"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
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