand take my hand and pull me up. It was an older gentleman and he looked like my Dad. I couldn’t help but get out of that hole as fast as I could, only to realize it was just one of the tour guides that lead us to the cave.
Was it him or the tour guide, I could have swore it was his face staring back at me? The truth is, it was him, I will see him everywhere I look now. I’ll have this same questioning. He is in the beyond and my only way to reach him is the very place he helped to dig out, my imagination, my connectivity to things that appear lifeless, but are not.
My father was a miner, he mined my heart and what was discovered was a shinier version of myself.
