Avoiding Disaster

In a dream, I almost died last night. Melissa and I were in a small plane going to Binghamton, New York, near where I grew up as a boy. I happened to look out the window and noticed that we were very near the ground, flying low over a road where my brother and I used to ride our bikes in the country. In the plane, we were following the road because we were nearly at tree-top level. I assumed the pilot was brining us in for an emergency landing and hoping there was clear ground ahead.

But then we took a sharp left up Twist Run Road. A real road – steep and twisty with stone cliffs (only in the dream) on either side. The plane was trying to follow the curving path of the road to avoid shearing off either of the wings against the rock wall. But it was clear we were going to crash and the only question was whether or not all of us would die? I looked over at Melissa and felt so much gratitude. This is it. I love you, I said and smiled as I looked into her eyes. There was nothing else to be done.

In the dream, I remembered I was in a dream and didn’t want to die in a plane crash so I backed away from the dream so as not to have to go through with it. A moment later, I was walking around the intact wrecked fuselage of the plane with all the other passengers. Miraculously, the pilot had gotten us down safely. We were all in shock, grateful to be alive but stunned by how close we had come to death.

The pilot was walking up and down near the plane deliriously happy that he had saved us all. He kept saying to us I did a terrific job. I got the plane down safely. Didn’t I do a wonderful job? We were grateful for our lives and happily supported his shocked narcissism.

I’ve been reading David Loy’s Ecodharma and yesterday afternoon was the chapter that considered whether or not it is too late to do anything to keep our planet from warming to the point where life as we know it is no longer sustainable. And if it might be too late, why should we do anything. His argument is that though it looks bleak, very bleak, we can’t know for sure and even if we did know nothing would save us, what we do still matters.

Many years ago I was headmaster of a small private high school for a year and a half. I was promoted from part-time art teacher to head in the middle of a crisis that was threatening to close the school. (Artists get chosen for leadership only when things are really bleak.) I worked with a group of parents to raise money and the Board of Trustees narrowly voted to keep the school open. But we didn’t come anywhere near our enrollment goals and the next fall, six months into my glorious leadership experiment, I had to announce the closing of the school.

For the next nine months, we lived with the knowledge that the school was going to close in June. I realized that my job as the leader was to help create meaning in the face of death. Some people said we shouldn’t care and should do whatever we want. It was clear to me, however, that our actions were more important than ever. Since then, I have been keenly conscious of the importance of beginnings and endings.

Of course, we are all living with a death sentence. Life itself is a journey of creating meaning in the face of our certain death. While the awareness of death can be paralyzing or cause us to act out of a self-destructive narcissism, it can also bring a focus and beauty to our lives. Knowing that we are here only briefly, that we and everyone we know will vanish, allows us to appreciate the preciousness of this fleeting life.

And the plane of our biosphere is in danger of crashing. Saying that it doesn’t matter because it will all end someday or that it is all a dream is to deny the wondrous particularity that appears in the form of you and me, the trees and the flowers, the frogs and the crickets. How do we appreciate the dream-like and fleeting quality of life at the same time we work on every level we can to heal our planet and to mend the institutions of our world that are so toxic and violent?

It was just a dream. But the vision of a fiery ending was real to me in the moment and resonates even now on this cool morning in August. So many dreams. So many fears. So many possibilities.

I think of the character Elnor in Star Trek: Picard—a new reboot of the series. He is a trained warrior from a sect whose vows are to only use their skills in service of righteous and hopeless causes. Picard, as usual, is trying to save the universe against overwhelming odds. The young man joins Picard and fights nobly. I won’t tell you what happens but I will let you know there is a season 2 in the works.