Canada Saga 2008 September 28

"Stories move in circles...There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. (Deena Metzger)

 As we drove across the desolate landscape of southern Wyoming, brown where there was any vegetation at all, the tan dry dust blew an occasional tumbleweed across a grey interstate which blended in with the grey sky.  The road stretched relentlessly on, between bluffs, over ridges, around high curves with a panaroma of more of the same.  The occasional gopher popped up, there were range cattle, and a few horses marching fence lines, sharing grazing land with prong-horn antelope, and a coyote raced across the Interstate in front of us.  Whatever communities there were appeared far in the distance, isolated and purposeful - a single ranch home, nestled in a few trees, a convenience store to serve the interstate traffic, unidentifiable clusters of  buildings, their smoke stacks covered with red clay dust. 

We flew past one of these at mach-Audi speed, and I read the blurred road sign to Michael: "Solvay." It was one-word short-hand,  available in lengthy relationships where so many memories have been accumulated, and now serve as connections to our shared stories. He immediately smiled, and related a story: when he was a young boy, his father, worked at the Solvay plant in Baton Rouge, which was making soda ash out of chemicals.  He came home for dinner and told them that there was a place out in Wyoming where they were actually mining soda ash right out of the ground. Here we were, in another part of the story of time, driving through Wyoming and Michael's boyhood memory. His Dad was suddenly in the car with us.

Long unhurried road trips do this for us: they provide the time and the vistas that become movie screens for the projections and reflections of our mind.  We rarely listen to the radio, maybe some few select CD's along the way.  We watch Americana as surely as it could ever be described in a living dictionary, and marvel at the differences of the topography and the lifestyles, as well as the sameness of the human spirit in its universal desires for happiness, kindness, purpose in life, family and love.

Many of the CD's we bring for the trip were given to us by Brett, created from his own memories of songs played in the home when he was a child, as well as those selected by him from stories he's heard growing up over the years.  The others, songs I'm not familiar with, I listen to very carefully, because they were chosen by my child, and give me a glimpse into the man that he is. It is joyful to listen to them all because they, too, represent our stories, and this is a way that Precious Child can be a part of our journey as we tour across the wild cowboy West and he works in Manhattan.

On one particular day, the strains of "I Can See Clearly Now" fill the car, and tears suddenly fill my eyes.  As Brett knew when he recorded this, it is the song of my brother - the one he 'gave' me two days after he died.  Mostly these days I listen to it with a warm joy; but every now and then it catches me off-guard, and it's as if his death happened yesterday. In these moments the tears are close and overflowing, in the memory of my sweet brother, and in my heart's swelling that my child could touch me this way.  It's another gift of our shared stories - no explanations were needed now in the car when the song and the tears flowed together.  And suddenly David was in the car with us.

Before we got to Colorado Springs the car was filled with 60 years of living and 40 years of marriage, memories, family, extended family and friends.  Then suddenly John Denver's mellifluous voice sang the grace of our early Colorado years as the front range of the Rockies came into view: "He was born in the summer of his 27th year, going home to a place he'd never been before...Rocky Mountain High."  There  we were: the young couple, just married, traveling cross-country to their new lives, new home, new child, all of the possibilities of life stretching out in front of them like these endless rolling highways.  How could it have been 33 years ago when it all happened yesterday?  The child who wasn't born then had gifted us now with this CD of song, piercingly bittersweet awareness of how quickly it all becomes memory, and story.

"Stories inside stories," are shared with those who have been a part of ours.  We stayed in Colorado Springs with our friends from those early Colorado years, who have a place next to ours in Canada.  They are the reason we are in Qualicum Beach at all, and summer after summer we continue to share our lives and experiences.  They have just returned from a cruise which included visits to Pompeii and Ephasus, and report that they feel very very small after visiting ruins and walking in chariot tracks frozen thousands of years ago.

Part of our finding our way home each year, on these long driving trips, is to remember that our place in time is not frozen at all. It is as changing as the scenery along the road, and is a part of a moving, living, vibrant Love.  Brett and Stephanie are living the story that we lived, as our parents lived it before us, and generations upon generations before them. The sweet joys and pains of life, the desires for suffering to cease and happiness to fill our lives, are common to those we know, and those we have yet to meet.

"Part of our finding is the getting lost,"  Deena Metzger continues in her wonderful quote about stories, "and when you're lost, you start to listen."  When we listen to each other, we realize that the stories are not OUR stories, but THE story - ever unfolding, through our children, our nieces and nephews, into and through the next generations.  "In the silence of listening, "Rachel Naomi Remen says, " you can know yourself in everyone, the Unseen singing softly to itself and to you," the Word made manifest in the lyrics of living.

We sing along with the Unseen.  Ultimately we bring our songs and stories to each other, songs and stories of challenge and wonder and awe and miracle. As we make our way back and to the building of our new home, we don't know what the winter holds, or where we will be next summer.   Whatever unfolds, there will be stories. 

YAY GOD

Canada Saga 2008 September 21

"All around, in every direction: Holy of Holies." (Ez 45:1)

 

Last week a friend was talking about his 100-year old mother, who passed years ago.  This friend is now 87 years old, and is in that sacred state of reflection that is given to those who have survived, thrived, remained open and are now unwitting mentors for so many of us.  He visits his wife daily in the Alzheimer's unit of a local skilled nursing facility, and he himself has just been diagnosed with lung cancer, a condition he was determined not to 'fight,' but to experience as his next life-challenge.

 

He said that his mother had given him a gift, a wonderful metaphor for looking at life.  It's like a funnel as you get older, she told him.  If you think of your early years as the large side, your vision narrows as you get older.  But if you think of your earlier time as the narrow side, then your vision widens as you get older - you have the capacity to see things with the larger wisdom of your learning, and life gets more expansive.  He said she 'lived life' until she died, and he wanted to do the same, even with his cancer. 

 

Another widowed friend and neighbor, who has macular degeneration and is slowly losing more and more of her eyesight, has just torn the rotator cuff in her shoulder.  She already depends on friends for many things; she invites us in with joy, not a sense of neediness, and remains active with her philosophy course, her daily walks, her unbridled inquisitiveness about the adventure of life.   Whenever I ask her to do something (go for a ride for an ice cream cone, go to a drumming circle), her enthusiasm is infectious.  She tells me she collapses into bed each night in a state of weary happiness with two words: "Thank you."  She sees her vision problem as a huge blessing, because it has offered her a different way of seeing (no pun intended) the events and people in her life. 

 

As I walked along the beach at the Tin Wis (Calm Water) resort near Tofino on the West side of the island, the rush of the ocean was a chorus for the lyrical reflections of the summer, for all of these souls that had been a part of its grace.  They embody the adage that when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. Perhaps the same is true of hearing. Michael stood on the balcony of our room, and as I walked towards him, the urgency and intensity of the pounding surf shifted and became more muted.  The individual waves became blended in a harmony that embraced the whole shoreline. I thought our prayers are like that: powerful in proximity to awakened Presence, and an undercurrent through our days thereafter.  The waves, like the memories of the summer, rolled in, ran along the shore, escaped back to sea or evaporated.  To the percussion of the surf, the thoughts ebbed and flowed, memories of the now-ending summer with its life passages of our son's wedding, the taking down of our precious house, and now the rebuilding of our new home. 

 

We drove over the mountains in their bubble-bath of clouds back towards Qualicum, and a weekend of planning and packing for our drive home on Tuesday.  I knew once he returned, Michael would be anxious to get on the road, and he is.  It is always bittersweet for me; as much as I look forward to being with family and friends and our lives in Louisiana, I miss being up here with the cool clear air, the mountains available for a glance at any given moment, the tumultuous or breathlessly calm water, the friends and neighbors who have been so kind.

 

One day while Michael was back in Louisiana, I took the ferry over to Hornby Island for a walk in the park, because Hornby is one of those "merge" places for me,  where the aboriginals tell us that nature, mankind and spirit dwell in balance.  Each time we go, we drive past the cemetery on our way across the island.  There is something about cemeteries, and the stories they tell, that intrigue me.  Since Hornby has its own eccentricity - even the sign for the ferry landing is whimsical and unorthodox - the cemetery must have a story to tell.  So I wandered through the gravesites, haphazard as they were, placed here and there with no order.  There was an old rusted-out bike leaning against a tree with beads and a placard on it; there was driftwood for headstones, and seashells and shore rocks as markers.  The Blessed Mother stood near the Buddha, and rocks were painted like lady-bugs on the burial sites of children.  As I turned to walk out, I noticed one last epitaph that made me smile, the way Hornby always does.  It was an elderly man by the name of Joe, and it read simply, "Gone to find out for myself."

 

That's what our travels and our lives are all about, really. We explore. We reflect.  If we're fortunate, we survive, we thrive, we remain open and perhaps become one of those unwitting mentors, like my 87 year old friend.  As we age, we look through that funnel and into the fullness of our lives. We realize that all around us, in every direction, we live in the Holy of Holies.

YAY GOD

Canada Saga 2008 September 17

 "And though I oft have passed them by, A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the moon, East of the sun" (Tolkien)

 

The harvest moon has been hanging around in the morning, posing just above the forest clearings in the pre-dawn sky.  With this in mind, I decided to get up very early and walk with my camera.  The entrance to Rathtrevor is dark, surrounded by the thick tall imposing trees that make it so inviting, although a bit eerie at this hour in September.  Everything in me was calling out for more sleep.  It was dark, chilly, EARLY, but Michael was arriving in the afternoon, and there were errands to run, healthy food to buy, ice cream cartons to dispose of and empty pizza boxes to hide.

 

So I made my way into the park and through the shadows on the narrow path out to the ocean.  The deep silence of the woods had me listening intently to the lack of bird calls, the softness of a barely rippling rising tide, and the quiet of a windless morning.  All of the show was in the sky to the East, with its ever-changing palette of sunrise glory.  The only other presence was a sea lion playing about 20 yards away, occasionally blowing before he dove under the calm waters for food.

 

When I was finally in a position to take a photograph of a fuzzy moon, veiled by incoming clouds and framed by two magnificent red cedars, the battery in my camera died.  So I walked on, in ecstasy at the scene unfolding over the water. Finally, a bright red sun scattered the dark clouds and laid a path to my feet as a flock of Canada Geese flew low above the sea, with their gently beating wings.  I was walking on air.

 

On my return to the car, I spied the tiny pine tree that I had been meaning to visit all summer.  There were shiny objects dangling from her branches but the tree was barely visible at the edge of the water, and on the other side of a split-rail fence placed to protect the fragile vegetation alongside the trail.  The deer had trod a path through the now high fall-yellow grass, a path previously hidden from view.  I suddenly decided that this was the morning I'd follow it.

 

As I approached the tree, I saw small laminated pictures hanging, dangling in the wind, catching the light of the rising sun.  The emerald green needles of the tree were soft to the touch, and after turning two or three of the pictures around, it was clear they were all of children, some toddlers, some young adults, all with Christmas stickers on them - and dates.  Then I noticed the long typed card toward the back of the tree, read the first line, and felt chills of connection, awe, reverence, and mystery.  I thought immediately of my elderly gentleman friend from Sunday, and the saga I had just written that had brought pain and reflections from many of you, each with your own story of children lost to mental illness, estrangement or death.  "In Memory of Missing Children," it said. 

 

I read the whole card, touched each of the pictures with the innocent and smiling faces.  Some hadn't been sealed properly, and these ghostly images of indiscernible features looked out past happy snowman stickers. The tree itself, barely taller than the grasses that now surrounded her, sat on a small rise facing the beauty of the ocean, and the wrath and fury of the seasonal storms.  

 

The memorial card went on: "Early in every morn' when the sun lights the rooms of this house, you are here.  Here inside pictures on the wall - here in the silence of memories. Your movements are felt inside of us, and we reach out to find you against grey walls, sensing your smile all around us when thinking your name...You are lost to us, but not far from the single quiet whisper of hope, nor from the eyes of the angels and hearts of those who will come to the silent waves, in wait of light's flicker, watching from the shore.  You are not alone."

 

"Missing;" "Died;" "Lost:"  all of the words are just an emotional thesaurus for 'grief.'

As I turned to walk away, I cried.  So much pain in the midst of such beauty.  Shortly before, I had been marveling at the exquisite lacing of light over Mistaken Island at sunrise, and now, I was in tears at the exquisitely piercing pain in the world, and the strangely gentle sense that had guided me to this tree on this morning.

 

When Sister Macrina Wiederkehr said that "Every tree is full of angels," she was surely talking about this one, representing the joys of birth and childhood, and the pains of loss.  The synchronicity of finding this tree at this time, by following this hidden path 'West of the moon, East of the sun,' experiencing the elation of the morning with this indelible sorrow - all of it becomes the dance of the mystery of life.  The world had once again given its gift of unspeakable beauty, accompanied by incomprehensible pain.  They are both part of our experience.  I thought of the words Brett and Stephanie chose in their vows of committed love to each other,  "through the best and the worst of what is to come," and the sincerity and generosity of the love that makes such a promise.  It's one, that we could make each morning to life itself, as we follow our own hidden paths.

 

After a long three weeks apart, Michael arrived back home safely this evening.  We enjoyed a lovely dinner at our favorite restaurant, The Final Approach at the airport, where the chef has a Louisiana heritage and a mean pecan pie.  When we got back home, we walked slowly out to the water, with the sense now of the unseen presences of those who "come to the silent waves, in wait of light's flicker, watching from the shore." The tide had returned, the shorebirds were busily and noisily having their own meal, and the day ended as it had begun - in beauty and unspeakable peace.

YAY GOD

Canada Saga 2008 September 16

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." ( Leonard Cohen)

 

There is a different feel to the air now, although the sun shines as brightly as it has all summer.  The cooler nights, finally lengthening into earlier sunsets and later sunrises, give way to crisp chilly mornings, sweatshirts and long pants.   This morning, as I drove towards Rathtrevor forest at dawn, I saw pale rose and yellow in a sky that backlit the tall cedars and the arbutus and maples, every leaf and needle etched in relief.  There is so much beauty in the mystical glow; my eyes wandered heaven-ward, even as I watched for deer and rabbits along the road.  In my rear-view mirror an incredibly full moon hovered above the road in the darkness still to the West.  For such brief moments, when I'm alone in this sacred place and time, I think of Thomas Merton's counsel that we should keep our "daily appointment with mystery."  In being faithful to those appointments, we encounter Mystery itself. 

 

Yesterday morning, on the path into the park, I met an elderly gentleman whom I had spoken with back in July.  At that time, he was looking forward to his 89th birthday, two days after Brett's marriage.  I wished him a belated happy birthday, and he invited me to have a cup of coffee with him at the local A & W after my walk. 

 

As we shared our coffee and our stories, and time passed, I found myself in that space where common-place words continue to flow, even as a heightened energy builds, a sense that something larger is imminent. It happens sometimes when we linger on the phone or in casual conversation, all business having been taken care of and all plans made. We linger with a feeling that there is something else.  And if the talk goes on a big longer, it happens: a synchronicity, a miracle, a wonder, an answer received or a wisdom revealed seemingly from nowhere.  Most times we are in too much of a rush to allow this natural process, which requires time and patience and awareness, to emerge.  We hurry our calls to return to our tasks, and we lose the rhythm of grace.  We have forgotten how to listen with all of our senses.

 

My new friend remembered that my son had gotten married, and we talked about the wedding.  I asked if he had children.  He looked down, then away, then directly at me. He had two sons, he said.  One was struck by a car and killed at the age of 12, just 12 days before Christmas.  The other had visited he and his now-deceased wife one evening back in 1984, walked out of the door, and was never heard from again. 

 

When I think about his tone and his words and the moment, it seems that everything else in the restaurant had stopped.  I'm sure there were voices and sounds and movement, but for me there was only stillness and the depth of pain and grief in his pale blue eyes.  "I was a church-goer," he continued, "and a scout leader, and I think I did right by my sons."  An ever-so-subtle tone of doubt crept into his words.  "But I hate the holidays now, and I haven't stepped foot into a church since."

 

He said this last in a challenging way, scrutinizing my face, I guess, for some form of judgment.  But I found myself telling him, instead, about the  woman I met, owner of a B&B in the wine country of California, six months after my brother was murdered.  She had a beautiful picture of her three cotton-topped, blue-eyed boys on her piano, and when she found out about David, she quietly shared with me that her youngest son disappeared without a trace at the age of 17, only 18 months earlier.  She told me then, though I didn't tell this grieving father, that her faith was the only thing that sustained her.

 

As I told him the story, he looked almost relieved. His sorrow, his personal guilt and agony were now shared with that mother who would never know the blessing she was giving thirteen years after divulging her own incomprehensible pain.  He had the same questions about her missing son as I had about his: was there conflict beforehand; was foul play considered; were there any signs of discontent?  We speak of mystery, of wanting to know answers, but confusion and chaos appear in our lives more often.  We are closer to God when we ask questions, Rabbi Heschel said, than when we get answers.

 

Then I told him that I didn't know so much that it was about going to Church as it was about knowing that we are part of something larger than just the events in our lives.  He was quiet; he nodded.  I don't know if it was in agreement, or just in acknowledging that this part of our talking was over.  His quick smile returned, and he told me had to leave to pack and get ready for the 5:15 ferry the next morning.  He was traveling to Dawson City in the Yukon territories because he had read a lot about it, had always wanted to visit there, and felt he was running out of time.  He laughed, and said he was hoping to make it to his 90th birthday next July.

 

Later that day, I read: "Our practice is not to clear up the mystery.  It is to make the mystery clear." (Robert Aitken Roshi) We do that by showing up for our daily appointments with it.  We do that by sharing the cracks in our own lives, never knowing when doing so will shine light into the life of another, even 13 years later, even people we will never know.  Sometimes these turn out to be perfect offerings after all.

YAY GOD