Mark,

Over twenty years ago you told me you believed that life spirals out in ten year cycles, each rotation bringing us not back to where we were, but to someplace very similar. I thought you were full of your usual bluster and bullshit and idiosyncrasy, but you were right. Every ten years, at the start of a new decade of my life, death visits. There are other landmarks I seem to pass about every ten years, but death once a decade is the most striking.

The first death in my life was my great uncle when I was ten. It was strange, surprising, and disturbing, but mostly unfathomable. I didn't realize before then that death could happen to someone I knew.

At twenty I faced my own mortality during 22 days in the wilderness of the North Cascades. By day I slogged and hauled my weak and weary flatlander bones up and over dozens of stunning, awe-inspiring, soul-searingly beautiful mountain passes and summits. By night I shivered in my sleeping bag and dreamed of falling endlessly into the void over razor-blade shale and tumbling boulders. Life by day, death by night. In the final week of the trip, I spent three days fasting in complete solitude under the shelter of pine trees laced with sun-gilt gossamer, rich humus smell of dirt for sustenance and cold babbling creek to slake my thirst. On the third day my mind and heart slowed down to the resonance of the place and I saw that there was no need for gods. Life was enough.

At thirty, I almost died. I came close enough to sense the void again, but this time I was under cold fluorescent lights, my skin was clammy and greenish from septic shock. I was run down from weeks in Thailand and Myanmar, living like the indestructible globe trotter I never was. My family was summoned and came from the four corners of the world to see if I would survive that first night. On some level I didn't. Any illusions I had about my own permanence or importance were lost when I discovered that there is no fighting death. It bloomed in my chest and raged in my blood, and I was not even conscious most of the time. I suffered and emerged and could take no credit for my fortune.

When I was forty, death took my mother. As she breathed her last, and my gaze drifted out the window to the great Red Cedar tossing its boughs in the wind, I felt the pull of the void again and said, "I'm not coming with you, mom, not yet. I've got kids to raise and a life to live." Mom gives us rainbows whenever we meet, my brother and me. She really does. The first was just before her memorial when we met at her favorite beach on San Juan Island. It was a strange feather of rainbow, high above the beach in the middle of the clear blue sky.

After each of these passes, I felt like I'd been cut loose from whatever it was I had been thinking my life was about. I felt untethered and terrified, but also inspired, magical, like anything is possible. It's like being on a plane, and seeing that there is nothing I cannot leave behind. Gravity itself seems like an illusion. Art pulls at me then. I get very creative, poetic, strange and deeply alive, but it doesn't last. I always choose love over art. There are no other options, and I don't have the mind for both.

It's been two years since mom died, and I am trying to hold on to the depth and inspiration her passing brought me, but the days get lost in love and family. I can't maintain the weightlessness.