The Scientist and the Mystic

Before I had finished putting all of my experience into words (see blog post Into the Unknown), I did a little integration work to create lyrics and a song to move what needed to be moved.

I used ChatGPT to turn my words into a story in the form of lyrics. From there I used Suno to create music to put those words to. If you click on the link below you can listen.

The Scientist and the Mystic

“Why is it so hungry?”

You looked at me like I should know.

I didn’t know if you meant the cancer

or the body letting go.

“Are you hungry?” I asked you.

You looked at me like you saw me new.

“Yes.”

And Simon brought you fast food, because that sounded good to you.

Three months.

From packing up Toronto

to a little place ten minutes from mine,

three months of hospitals and oxygen,

three months collapsing time.

You asked me "am I too immature

to hear the things you know".

I laughed and said, “Not at all—

I just stopped talking about them with you.”

You’d laughed at my Holy Spirit once,

and I returned the favour too:

I said you had a twelve-year shelf life

when it came to love.

“Ten years, actually,”

you said with that smile.

And there we were, father and daughter,

laughing for a while.

Then you asked me

to take you on as my student.

And everything turned around.

There might be things in there.

There might be nothing at all.

You’d spent your life believing

what you could measure, touch and call.

You asked me to be your teacher,

to show you what I’d learned—

but I walked into your darkness

and the direction turned.

There might be things in there.

I still don’t know.

I went as far into that room

as I knew how to go.

“What do you think happens when you die?”

“Nothing,” you said to me.

Then later, softer:

“I’m scared.

It’s like I’m walking into a dark room

and there might be things in there.”

No angels waiting in your language.

No spirits you could call.

No story you could lean against

when the certainty was gone.

So I sat down with the mushrooms

and asked them not for mine—

show me a world where matter ends,

where death is the end of the line.

And they did.

Fuck.

It was terrifying.

And finally I understood something you had been trying to say.

There might be things in there.

There might be nothing at all.

I couldn’t give you comfort there.

It was your path to find.

You asked me to be your teacher,

but you gave me your fear instead.

I learned more in that darkness

than from anything I’d read.

There might be things in there.

There might be nothing beyond.

For a little while we stood together

where certainty was gone.

I asked if you wanted a journey,

something to loosen fear’s grip.

You said yes without hesitation—

and then June began to slip:

hospital into hospital,

plans made and broken again,

trying to find enough quiet

to meet what was coming in.

And somewhere in the chaos,

the scientist and the mystic

were looking into

the same dark room.

You let me into your world.

I let you into mine.

Maybe that was the journey.

There might be things in there.

I hope you got to see.

I hope whatever met you

was bigger than what we believed.

But I won’t make you an angel.

I won’t pretend I know.

You never needed me to make it pretty.

You needed me to go as far as I could beside you,

right up to where you disappeared.

You asked me to be your teacher.

I carried your question from there.

Now kindness breaks me open.

Dark rooms do it too.

Sometimes I lie there crying

with nothing else to do.

And I think about that doorway,

the question hanging there.

There might be nothing.

There might be things.