The Golden Thread

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

— William Blake

Since childhood I have been a list maker. Mom encouraged me to write a list of gifts I hoped Santa might bring, and the nascent librarian made my own little card catalog from index cards of the books I owned. Eventually this obsessive/compulsive behavior channeled itself into a checklist of homework and chores. At 53, even after years of therapy and daily meditation, the to-do list is still my compulsion of choice.

The Wunderlist app, which lets me create as many lists as I want that automatically sync among iPhone, iPad, and computer, is the app I click on more often than Facebook or Flixter. It is a marvelous master list of lists – the grocery list, the gardening chores, the all-purpose inbox that includes everything from “send Halloween cards to my nieces” to “write a will,” and even a honey-do list that I can send to my honey’s Wunderlist. Yet as miraculous as it is, Wunderlist is no match for the manic and multi-pronged list constantly streaming through my brain like ticker tape.

Yes, I love my lists. Any sort of worldly success I may have achieved in this life I attribute to them, but lately I’ve been saying a prayer before I go to sleep that has got me thinking about my deathbed: “May God grant me a peaceful night and a perfect end.”

God alone knows what a perfect end might be, but I am certain that when mine nears, whether it is prolonged or lasts an instant, I want to reach for a ball of golden thread spun from poems and prayers, not a spool of errands and chores. In the moment of crossing to the far shore, I want to see the lady in blue with a crown of stars, smell the scent of redwood and cedar in my backyard on a hot summer day, feel my beloved’s hand stroking my hair.

“Life and death are one thread,” Lao Tzu said, “the same line viewed from different sides.” Is he suggesting that the kind of death we wish for can teach us how to live? For me, gratitude seems like a good place to start. My final list of the day is not an inventory of tasks, but a catalog of what I’m grateful for, from the mundane to the profound. As I am about to open the door into the great mystery, I hope this is the golden thread my mind will reach for, that I can follow to the far shore.