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Potter, Dennis - I see it as the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be
Identifier
021622
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Art of Dying – Drs Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick
By accepting and living in the now our attitude towards both life and death can be transformed. No one has expressed this truth more movingly or with greater clarity than the playwright Dennis Potter, in his final interview with Melvyn Bragg in March 1994, a few weeks after he learned that he had terminal cancer, and a few weeks before he died.
However predictable tomorrow is . . . there's the element of the unpredictable, of the 'You don't know'. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid to me that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene.
You know, I can celebrate life.
Below my window in Ross . . . the blossom is out in full now . . . and looking at it, instead of saying, 'Oh, that's nice blossom', I see it as the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be . . . Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the newness of everything is absolutely wondrous . . . The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy, do you see it! And, boy, can you celebrate it.