©2021 Jacob-Joseph Shefa
2020: “The Year of Seeing Clearly,” 2021, “The Year of the Phoenix”
Surfing the Loneliness Epidemic, Dreaming of Bob Dylan,
Becoming a Diaphanous Elder, Nearly Dying and Resurrecting from COVID-19
For Leesann and Evin Shefa
For believing I would make it home.
“And the cards are no good that you’re holding,
Unless they’re from another world.”
Bob Dylan, “Series of Dreams”
Surfing the Loneliness Epidemic
I always felt I was stronger than loneliness. From my years as a spiritually-inclined, introverted teen, on through the slow, steep climb into middle-age, and the threshold into elderhood, I savored being alone. I believed I had largely transcended that haunted, vulnerable state we call ‘loneliness.’
I was wrong; nearly dead wrong, as it would turn out. For so long, I failed to see I was fading into an amorphous member of what social scientists are calling ‘the loneliness epidemic.’ Even while I thrived in my professional life as a mentor and educator to adolescents, my inner life grew increasingly scarred by loneliness. The solitary state I once savored became a sort of incarceration; a lockdown.
A faithful, dogged companion, loneliness waited for me each day, greeting me at the gate as I exited the middle school where I worked. During the day, I was absorbed in my work with teenagers: teaching mindfulness and stress management; delivering social and emotional learning curricula, and providing individual mentoring for students struggling with mental and emotional health challenges. As heartbreaking as this work could sometimes be, the laughter and wonder still vibrant in these students’ eyes nevertheless filled my heart each day. It was only as I came outside into the twilight each night that my very bones ached and screamed silently with loneliness.
Long separated from my wife, I returned each night to a modest apartment in a bad neighborhood populated by people with broken dreams. On most evenings, a lonely dinner was followed by time spent writing in my journal and reading myself to sleep. I wrote a lot about how lonely I felt, and how this state of isolation could not go on.
As I navigated my days and trudged through my nights, I had no idea that loneliness might also be a kind of call; a gateway to a vibrant sense of mystery, and what you might call my final vocation: becoming an elder. I could not have known that the heralding event of this transformation would be a dream. Depth psychologist Carl Jung wrote about ‘big’ dreams; powerful catalytic messengers from the collective unconscious or imaginal realm that could transform a life. In my big dream, the co-starring player was none other than Bob Dylan, the eternal troubadour. We met at a sort of ‘gypsy camp’ high in the mountains where this sage elder posed a question about the purpose of my life. He taught a mysterious game whose rules I could not fathom.
Dreaming of Bob Dylan
I keep a journal each year, and always give it a title; my way of heralding in the themes I hope to embody in the year ahead. I titled my 2020 journal: “20/20: The Year of Seeing Clearly.” As I wrote these evocative words, I could not foresee how loneliness would continue to engulf me; nor that I was going to nearly die just a few months after penning this title. Before that pinnacle event though, I had a dream.
A haunting dream where I wandered; lost, high in the mountains. The very air swirling around me felt permeated with loneliness; yet, paradoxically, there was also a strange sense of peace in these heights. The loneliness I had been living through each day had now overflowed into my dream world. Was it escape from loneliness that called me to wander, or a quest towards something still more elusive? As mythologist and dream-master Michael Meade writes, oftentimes “the greatest gifts and deepest wounds lie in the same area.” Not long before I had this dream, I had begun to wonder, what if I stopped fleeing loneliness and instead, turned to face its call?
The dream: I am very high in the mountains, lost, wandering. It looks like the mountains high above New Mexico where my wife and I once lived during our happier, younger years. I have an event to go to down below with my wife from whom I’ve long been separated.
An elderly Bob Dylan is up here at a sort of gypsy camp. He comes up here to get away from it all. Bob is wearing loose-fitting, comfortable clothes. I don’t know why, but I think of them as ‘clothes for elders.’ Bob is comfortable with who he is. I come upon a clothing bazaar offering this comfortable line of Dylan clothes as well as a line of his jewelry, mostly black sapphire and other dark jewels. The clothes, too, are mostly black or dark plaids; lovely shirts, loose fitting, and almost diaphanous. The clothes and the jewelry are laid out on the earth. The jewelry is simple, yet elegant, with a luminosity that is connected to the peaceful atmosphere up here.
Next, both Bob and I are eating dinner, sitting across the campfire from each other. His ancient-looking face is etched with sorrow and laughter lines. Semi-formally, yet in a relaxed way, I invite Bob to share a meal with me. He gets up and comes over with his plate. When we are done eating, Bob gets out this intricate game he teaches; a sort of board game with sparkling, jewel-like images. There is something elusive and allusive about this game; and it’s impossible to tell if one is winning or losing, or if such traditional notions even pertain way up here in this ‘gypsy camp.’ I know that I’m probably going to be late if not entirely miss the event below.
Now, there are others playing the game with Bob. A young Asian man is eliminated from the game. It seems that when this man is asked by Bob, as part of the game, “What do you do?” he answers something like, “I’m a salesman.” This young Asian man is immediately eliminated from the game because he did not follow a true calling in life. In rejecting this young man, who one can see is sad at the news, I think I see a touch of the young, crueler Bob Dylan — or is it just that Life itself is tough, eliminating us from the game if we have failed to follow our true calling?
My wife and our 21-year-old son arrive. Bob’s game is mysterious. It has its own rules. I think about what I will say to Bob when he next asks me, “What do you do?” I understand that the question really means, ‘What do you do with the precious life you have been given?’ “I help students to find stillness inside, and to find meaning and purpose in their lives,” I rehearse in my mind how I will respond.
Becoming a Diaphanous Elder
A few weeks after my Bob Dylan dream, I had a one-time phone consultation with a dream counselor based in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I did not want to return yet to my lonely apartment after work. Instead, I sat in the parking lot of the library on a gloomy, rainy day, listening to a total stranger’s voice on my cellphone, digging deep into my soul’s yearnings. My dream-weaver had a lovely, incantatory way of speaking. Mostly, I sat very still in my old, battered Toyota 4-Runner, the only movement a gentle rocking, shivering as I wept. I heard the dream-weaver’s kind and gentle voice; elliptical, chantlike:
“Be in high mountains, wandering and lost.
See Bob Dylan waiting for you.
How you invite him to eat with you and he does.
Then hear him ask, ‘What do you do?’
Tell him, ‘I wander, I am lost.’
Feel deeply into whatever arises;
Weariness, fear, desire
For connection
To the mystery…”
Remembering how I sobbed, speaking to this now intimate stranger, as I realized that my life had departed from its essential call to mystery, awe and wonder. In that moment, I understood that my loneliness was not solely for other people, but soulfully, for connection to that revivifying sense of mystery that had once been central to my life. It was as if the dream had called me to search ‘in the high places,’ for that lost connection.
In the weeks following my dream consultation, it began to dawn on me that I could move towards acceptance of loneliness. There were riches yet to be discovered high in the mountains. Having self-compassion; befriending my loneliness, as well as celebrating mine and other’s gifts; these became priorities. All of this had to do with becoming an elder, one with one foot in the dream of their individual life, and the other in the community. The elder, as I saw it, was not just someone who had grown older. The elder was someone in a dance with the mystery of life itself; strangely joyous, by virtue of having gone to the edge of things, even unto death’s threshold. But the elder was also someone who fostered and cherished their connection to others.
The dream session invited me to settle into my deeper self, with all my vulnerabilities, in a way that had always eluded me. I decided that I needed to wear loose-fitting clothes, like the ones for sale at Bob’s mountain bazaar. To begin to be more at ease with who I was becoming — finally, after so much wandering. To be in the emptiness and loneliness; to allow a part of myself to become that emptiness and loneliness; a hollow reed through which the essence of mystery, awe, and wonder breathed.
What would it be like to become ‘diaphanous’; transparent to the ultimate mystery of my death? A numinous figure awaited me still higher on that mountain; as if I was being called to spiral still further upwards. Without fully understanding how or why, as I abided with this imaginal guide, I realized that the dream had heralded my impending transition into elder-hood. Before crossing that threshold though I had to first be initiated by death — my own death.
3/21/20 to 3/21/21
I began writing this essay on March 21, 2021; exactly one year ago to the day that I was rushed by my wife to Desert Hospital in Palm Springs with what would quickly prove to be a near-fatal case of COVID-19. Two months later, in those still early days of the pandemic, I became the first COVID-19 patient to leave Desert Regional’s ICU alive, as I headed up the mountain to Joshua Tree for a month of rehab, where I would begin to regain movement and strength.
The statistical side of my experience was simple:
· 52 days on a ventilator.
· 72 days without solid food or water.
· Loss of 45 pounds.
· Loss of the ability to stand, to walk, to swallow, and to raise my arms; followed by the slow rehabilitation back into mobility.
At more subtle levels, as I emerged from a prolonged coma, and even once I reached the mountains in Joshua Tree to begin rehab, I continually wondered whether I had actually survived, though I kept these contemplations to myself. Had I already died; or was I perhaps merely wandering, lost in the bardo, that interim zone between life and death?
Medical research is increasingly revealing that loneliness can greatly weaken one’s immune system. Scientists posit that lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day or having alcohol-use disorder. Iconoclastic thinker, Noreena Hertz wrote in her 2021 book, The Lonely Century, “Even before the Coronavirus triggered a ‘social recession,’ with its toxification of face-to-face contact, three in five U.S. adults considered themselves to be lonely.”
Do I believe that I got COVID from loneliness? Obviously, that is a stretch; yet I cannot help but wonder if my ongoing and deepening loneliness provided fertile ground for the virus’ brutal invasion.
Just before being felled by COVID-19, I remember writing in my ‘20/20 Year of Seeing Clearly’ journal that I had come to the end of a way of life that no longer served me; too much loneliness, too cerebral. I vowed to myself, on the page, that I would find a way to rebuild my life centered round love and connection. I would live from the heart outwards. I could not see how I would bring about such a drastic change; I just knew it must happen. As it turned out, my dream and a meeting with death showed the way.
When I came down from the mountains in Joshua Tree, I returned to my family; my estranged wife and my young-adult son. I looked like a way-too-slender version of a person I once knew. In fact, I looked nearly diaphanous. In pictures taken upon my return, I appeared to be gazing into another world entirely. I was utterly uncertain if my wife and I could find a new chapter together, yet just as I felt called into the mountain inside my dream to meet Bob Dylan, to find a doorway through loneliness into elderhood, so did I feel called by the beauty and soul in my wife’s eyes — the same light that once called me to marry her so long ago — to try one last time to reunite. Both alone and together, we now step into the mystery of an unknown future.
Have I managed to banish loneliness entirely? Not at all; in fact, as some have averred, there is nothing lonelier than being lonely inside a marriage. Yet, something has changed. Perhaps it’s the simple fact that I have begun to make good on my vow from my 2020 journal; taking small, consistent steps in reaching out to others, in forging connections; first, with my family, and then, spiraling out from my heart into the world. I also recognize that a simple acceptance of loneliness eases the sense of isolation and lockdown. I can walk with loneliness now, rather than being engulfed by it. It feels like an oblique answer to Dylan’s query from my dream: I still ‘wander,’ but the wandering is not simply ‘lost,’ but is, instead, a search for higher connections to mystery, awe, and wonder.
These days, though I have added back some of the weight I lost, I often have an inner sense of being diaphanous. While one part of me is more firmly rooted in daily life than ever before, another part of me more steadily accesses a vibrant, imaginal realm of dreams and visions in which wandering still goes on, and death is always near at hand. I have also noticed that my whole wardrobe has changed. I am dressed in the clothes in my dream — loose fitting, comfortable; almost…diaphanous. When people ask about my clothes, I like to say that I am “dressed in a dream of becoming an elder.” I realize it might not make much sense to the person; but I know what I mean.
Slowly yet steadily, I’m climbing into elder-hood. I know I have crossed a threshold, and even found a foothold on this trek into the final third of my life. My new life as an elder awaited me ‘up here,’ high in the imaginal mountains, so to speak; in places once inaccessible or too frightening to enter. I have begun to befriend loneliness, and even to embrace the now ever-present specter of my death. When people of my generation lament their aging, I think to myself, but this is the job I’ve been training for my entire life; to become an elder.
Once upon a time, a lonely troubadour sang about the blessings that await those who become ‘forever young.’ Dylan’s compelling voice beckons the listener to “Build a ladder to the stars/Climb on every rung/May you stay/Forever young.”
This new state I’m entering combines the gravity of elderhood with a connection to perennial youth. Here, mystery, wonder and awe abound. The freedom to keep climbing into this freer state becomes available with each breath.
It’s called, ‘the present,’ and I breathe it in as a gift.
