A pause for thanks

For the last few months I have been sorting through boxes of papers from my parents’ house, and this, and the upcoming one-year anniversary of my Dad’s death has me thinking about my relationship with him. In the past, I would have emphasized the differences between us. Now I'm feeling our similarities.

As I have said before, my father was very private, and at least in his adult life, only talked to a few people. He liked to be social if there were games involved—ping pong or volleyball or horseshoes—but when it came to talking, it was mostly his family that he turned to: primarily my mother, and while I was at home, me.  When he did talk, he tended toward the monologue. It was like he needed a place to unroll all of his thoughts in front of him so that he could understand what was in his head. And then at the end of the conversation he would roll all of them back up again until the next day when he would take them out again as though no one had ever seen them before. My mother—as I said when I wrote about my father last year—did a lot of knitting.

He also wrote voluminously—in longhand on yellow notepads and spiral notebooks, and later on the computer—and then created booklets out of what he wrote, comb bound after he got his own comb binder and copy machine. He wrote about all the different projects that he was involved in: water rights and field burning and property-boundary disputes and taxes. But the subject that he wrote about the longest, and the one he and I always talked about, was religion.

Thinking about this now is odd. On the one hand as a kid, this was upsetting. My dad’s conversations with me felt oppressive and heavy and often left me feeling trapped and taken over by someone else’s life. It took me years to unlearn enough of the passive stance I took toward those conversations to have my own boundaries and direction. And yet those conversations were also the precursor to my own life-long interest in spirituality and my deeply-satisfying work as a therapist.

I had come to peace with my father some years ago, but as I look through his writing I keep seeing new things about our relationship. For example, even just as I was writing this, I realized that he didn’t talk to me about everything. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that he had all kinds of projects going on, but he mostly talked to me about religion. Or perhaps I only really listened to him when he talked about this subject. Either way, that’s news. Either he knew more about me than I realized, or I had better boundaries than I thought, and could tune out things that didn’t actually interest me. Maybe I was there at the dinner table with him, not exactly out of choice, but at least out of inclination. 

*******

The other night, late in the evening, I was finishing up reading Dad’s letters to his siblings, and had been talking about my thoughts and reading passages to Tom who was doing something else at the time—working on his pictures or getting ready for bed—and he commented after something I said about Dad, “Boy, you two sure are a lot alike.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this. I don’t want to be that person who talks on and on at the dinner table long after everyone’s eyes have glazed over. I don’t want to be so compulsive about what I am thinking about that I can’t put it down. I don’t want to make booklets about religion and send them to my relatives and have them not respond.

But when I reflect on it, Tom has a point. I was, after all, talking to him mostly to figure out what I was thinking. I also write a lot, and as I look over old journals I notice how often the same themes come up. And I make books: a row of handmade books of poems and essays sit on my shelf right now, and every few years I organize whatever it is that I am working on into some kind of collection.

Dad didn’t have a public place for his ideas. It hurts my heart a little to see him begin a letter to his brother with a remark about not having heard back about the booklet he had sent to him recently on religion. And I can remember my own reluctance to open letters he sent to me at college because I was pretty sure I already knew what was in them.

I am aware more and more of the importance of having people just listen to you. Mom and I and other people in the family did listen to Dad in many different ways. My sister was better at listening with a tennis racket. My brothers listened through music or ping pong or working together on the farm. I think Dad was happy enough with the avenues he had for self-expression.

But looking through his stacks of writing, and wondering what drove him to work so hard to put his inner thoughts into words, and feeling that same need so strongly in myself, makes me feel especially grateful to have some public place for my writing. In particular, I am grateful to have this blog, which I never would have started without Tom's encouragement; and I am grateful for all of you who read it—your listening, and your letters back to me, encourage me to keep writing. This has been a place where I can "talk out loud" about what I am thinking; and it challenges me to put my thoughts in a form that I can share with other people. Both of these help me know myself better.

I am also feeling grateful for Dad, just for being himself. As time goes on, I appreciate him more. And this is a good thing, because Tom’s right: we are a lot alike, and so if I am going to love myself, I had better learn to love him. 

******

In later life my father finally condensed his thoughts into one short piece about his religious position, titled “Religion and Me”, that I think is a good summary of his lifetime of thought. And in a letter he sent me along with the booklet, he wrote a sentence that I appreciate again reading it now: Thanks for being this Philosopher’s Sound Board over the years. I think realizing that he was thankful for who I was goes a long ways toward building that bridge of love over the troubled waters of the past.

Feeling more appreciation for my father isn’t something I could have tried to do. It just happened as a natural result of the passage of time and my continued interest in my dad's life. Understanding and empathy come from engagement. And I believe that we are each engaged by what we need to be engaged with—that we can’t help it. That what we each need to look at grabs us by the collar and won’t let go. And so if we turn toward whatever has us in its grip, it is likely that this will lead us in the direction of love. Because really everything leads in this direction. Even hatred. Even separation. Even our own stubborn clinging to everything we know. Help is there where we least expect it.

Dad did this—he turned toward what gripped him, to the best of his ability. And I think that talking and making booklets helped him to distill his life into a place of more acceptance and humility. And that helps me see that the things that I do naturally—no matter whether from compulsion or interest—will do the same for me. And I am remembering the phrase with which Dad often ended his correspondence—with love and affection—which makes me think now that he might have saved his best point for last.

WHAT IF? (Part 3b: Beyond helplessness)

    © Marc Hanson   Used by permission of artist.

The last post helped me to calm down—but I still didn't know what to do about the hazelnut sprayers.

What I could see was that my first response was violence—violence toward the workers in wanting to scream at them to stop; violence toward myself in telling myself there was nothing I could do. Either leads to helplessness: I’m either helpless to the strength of my emotion, or helpless to my inner criticism.

I am looking for a third option.

What I find is something I will call containment. There will always be affliction. Life lives on other life. There is no getting away from it. It doesn’t matter where on the food chain we eat, we are eating living beings, plants included.

In this case, there will always be affliction associated with growing food—hard work, weather, insects, markets. A farmer is faced with all kinds of difficulties. This farmer’s attempt to deal with these difficulties is pretty normal. (Though what the normal response seems to miss is that this style of farming attempts to destroy the afflictions themselves without seeming to recognize the whole new set of afflictions this creates.)

Similarly, my response to the people spraying is normal—my anger, fear, and disgust are all natural responses to feeling threatened. These are not only normal, but these responses are necessary—they let me know that I am alive and awake. They let me know what I care about.

The question isn’t how do I get rid of all affliction, or how do I get rid of my responses—these are both impossible. The question is, how do I contain my response, like a fire in a hearth, so that it provides useful heat, rather than a destructive blaze?

In this case, I can think of several options:

First, by pausing. Just stopping before acting allows my mind to settle so that I can think clearly.

Second, by my attitude toward my response. A friendly attitude to all of my feelings allows calmness to arise more readily. A critical, self-blaming attitude only creates more upset emotions.

Third, is to really feel what I feel. To name my feelings—all of them—and to simply experience them, viscerally, just as they are.

When I do these things, finally my mind begins to open up and start to work again, and I think of some alternatives to the violence of my first impulse. 

• I can talk to the workers to find out what they are spraying.
• I can ask the landowner to give us notice if they are spraying in the future.
• I can research hazelnut farming practices.
• I can choose to purchase organic hazelnuts.
• I can invest in an organization that promotes organic farming in the Willamette Valley.

Or, the option that I had already instinctively taken:

• I can write a blog post about it.

This whole approach of containment is not something I thought up myself. It is another example of help, in this case in the form of a book that I had read before, but forgotten, until I unearthed it from a storage box just after the spraying incident. The book is David Brazier’s The Feeling Buddha, which offers a practical approach to acting with courage in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. This is based on Brazier’s interpretation of the Buddha’s first teaching, but does not require Buddhist beliefs to appreciate or practice.

Brazier’s book helped me see that part of my helplessness came from my misconception that my action had to eliminate the affliction. I was trapped in an all-or-nothing approach. If I can’t “solve the problem”, then why bother trying at all? Since most problems are not solvable, this results in a lot of “why bothering.” 

Not only that, but it was okay that the problem wasn’t solvable—this is the nature of most problems. Even if a problem has a solution, there is another problem waiting to take its place. This is part of the natural order of life—that problems, afflictions, exist. Birth to death we are faced with them. And that’s okay. Just because we face problems doesn’t mean we are failures. It just means we are alive.

I will let you read the book yourself if you are interested in more about this. But I would like to return briefly to the statement I made last post that we need all the shadow parts of ourselves. Whatever for? Wouldn’t we all be better off without them?

All these things that rise up in us let us know what actually lives in the depths of our minds. It lets us know what we fear, what we hate, what we don’t understand, what we crave. All of this is important information. It lets us know with exquisite accuracy what work we have to do.

But the work we have to do is not the work of eradication. It is the work of containment—again, containing the fire in the hearth.  Afflictions are the fuel; our responses are the spark. Fuel and spark together creates the fire that we can then use—when protected from the wind—to nourish passionate, meaningful lives. 

We need the shadow parts not only because they represent dismissed aspects of our multifaceted selves, but simply because they contain a lot of energy. When I cut the parts I don’t like out of my life, I reduce myself—my fire is too little. When I allow these parts to rule me, my fire gets too hot—I destroy myself. 

We are invited instead to a practice of constant tending. To see the affliction of our lives for what it is: beyond good and bad, failure and success, it is fuel for the fire of a meaningful life.

---------------

Brazier, David. (2002). The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity and Passion. New York: Palgrave

Part 5: The story of our lives

When I was training to be a therapist in graduate school, our first assignment was to write our autobiography. This was partly to see how we were shaped by the first system we lived in—our families. But I think an even deeper purpose was to show us that our very idea of who we are is a story, and one that we largely construct ourselves.

In the second year of graduate school we revisited and updated these autobiographies. I found that some things that seemed important to include the first year no longer mattered the second. Through the work I had done, some hurts had healed. My story had changed. Perhaps only a little, but those changes gave me a lot to think about, and led to many more small changes over the years.

With the death now of both of my parents I feel the need to update my story yet again. So much changes with their passing, not least of all my ideas about myself. I feel a strong urge to write, to make meaning of these events, to integrate this new information. Things change. Nothing stays the same. Even parents pass away. We will follow too, soon enough. Given this, what matters to me? Where do I want to put my energy? Where is this story headed?

*******

My story of my life with Dad begins with a mixture of pleasure and discomfort. Especially as a little girl I have warm memories of playing together: learning to ski, playing hockey on the frozen lake, fishing for perch with worms we dug ourselves in the mud by the spring, playing Yatzee on winter evenings, or curling up with him on the couch to read the funnies. But I also have memories of being uncomfortable around him.

Dad was an unusual person. He had definite opinions that were often outside the norm. He didn’t communicate easily, though he talked a lot to the people closest to him, and he wrote voluminously on topics that he was wrapped up in. He wasn’t that good at empathy or seeing other people’s gifts—or if he was, he didn’t waste time expressing it. He was better at talking at you than with you, and if you wanted a conversation with him you’d better find a topic he was interested in.

Dad had strong principles and was a champion of truth, which meant he was bothered by the natural inconsistencies of government, religion, or people just trying to live together. And though he was usually pretty calm, his emotions were intense when ignited. When he got started on something that involved both his principles and his emotions, he was like a rat terrier with a rat—he just wouldn’t let go. There was an obsessive side to him that led him to spend years of his life trying to “straighten out” various disputes. And when he was involved in one of these issues, it took up all his time and all the space in his mind. As I said, he talked a lot to those closest to him, and one of the reasons Mom knit so much was to have something to do with her hands while he was talking to her about whatever dilemma he was immersed in. Mealtimes were dominated by the topic that was uppermost in his mind. And there are stacks of comb-bound booklets left in his office that are several feet tall (each), on disagreements he was involved in over water rights, government regulations, or religious differences.

Quite frankly, as a girl I was afraid of him, especially at the dinner table where his obsessions got aired as lengthy monologues or rhetorical questioning. My story at that time didn’t include any ability on my part to protect myself from his emotions and his need to work things out that were weighing on him, and I often felt trapped and voiceless. I mostly outgrew the fear (mostly), after a long struggle to develop my own answers and my own inner resources. In recent years I felt a lot of love for him—and also a growing realization of our kinship and how similar we were in our essential values—but even then it was hard to know what to do with him or how to express that love. 

Largely, this was because Dad wasn’t that comfortable with expressions of affection. At his memorial, a grandson told a story about his amazement when he actually got a hug from his grandpa—sometime in his 20’s. As a young woman, my memories of Dad expressing his appreciation are spare. I remember getting my first “grown-up” clothes in high school, a tailored gray suit-jacket and skirt, but when I wore it to show him, his only comment was, Well, you won't be doing any carpentry in that. As I tell this story now, it seems ridiculous that I couldn’t see that he meant this as a compliment, but at the time I felt offended and hurt. My story wasn’t big enough yet to include his kind of love.

This summer, when we stayed with Dad for three months, Tom and I lived in our trailer and would come into the house to share a meal with him, or read together, or watch the news or Lawrence Welk. Dad would head to bed around 7:30 and he and I had a ritual way to say goodnight to each other of reaching out and holding hands for a moment. At the beginning of the summer I would give him a hug, but somehow it evolved into this short hand squeeze, which seemed like just the right distance for both of us. I still remember the feeling of his hand, so roughened by farmwork that it felt like he was wearing leather gloves. I felt so loved by that simple gesture. And when I just let that into my heart my story changes again.

Now, after his death, none of the past seems to matter much at all. It feels like some kind of artificial barrier has been lifted and there is just a field of love around me now from him. I spent so many years of my life cowed by him, then so many years developing the inner strength to be my own person with him. Then all of a sudden the whole story is turned upside down, irrelevant, and all that is left is this sensation of this warm presence behind me, all around me.

Our summer together was the rehearsal for this. My need to be right dissolving in the sprinkler-moving antics. My need to be helpful dissolving in his ownership of his own fate. My story of his lack of affection dissolving in my reaching out and having him reach back. 

When we left the farm, he dressed up in his town shirt and stood in the driveway leaning on the ski pole he used as a cane, watching us pack up and fold the trailer away. When we were ready to go, he and I had a minute alone while Tom got something out of the house. We stood silently for a moment, then as he heard the door to the house slam, he reached out, not with his hand, but with his whole body, and squeezed me hard against his chest in a tight hug. Then he let go, and through my tears, I could see that he was saying goodbye, probably for good. And in that goodbye, he was giving me the only real gift he ever had to give.

I go forward with my life, however my story unfolds, wrapped up in his eternal love.

-----------------------------

This is my last post in this series on Dad's death. I have appreciated having a place to write where there are people out there receiving these words. Grief is both deeply personal and completely universal; it is something that you experience alone, and yet feels lighter for being shared. I am grateful for all of you reading this. Your presence means a lot to me.

And that reminds me of the joke that one of my brothers kept telling the week after Dad died.

There was a man who was at the funeral for his wife. Toward the end of the funeral he got up and asked, "Is there anyone who would like to say a word?" A friend of his got up, faced the congregation and said: "Plethora." Then he sat back down. The bereaved man teared up at hearing this and said, "Oh, thank you. That really means a lot!"

I think Dad would have liked that one.

Part 4: Polarities

Dad wasn't one to reach out. He didn't like the phone, and as he aged he wrote fewer and fewer emails. Over the past years I got used to long stretches of time without hearing from him. Now that life is starting to return to normal again after his passing, it is easy to forget that he is gone. It startles me when I suddenly remember—he’s dead. I come across a draft of an email to him that I didn’t send and realize that he will never read it. Or I imagine him sitting down to eat dinner where he has sat for the past 50 years, before realizing that not only is he gone, but so are the chair and the table.

Last month I was flying back to Arizona from Seattle and passed over Cascade Locks on the Columbia River where Dad worked for awhile as a young man. I always think of him when I am near this place and try to imagine his life here; or imagine how he would feel about this place now, so many years and miles away from those experiences. I feel a jolt in my stomach this time, as though I pulled on a rope and no one was holding the other end. These thoughts have always been a connection between me and my father, like I could touch him from wherever I was. Suddenly that connection is slack—and I feel as startled by that as if I had suddenly fallen backwards, the rope snapping toward me in a loose pile.

We have moved to another spot in Cascabel—a place that someone else owns—with a yurt, a screen room, composting toilet, and outdoor shower. It had been unoccupied for awhile and we have done some cleanup and repair. I keep catching myself wanting to tell Mom and Dad what we are doing. There is no substitute for a parent, not even other family members. And it is in the transitions that I especially miss their physical presence—those times when something in my life is changing.

There is something about watching a parent who seemed so fearsome when you were a child weaken in old age. An image arises of Dad walking across the lawn from his truck this summer at the Fourth of July party. A nephew of Mom's is visiting for the day and Dad has a home movie from the 1950's of a Christmas when this man was a little boy. Dad has his iPad in one hand and cane in the other, and has driven across the farm to my brother's house to show this video to his nephew. His frailness as he lists across the thick grass, the vulnerability of his eagerness to show the video, his slightly awkward social timing—all of this pulls at my heart, even now.

Part of me still feels shock and confusion about how a person who is part of the foundation of my life can suddenly just disappear, can be here one moment and gone the next. Part of me is still grieving. Most of the time, though, I don't think about it. Life goes on. I get busy, get swept up into daily life. And that makes the pain sharper, I think, when I am suddenly reminded of the absence.

A man at the rest area walks slowly at the elbow of his elderly father. My tears come suddenly as I watch them shuffle together toward their car.

*******

For weeks after I got back from the farm after the memorial, whenever I meditated on my chakras the only one that was active was my first—the family chakra, group energy, belonging, community. All the rest of them were shuttered, dark, tiny lights buried somewhere deep inside. Finally, I got curious about this, explored a little deeper.

I find that I am staying on the level of the physical with my grief—I am not allowing my other feelings, which, once I look at them, are surprising, almost shocking. What my spirit feels about Dad’s death, what I have been suppressing, I can only describe as joy. A bright light encompassing me and everything around me.

It is like Dad spent his whole life—even as capable as he was—caught up in a tin can. And now all that energy is free.  It is as though a flame has been lit—both inside me and around me. I feel energy flowing through me that is not my energy. I feel held. Peaceful. Content.

Light and dark, risk and safety, autonomy and community—these polarities cannot be resolved one way or the other. Somehow they exist together, simultaneously. Somehow they negate each other and define each other all at once. Somehow we need both.

I am beginning to know this too about death—that the grief of the body and the joy of the soul are intertwined. I no longer believe I can deny one in favor of the other. They are both essential. I miss my parents deeply AND I am joyful at their presence. I long for what I used to have AND I feel new energy. There is no “but” anywhere in those sentences. They all exist together, all connected.

...the tree, the bark, the root, the fruit, the seed, the life that animates it all...

*******

And then there is love. As I talk to a friend awhile ago I find myself saying to her, “I think part of what hurts right now is how much love I feel. It’s so intense—like a pain in my heart.” I am taken by love as though I have been struck by a wave on the beach. I feel love for my siblings, for my nieces and nephews, for my ancestors, for my friends and clients back in Seattle, for the people we are getting to know here in Cascabel, for the land and mountains and plants and rocks and animals. I find myself trying to manage this love, this pain, by limiting it—by understanding it or by restricting it to certain people. But it is like Dad’s death (and everything associated with it) released some kind of dam that kept me bound up in cause and effect, and beyond these individual forms we take for awhile is a universe of energy.

This is a little like the perspective of riding in an airplane. From that vantage everything seems elegantly connected, part of a larger pattern, beautiful.

But what happens when I come back to earth? Once landed, here come all the same old difficulties—irritations, frustrations, disappointments. People who don’t do what I want, suffering that is out of my control. I can feel this immense love one moment, then be hurt and angry the next.

Again, I remind myself, you can do both. The difficulties don't negate the love. And the love doesn't mean you ignore the difficulties. When I am connected to both I have both perspective AND empathy. I know that "all will be well" at the same time that I am willing to deal with what is here in front of me.

We are big enough to hold it all.

Part 3: The fertility of the senses

I hope you take time to feel all there is that’s offered because the fertility of the senses RIGHT NOW will not return. It’s precious. It asks for nothing but your presence. I have the sense that’s why we feel so tired when someone we love deeply dies—so we’ll float in the deep end for awhile and forget about exerting ourselves.

                                                    --Gail Baker(1)

Thanks to my friend for the reminder that with death comes some kind of opening—cracks through which we glimpse our inner life, or the hearts of our loved ones, or different dimensions of awareness.

I keep feeling that I am ready to return to my usual life, but one thing after another interferes. Most recently, I got sick enough to stay in bed for several days. Though I felt terrible, I also knew I was longing for time to reflect and write, and honestly just time to do nothing. It felt so good to just lie in bed and allow. To let everything flow through me. To just feel everything that has happened.

*******

My brother asked me the other day what would I have been writing in my blog if I hadn’t been worried about what Dad would think? At first I don’t know how to answer the question. There is a little girl inside me squirming and stubbing her toe and mumbling, “Oh…just stuff…”

Good grief! I think. Get a grip on who you are, lovely one!  This is an important question he is asking you! And maybe he really wants to know. Maybe your Dad wanted to know, too, and didn’t know how to ask. And, besides, whether anyone wants to know or not isn’t even the point. You know who you are. Speak up!

When I was young, my subjective inner world was hard to talk about. I lived it inside myself in my life with books, but my emotions, my personal will, my creativity, and my spirituality were all things that I felt cut off from in the outside world. It’s no wonder, when I think about it, that I became a therapist who could help people value those things in themselves. Our greatest gifts often begin with a wounding.

Now I treasure my subjectivity. This is how I know who I am and what matters to me. It is the root of my unique contribution to the world. It is the rich variability between people we need as a species. And it is those subjective experiences I am wanting to talk about here today.

*******

Five days after Dad died, my sister sent me a text with the quote from H.D. that ends the last post I wrote before Dad’s death.

            …last night

      was the first night that it came,
      the distant summons, the muted cry, the call,

      and my bones melted and my heart was flame,
      and all I wished was freedom and to follow…

                          --H.D.(2)

And she brought tears to my eyes by writing, out of the blue: This quote from your blog sounds like Dad saying goodbye.

*******

The night before Dad passed, I lay awake unable to sleep. As I lay there I could feel my body quivering and shaking slightly with the anxiety of knowing he was in the hospital, of my rush to make travel arrangements for the next day, of trying in vain to relax and get some rest. At some point—late, and very unexpectedly— there was a feeling as though a tremendous wing of joy had passed over me in the dark. Then just as quickly as it came, it was gone, leaving me with my own anxious restlessness again.

I have no idea what this was. All I can say is what it felt like. And I say this knowing that it may only hold meaning for me. But it felt to me like some kind of presence. It felt like Mom waiting for Dad. Like the energy of all our loved ones out there waiting for us. Like Dad recognizing this was there for him.

If you knew my Dad, you would know how big a leap this is to make. If you knew how much of his life he spent arguing against the offenses of religion, the way that it has historically separated us from each other, the violence done in the service of specific beliefs. Yet Dad always believed in love, and knew that there is power in love. He didn’t often talk about it, and his love was often obscured by his strong personality, but it was always there at the center of who he was.

*******

When I would visit for a weekend when we were caring for Mom at the rehab center, Dad would spend the night with her and I would drive in from the farm house in the morning to replace him for the day. One day as I was leaving the house, I noticed that he had left a lawn sprinkler on overnight. I thought he might have forgotten about it, so I shut it off when I left, not realizing that if the pump was still on without any sprinklers running it could ruin the motor. When I met Dad that morning and told him about the sprinkler he got mad at me and hollered at me in the hallway of the rehab center, “You have to trust me!” This startled me and hurt—especially because I was trying so hard to do the right thing—and though I could understand why he was short-tempered, his reaction upset me for the rest of the weekend.

At first when I thought about it, the idea of me trusting him seemed ridiculous. We were all stressed, and he was 90 years old and had been forgetting all kinds of things—I would find the stove on hours after breakfast or the water running after he had left the bathroom. And he wants me to TRUST him? On what grounds? I felt like shouting back at him.

But that statement stuck in my head, and over time I got curious about it. Did I trust Dad? What does it mean to trust someone? Was he talking about something deeper than his lawn sprinkler? I started using that as a kind of barometer for my actions in the last years that Dad was alive. What would I do right now if I did trust him?

One day last summer I happened to hear Dad throwing up. When I came to the bathroom door and asked him how he was doing he admitted that he wasn’t that keen at the moment. He had taken some old supplement that had been open for awhile and he thought that had disturbed his digestion. But when I asked him if he needed any help, he said that he didn’t. Just let me suffer on my own, was the gist of his response. Ok, Dad. I will trust you. And I went off to bed.

Or when I took over moving his lawn sprinklers this summer when he got too unsteady on his feet, I thought I would just go figure it out on my own, but Dad had all the details down to the inch—where to place the sprinklers, how large to make the hose coil when I was finished, what order to move the sprinklers in. Everything had its place and its purpose. In the past I would have felt constrained and offended, but pretty soon I realized that I could just trust him. And as obsessive as his system was, it did actually work. All the lawns got watered in a short amount of time. His hose never had those annoying kinks in it. And after I started trusting him I could relax and follow him around as he showed me exactly where to place the sprinklers, and just enjoy doing something together with him.

I am finding that his request to trust him doesn’t end with death. As we are cleaning out the house and I am deciding what to keep and what to throw away, I start hearing those words again in my mind. Only this time they aren’t angry. Now they are kind. Warm. Comforting. Trust me, I hear. Which now translates into: It’s ok to let go of things. What needs to be done will get done. I have taken care of the things that were important to me…save what you want and get on with your own life.

*******

Virginia Woolf’s father died tragically and early, when she was in her 20’s, and though she was devastated at the time, she reflects in her diary much later that if her father had lived it would have been the end of her literary life. "No writing, no books;--inconceivable." (3) I have to say that I recognize her feelings. I am thankful for the years I had with my parents—that they got to know my husband, and saw me become part of my community in Seattle and find work that I loved. But I am also grateful to be so young when they died. I feel like there is possibility for me to focus on my own life and my own calling—and perhaps specifically on writing. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I have written so much since Dad died. There's room for books now that there may not have been room for before—at least not inside my own head.

But the expansion I am feeling isn’t only about not having the extra duties of caring for an elderly parent, or the loosening of old identity. I have also had the sense—first after Mom died, and now also after Dad’s passing—that when someone close to us in our family dies, it makes something available to us. It feels like there are “family resources” created by the lives of my ancestors that are stored up for me to use, and that when a person passes, the key to those resources is passed on to the next generation.

I don’t even really know what I mean when I say this, or how to put it into words. Anything I say is certainly meant as the finger pointing at the moon. But it feels like there is some kind of reservoir of love, patience, kindness, wisdom—certainly way more than any person showed in their actual life—that is available to me now to draw from, and that I will pass on when I die.

So their passing gives me this gift. Not only the gift of time and space, and the perspective to see myself more accurately in relation to them, but the gift of support. As I am quiet and listen, I can feel energies coalescing around me in new ways. I am surprised today to realize that what I feel, even in the midst of sadness and grief and uncertainty, is power. The power of knowing who I am. And the power to create from that.

*******

I open one of the books of poetry that I bought recently in Fruita and read:

      In the depth of the ground
      my soul glides
      silent as a comet (4)

Yes, I think. That is how it would be for Dad.

------------

(1) www.gailbakerartmaker.com
(2) p. 61, H.D., (1972). From "Sagesse" in Hermetic Definition. New York: New Directions.
(3) p. 17, Virginia Woolf, quoted in Tillie Olsen, (2003). Silences. New York: Feminist Press.
(4) p. 217, Tomas Tranströmer, (2006). the great enigma: new collected poems. Translated by Robin Fulton. New York: New Directions.

Part 2: The Dig

When Mom died nearly four years ago, Dad didn’t move any of her belongings. Her shoes stayed next to the door, her pillbox on the table, her clothes by the dryer. He just went on living around them while his life piled on top. So with his death, one of our first tasks was to clear out their home, which meant going through both of their things at once.

My parents have lived in this house for 50 years—my brothers and sister moved here as teenagers, but this is my only childhood home. After so many years of stasis, the house and its contents felt like a tightly compressed ball of energy. When Dad died, it was like a fuse was lit, and all that energy exploded immediately in all directions. Keepsakes went out the door with children and grandchildren. Bags and bags went to thrift stores and recycling. But the majority was ready to be released as heat and light, and we filled an entire farm truck (twice) with things to be burned in Spokane’s waste incinerator. There was something so right about all that accumulated history and memory being turned into electricity, about clearing the house of the old to make way for the new.

As we cleaned, it struck us that we were conducting an archaeological dig. The top layer was composed of the remains of Dad’s last years alone since Mom died. This layer was mostly things that were clearly disposable: junk mail, old birthday cards, broken sprinkler heads, grocery lists, medication fact sheets, dried up pens and paper clips and popsicle sticks, and all the other little odds and ends that accumulate from daily living. In the parts of the house that he didn’t visit much, this layer consisted of a thick coating of dust.

Below that were the remains from Mom’s last couple years of illness before her death—foot braces, medical bills, memory books from the nursing home, pill bottles, well-worn clothes with her name written on the collars in permanent ink. And below that was a poignant layer of disorganization before we recognized that Mom’s mind was deteriorating. Books on the floor next to the bookshelf. Emails printed out but not filed. Unanswered letters and half-finished projects. I find in a wastebasket a particularly painful note marking the exact edge when Mom suddenly went from her capable self to no longer being able to write an email or care for herself. The note mentions an upcoming concert, then reads: “My condition is deteriorating noticeably. Katie is coming to go to the appointment with the neurologist with me.” This is her rehearsal for one of the last emails she wrote. And this is the only piece of paper in her garbage can. Before that she emptied her can regularly; after that she never used it.

*******

When we skim all this recent history off the top, run the vacuum, and dust everywhere, suddenly the house that I remember when Mom was around is there underneath, still intact after all these years—the same tablecloth, the same memorabilia on the mantelpiece, the same piano music and books and pictures. It is a shock to realize how much the house had changed slowly into “Dad’s house” and to find this familiar place below.

Then we dig even deeper, past the recent history into closets and drawers where we unearth each of our childhoods. First mine—as I was the last to live there—in the puzzles and projects in the dining room cupboards. A replica of a saber-toothed tiger skull that I was chipping out of plaster. Colored plastic strands for braided bracelets. A pelican half-carved out of a bar of soap. Magazine pictures pasted onto scraps of plywood. Bits of lichen and seeds and dried flowers and shells.

Then the life of my siblings appears. In the filing cabinets there are folders for each child of their artwork, grades, school pictures, hospital records for tonsillectomies, and a packet a memorabilia from each birth. There are music lessons, the Learn to Draw with John Gnagy art set that they all drew from together, electronics kits and science fair projects, a row of my sister’s tennis trophies, window sills full of my brother’s pottery from a class he took in college, a quilt that my brother and sister-in-law made that is so well-worn from years of use that Mom had given up patching it. And for all of us, skis and ice skates. Pull toys and blocks. Caroms and Monopoly and Space Shot and Pit. Giant ancient flannel sleeping bags and army surplus camping gear. And the yarn and patterns from all the sweaters and blankets and socks that Mom knitted over the years for children and grandchildren.

Below that we find their life before children. Letters and photos from graduate school. A collection of scientific papers from the lab where my mother worked while Dad was studying physics. A box of unused wedding gifts. Photos of college ski trips. Biology notes, textbooks.  Then younger still—4-H ribbons, a red metal horse, a monkey that climbed a stick when you shook it, a little Japanese box with a secret drawer, a tiny candle stub, some “Willkie for president” pins, a pair of steer horns, an old bell with a strap small enough that it must have gone on a lamb.

We dig and sort, clean and cry, share memories and frustrations, and haul box after box out of the house. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming. I feel dizzy with it all, as though I am living in a house of mirrors and I can’t find the passage out. I am not even sure who I am grieving for anymore. Who just died? Is it Dad? Mom? The house? My childhood?

But as we uncover hidden stashes, sort closets and drawers—as room after room slowly empties, I feel like the house is breathing a sigh of relief. It is coming into the present. Soon it will be a place where the current farm owners can live and work. And at the same time, my ideas about my parents are coming into the present as well. My picture of my parents as people is filling in. Now that they are gone I can see in the reflection of their belongings more of who they actually were, rather than just my ideas about them. It’s so clear in this dig through the past that they lived for forty years before I showed up, and that all of my experience with them—all those events that are so fraught with significance to me—are just one small part of who they were. And if this is true of them as people, how much more true it is of them as souls, whatever that connection is to the vast fabric of the universe.

*******

After two whirlwind weeks, I fly back to our trailer in Arizona. Two weeks of very little sleep left me physically tired, but more than that, I felt profoundly unmotivated. A good part of my energy still seemed caught back at the farm, 1500 miles away. Though I felt a sense of freedom in the first days after Dad passed, I didn’t have any plan for moving forward. No longer do I have to wonder whether I will be needed to care for him. No longer do I have to hope he won’t break a bone or wreck the car or burn the house down. And yet all I wanted to do was curl up around my memories and hide.

It has taken me a few weeks to get my feet back under me. It’s like I have been whirled in a blender and my ideas of who I am have been tossed around and broken apart. It is not an entirely unpleasant feeling, but I am still waiting for the present to coalesce again—waiting for the new reality to feel real.

Part 1: "May we have your father's grace"

Marynard A. Cutler (1923 - 2018)

After almost 96 years of life my father passed away on December 3, nearly a month ago now. As I start to write this, I feel a wave of sadness, as I always thought of Dad when I composed a post. Though he almost never said anything to me about my writing, he was a fan, and I know he read every word. His greatest compliment was when he commented once that he didn’t know how I could put all those words together in the right order. He wondered (in his usual understated way) “If someone took all the words from one of your stories and mixed them all up in a box, could they make something like this out of them?”

On the other hand, I also worried about what he would think of what I wrote. My life is quite different from his and I have tended to keep a lot of it to myself around him. This blog pushes my comfort zone about sharing my inner world. Would he judge my choices? Would he understand what I was doing? Would he think I was nuts?

So as I write, I feel an odd combination of loss and relief. Though in a way I feel freer to speak my mind, there is a hole out there where he used to be receiving what I sent out. I had gotten used to him being there like a light in the night showing me the edge of the world I lived in. Now that little light is dark. I feel the emptiness where it once was.

*******

There's so much in my heart since Dad's passing. My mind is a log jam of thoughts and feelings. Where to begin? I realized today that I didn’t have to fit all my thoughts in one post. That helped. And with the pressure off, it was clear that the first thing I wanted to talk about was his actual death.

Both of my parents were capable, intelligent, independent farm people. Mom, however, became incapacitated at the end of her life by small strokes and a series of falls and broken bones. She needed full-time care for her last two years of life, and spent many months in a rehab facility.

Dad never wanted to go to a nursing home or even have someone care for him in his own home. He said to me once when he was younger that he would crawl around on the floor to take care of himself before he would have some stranger come into his house to help him. And the thought of going to any kind of retirement home always made him grimace like he was in pain. Though he would gladly accept help from his children in his later years, even that was always on his own terms.

Over this past summer when I stayed with him he was clearly declining. He tired easily, was often dizzy, and would occasionally collapse without warning. Though he could still take care of all his daily chores, his world had shrunk down to the house, the iPad, and the television, with an occasional drive on the farm roads to see what my brothers and niece were working on. 

After Tom and I left in September I think he was about the same, but later that fall he started letting my brothers know that he was ready to die, and even looking into what hospice provided. Then on December 2nd my brother found that he was having some small seizure-like episodes. He had also thrown up and just wasn’t feeling well, so in the evening my brother took him to the emergency room. When he got to the hospital they found that his heart rate was very low—I believe the doctor’s comment was, “How can you be talking to me when you have a heart rate of 35!”—and that he would need a pacemaker to survive.  At first Dad was uncertain about what he wanted. What would the pacemaker do for him? Was it a good idea? His sons were uncertain how to advise him. So much seemed like it hung in the balance. What was the right decision? And who would make it and how?

Sometime in the last three years I had read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande—one doctor's exploration of how to help people do what is really important to them at the end of their lives, and his critique of how and why the medical professional sometimes fails to achieve that. It seemed like the doctor who attended to Dad on his last trip to the hospital must have read the same book, because his ability to help Dad with this decision was noteworthy. He spoke directly to Dad, not to my brothers who were in the room with him. He made sure Dad could hear and understand him. And he asked Dad very specific questions about what really mattered to him. If Dad contradicted himself he would simply point that out and continue to patiently hold space for Dad to make his own decisions.

Further tests had showed that Dad’s heart had been damaged by a heart attack. And the doctor’s careful attention to him allowed Dad to take that information in. At some point in the conversation, Dad became very clear. No pacemaker. No surgery. It was time to let nature take its course.

Dad was moved to a room where he could receive comfort care. I was able to say a few sentences to him on the phone, and when one of my brothers left for the night Dad was still arguing with him that he wanted to run the remote control himself. A couple hours later he drifted off to sleep. The next morning he gradually stopped breathing and died.

Dad wasn't someone who shunned medical care. He had a quadruple heart bypass in his 70's as well as surgery for prostate cancer. Just in the past few months he had had some cancerous skin growths removed from his face. He got angry with my brother when he recently tried to help him fill out a form specifying what kinds of medical care he would and wouldn't want in an emergency. "That's what the doctors are for!” he shot back. “They are supposed to make those decisions!"

But he knew what he wanted, and he knew when it was time. For him, life was not worth living if it meant moving out of his home or being helpless. He wanted to be able to cook his own turkey loaf in the oven and play ping pong even if he had to hold onto the table with one hand to steady himself. He took every opportunity to live a long life, to enjoy working and playing, but in the end he didn't grasp at it. He was able to open his hand and let go.

As a good friend wrote to me after Dad's death: May we have your father's Grace.

Beginning again

Triple Divide Peak, Glacier National Park

If I listen carefully I can feel a little shift inside when something is right for me. It is a kind of knowing that is hard to describe; there are no sounds or words or fireworks that go with it. It is actually kind of ordinary, a matter-of-fact feeling. I imagine it feels the way a compass would feel about north—if compasses had feelings.

This was the feeling I had when I heard about Triple Divide Peak in Glacier National Park. As soon as I read about it, I knew that it was important to me for some reason—and I knew that I wanted to go see it.

Triple Divide Peak is unique, not only in Glacier, but on the continent. As its name suggests, it is the intersection of three of the main North American watersheds. Simply put, a raindrop falling on the top of Triple Divide Peak would end up in the Pacific, Atlantic, or Arctic Ocean, depending on which face it fell on. Of course it is never that simple—specifically, there is some disagreement about whether the Hudson Bay drains to the Atlantic Ocean or the Arctic—but it was this metaphor that captured my attention.

We set aside our last day in Glacier for this hike, which would take us to the pass just below the peak. Starting from the deserted Cut Bank Campground, the walk up was uneventful, other than coming suddenly across the broad, slab-face of a big mama-moose browsing in the underbrush, and being amazed that such an enormous animal could melt so quickly into the forest and disappear. The trail to the peak was not a popular route.  We didn't see another person all the way up to the divide, and once we arrived at the top, we were alone. This allowed me to take a good long look at the peak and to savor the sensations of being perched on the narrow ridge, imagining the connections that stretched from here all the way across the continent to those three far-away oceans.

Then after eating lunch we walked back down. Other than the welcome solitude and the mindfulness, I can’t say that I experienced any major revelations. It was a nice day and I was pleasantly tired at the end of it.

But somehow the image of the peak kept returning, as though it had a message for me, but one so subtle I couldn’t quite hear it. It wasn’t until I had rolled this experience around for several more weeks that I could begin to put its meaning into words.

Part of the metaphorical power of this place for me is that it points to our ability to begin again. I once attended a weekend workshop with meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg in which she spent the entire weekend focused on the idea of beginning again. Your mind has wandered away from your meditation? Begin again.You have made an error in judgment? Begin again. You have suffered a defeat? Begin again. And again now.

And now.

And now.

Her message, I think, is embodied in this peak. This peak is the physical equivalent of the mental practice of beginning again. So often a thought or a habit takes off and we are barreling down the slope to the Atlantic again. Or the Pacific. As long as we are in that thought, there is no turning back—the path ahead is inevitable. When we begin again we return to the top and to this larger perspective, to a place that includes all the oceans—and all the paths to them. From this place we have the ability to choose again and again which path we will take this time, to choose our attitude and our orientation.

This peak also feels like a metaphor for discernment. Discernment about the things that matter—things at the core of who we are—is a subtle activity with profound consequences. Just one step to one side or the other of this ridge sets us on a path which ends thousands of miles away from the others. A little deviation from our own integrity or values doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, but pretty soon we are so far away from ourselves it can feel impossible to get back on track.

The good news is that no matter where we have ended up, the peak is always there, and mentally or spiritually we can always begin again in any moment.

These are both useful ideas, but when I hold the image of the peak in my mind, there is a still deeper image, one which I can sense, but don’t quite understand—an intimation of a kind of awareness. I imagine a practice of actively balancing on this thin edge, not as a way to find the “right” direction, or the right answer, but as an answer in and of itself, an awareness that lies outside the realm of “answers” at all.

I have been practicing imagining being at this peak and noticing how this affects my thinking and behavior. I notice that I feel calmer when I do this, more disinterested, freer to respond to things authentically in the moment. There is a perspective here that is all-inclusive. From this place there are no wrong paths, no wrong ocean to end up in. If this peak leads everywhere, how would you determine that one place was any better or worse than another?

From here I can also feel how connected everything is. Those raindrops that start on this peak don’t stop someplace—they keep going, transforming all the while into creeks, rivers, rain, snow, plants, animals, people, and yes, even pee and poop. One thing turns into the next in an infinite chain. And this chain doesn’t end at those three oceans. Those oceans stretch across the globe to other continents. The water in those oceans rises up into the air as rain again. The oceans and the earth itself are pushed and pulled by the moon and the sun and the other planets in our solar system. And on and on… It is all connected, and my usual linear cause-and-effect thinking is a tiny fragment of those great cycles of activity.

And I can sense ever-so-faintly that even those great cycles are embedded in an infinity that I can’t even begin to imagine, the vast swathes of galaxies in the night sky giving just the barest hint of the actual stretch of reality.

Back here on my imaginary seat on the rock at the top of the peak, my head is spinning and my imaginary butt is getting sore from sitting. I think I need to get up and stretch; eat something; see what the weather is. Our real-world perspective is always present and needs tending. But the image of the balance point helps me to live with more grace and ease in the midst of all the pulls toward one slope or another—helps me to see the bigger picture that my tiny world is part of.

And this ending reminds me of a Haiku I read last night by Claire Everett of North Yorkshire, England:

     earth from space...
     and here I am
     dotting an i

********

So much has happened since I wrote last. We finished our trip up the east side of the Cascade Mountains this spring. We spent the summer on my family’s farm outside of Spokane, Washington. We passed the two-year mark of leaving our house in Seattle on September 7. And now we are traveling again, heading south for the winter via the Rocky Mountains. We started with a week in Glacier National Park and a little longer in Yellowstone (with stops in towns for work and supplies.) This just barely gave us a taste of those two great landscapes, but that taste was memorable. And we will definitely be back...

On smugness

May 13: After a morning crammed with too many tasks, I rushed through lunch, jumped in the truck to drive to the farmer’s market before it closed at 1:00, and in my hurry, tried to make a tight turn out of our campsite to take a shortcut to the park entrance and…

…ran right over our solar panel.

I still cringe when I think of that moment—that tiny bit of resistance on the tires, then an unusual crunching sound—really quite slight, actually; I could have continued driving and not known anything had happened—and then Tom’s furious shout, the sudden horror hitting me in the belly of what I think that sound may have been…then the image of the mangled metal and glass ground into the dirt, our beautiful solar panel broken beyond recognition.

In that moment of seeing the wreckage, there was no way to avoid my responsibility. Or deny the destruction. I felt shocked and furious at the pointlessness of it. What a waste! Of the solar panel itself, of our time, of our carefully made plans. To make matters worse, the solar system is Tom’s baby. He researched it, bought the pieces, and put the system together. He puts the panels out and repositions them during the day. He checks the water level in the batteries, monitors the storage levels. The freedom it gives us to travel to places without hookups is especially important to his pursuit of photography—not to mention his psyche.  As I look at what is left of it, I feel sick to my stomach. I feel like I have run over his pet dog. And I can tell from his reactions that he feels that way, too.

When we have calmed down enough to hold a screwdriver and a hacksaw, we work in silence to try to salvage something out of the broken mess. Tom notices that amazingly the panel is still generating some electricity, and when we look more closely we see that only one of the two folding panels is crushed. Also, even though I drove right over the controller, when he unhooks it and rewires it to the intact panel it actually works. We hacksaw the two panels apart and remount the controller and the legs on the single functional panel. At least it is something. It won’t generate enough power to stay off grid for long, but if it is sunny, and we are careful, we can get by. Tom makes a weak, but valiant attempt at a joke. I appreciate it, but am not yet ready to laugh about this. I still feel sick to my stomach; even feel a hesitancy to get back in the truck. The farmer’s market is definitely out of the question.

**********

This is a solvable problem. I realized that where it hurt us really was not in a practical or economic place—certainly we could problem-solve a solution and we could afford another panel. Where it hurt the most—after the first shock of the wreckage—was in some kind of pride tangled up in my identity. We have been doing this for awhile now, and I was proud of our system. I was proud of the independence it gave us, its flexibility and mobility. It was compact and portable, easy to set up and store, and—as long as it was sunny—easily generated all the power we needed. I was even proud of the fact that Tom got a good deal when he bought it because the box had been damaged slightly at the warehouse.

Ultimately, this is not a very big problem, especially considering what many people in the world face daily—volcanoes, war, rising seas, loss of home or loved ones. Neither of us were hurt. Life went on with all of its daily joys and challenges. A month later it has become (mostly) a funny story.  

But the pain of this was worth listening to. It was real, in that moment. And it also opened a door to reflection.

This pain was a signal that I just needed to STOP. Slow down. Find my way back to my own body. What happened was the natural outcome of being in a hurry and of being pulled in too many directions. I was already on this path when I slammed out of the trailer earlier—feeling harried and rushed and irritated at something—I don’t even remember what. This hurry is why I didn’t check the blind spot on the truck, why I cut the corner to drive the wrong way on the campground road, why I just didn’t take a moment to think.

And this pain also pointed to a certain smugness that had crept in as we got “good” at what we do. There is nothing wrong with appreciating things that work. But in my smugness I was basing my identity on them working. I had begun to forget what it is like to not have enough—whether it is electricity (or water or food or shelter) or more abstract things like safety or choice. I had forgotten the discomfort of being a beginner. My pride in our setup was stretching toward feeling superior. My smugness was separating me from other people.

Now we have half a panel with a broken leg and sawed-off hinges. We can’t generate enough power on cloudy days to keep up. This is sobering and feels like a good reminder. A reminder that resources are not unlimited, and that in the end, nothing lasts.

But most important, I think it is a reminder about gratitude, which I think is the antidote to smugness. Gratitude keeps me in the present rather than hurrying to get more. It helps me find my own calm center again. And gratitude is a way of appreciating something good without setting myself apart from others for having it. Gratitude recognizes that I can’t take good things for granted. That they come and go, and their presence is always a blessing.

In the end a broken solar panel is a small price to pay for this.

Flow

photo credit: Tom Talbott, Jr.

In Progoff Journal Work one of the first steps to examining one’s life is to identify what “period” one is currently in. This is not something that you can measure from the outside, as these periods don’t have a specific length or content—it is something that you only know from the inside.

When I think about my own life, I can feel how I have been in a period of “dismantling.” This period began with my mother’s death in March of 2015 and probably ended around the time we sold our house at the end of 2017. As I have written about often already, this period was mostly about letting go and allowing old forms to disintegrate—possessions, identity, the structures I had created around work and home. However, as I look back over the past four months, I can start to feel the beginnings of a different period, a period defined by something new: something that feels like flow.

This period feels more fluid and more relaxed. In this period, “letting go” is still necessary, but it is more interwoven with new growth. Instead of the avalanche of letting go that the past few years brought, this feels more tidal, an ebb and flow of give and take. Or like a stream, whose course is created by the simultaneous arrival and departure of its water.

The activity that has most defined this new period is a practice I started in January of writing “a poem a day.” I should say right up front that these “days” sometimes stretch out over the course of a week or more when my life gets busy or I get distracted. But I like the simplicity of saying it this way—a poem a day, meaning not just thinking about poetry, or writing lines of poetry, but actually writing a poem, which, however brief, is something complete in and of itself.

             …capsules
        containing the whole…

        a stone
        a bone
        a shell

After several months of this, I am starting to learn that in order to write a poem today, I have to let go of the poem I wrote yesterday. And I am also realizing, after sitting down in a completely un-poem-like place and then finding a poem there after all, that the possibility of a poem always exists, even if I am not aware of that possibility in the moment. This means that my job is not to “make up” a great poem every day, it is simply to tend my connection to the source of poetry.

Or as William Stafford said: “I think you create a good poem by revising your life…by living the kind of life that enables good poems to come about.”

Stafford also said: “That poem is best that is most congruent with who you are,” and this is the goal of this practice for me. I am not in this for the good poems, I am simply practicing writing in ways that feel more and more congruent with who I am.

One way of letting go of the poem that I wrote yesterday is to share it with other people. So, if you are interested in reading some of the poems from the past four months, I have posted them on the Poem a Day page on this website. I will likely take a break over the spring and summer, as this is the time of year to be outside, but this has been an enjoyable practice for the past four months.

--------------------------

As of April 14th, we are back on the road again in our own little rolling home. We spent the month before that getting Winky out of the garage, fixed up, aired out, and packed again and ready to go. In recognition of her limitations, we headed over the mountains toward a drier climate and have been spending a few days in Sisters, Oregon, amongst the big ponderosa pine trees. We don't have an exact plan yet, but the general idea is to spend some time in eastern Washington and Oregon exploring some areas where we have considered settling down.

The way it is

When I began this blog last year, I chose the opening line of William Stafford’s poem “The Way it Is” as the tagline:

There’s a thread you follow.

I knew this poem was important to me when I first read it many years ago, but I didn’t realize just how appropriate it would be for this past year. As I reflect on where I am at now, I realize that this poem puts into words what has been most important to me in our travels.

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.

********

Over the past year, we have lived in 80 different places. All of this moving around has made it clear what does change—which is pretty much everything. The people, plants, and animals all change. My thoughts, emotions, hopes, dreams, and fears all change. My relationships change, as does my personality. Weather, seasons—even the sun, moon, and stars all change, though you might have to wait awhile for that.

As Stafford says:

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

And yet, even in the midst of all this inevitable change, there is this thread.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

The thread isn’t something I can describe directly. Like Stafford, I can only assert that it exists. There is no proof of it other than the action of following it. And I can only indicate where it is by recognizing where it is not. But when I returned back to familiar people and places this summer (noting the changes that had happened there as well) I realized that the true gift of this year was this simple: that in the quiet, I could feel that thread inside me.

********

I thought I was going to do a lot of reflecting and writing on the past year. I expected to spend this month creating a thorough retrospective of everything I had seen and done and learned. But though there are many experiences for which I am grateful—seeing Zion, meeting the community in Cascabel, getting comfortable using a laundromat, living for a while around cattle and horses, learning to walk in the desert, feeling the vast expanses of the Southwest, returning to friends and family…to list just a few—I think that my retrospective is done.

It is not the breadth of my experience that is most important, but the simplest thing that can be distilled out of all that experience. And that simple thing is this:

There's a thread you follow.

Following this thread led me into this year. It led me through this year. And following my thread will take me wherever I go next. That is enough.

So in the end, all that I learned this year was already there, right in front of me, all along.

The Way it Is
by William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

---------------------

p.s. I noticed that this was the only picture I took on our one-year anniversary two weeks ago. I guess some part of me was already tuning into the meaning of this year...and has a sense of humor...

Day 348: Zen and the Art of Knitting

Sometimes doing the wrong thing can turn out to be the right thing.

Many years ago my mom gave me a book called Zen and the Art of Knitting. The exact history of this gift is lost to me. I have never had the best long-term memory—and arriving on the other side of fifty hasn't improved it—but I think the book was a present for a birthday, or perhaps Christmas. If it was, though, it was one of those presents that I think even she downplayed. An I’m-not-sure-if-this-is-your-kind-of-book, but-I-got-it-for-you-anyway, kind of present.

At first I didn't read it because I often don't read books I am given right away. It takes me awhile to warm up to them. I have to live with the book for awhile before I know whether I want to open it. Besides, there is usually a pile of half-read books in line already that I need to work through before getting to the new one.

Then there was the problem with the title. While Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a favorite book of mine as a younger person, I am suspicious now of books that start with Zen and… . There is a faddishness to it that seems very un-Zen-like. And I dislike the way that Zen gets used to mean just about anything we want it to, especially something we want to sell.

And, on the other side of the coin, it seemed like a cheap shot. Really, is there anything so obviously Zen as knitting? Do I really need a whole book to tell me that knitting is everyday meditation?

So it sat unopened, moving about the house sometimes from one bookshelf to another in one of my library-reorganization schemes. Sometimes I would look at it and think about reading it, but it just never felt compelling enough. But any time I would think about giving it away, its status as a gift, especially a gift from my mother, would stop me.

So I kept it. Even through last year’s great purge of downsizing from a house to an 18-foot trailer. But now after almost a year on the road, I am doing some even deeper culling and I have been going through book-boxes with an eye to letting go.

So I pulled it out yesterday with the intention of sending it on. After all, I don't even knit these days, and my mom died two and a half years ago so I can’t talk to her about this book even if I did read it. It seemed like an obvious non-keeper.

But as I flipped through the book, looking for scraps of paper or bookmarks, I noticed that it had an inscription. Surely I must have known this? But my long-term memory was doing what it does best, and if I had known I’d forgotten. The inscription read:

Katie,

Pages 28-33 struck a special chord with me.

“... I see the hand of God in the details of my everyday existence. In my life it all comes as a package.”

“The insights I have gained into the spiritual and creative benefits of knitting seem Zen-like to me in their emphasis on finding the holy spark in everyday life, in sitting still, in letting things unfold.”

Love,
Mom

More than two years after her death, this inscription in her distinctive handwriting feels as if she has reached out unexpectedly with her old warmth from whatever realm she has disappeared to. And her invitation mirrors my current thoughts with an eerie accuracy. How much of this year has been about just this? Seeing God in the everyday. Recognizing that my life is an indivisible whole. And, most of all, simply learning to sit still and let things unfold. 

I turn to the section she references, and it begins with the author sitting on her porch watching a swarm of newly hatched butterflies: The air is thick with them. They make shadows across the pad of paper on my lap. Another moment of synchronicity snaps across my consciousness as I think about the post I wrote this year about the beauty of the swarm of Ctenucha moths hatching at Madera Canyon.

Further on I read: I’ve learned to make peace with the chaotic nature of life, to sit still when upheaval surrounds me, to do nothing when nothing is required. This seems to apply to both Mom and me. I think about how Mom had to do this in the last years of her life, had to learn to really do nothing, as even knitting—something she excelled at—became too complex to enjoy. And at the same time it feels like through this book she is also speaking to me, letting me know that she understands what this year has meant to me. In this moment, concepts like past and present, or her and I fall away. Some kind of healing is happening, some kind of reorganization of my habits of thought.

At first, I feel a familiar guilt for not paying more attention to who she was. Why was I not more curious about something that she sent me because it meant something to her? Why could I not set aside my own life for a day or two to read this? But I know that my own circumstances and personality have made my struggle not so much about how to have empathy, but rather how to have boundaries. If I couldn’t see my mother, it was not because I was too distant, but because I was too entangled. With a kind of terrible irony it was her death that allowed me the room to be curious about who she was as a person, as someone apart from her role as my mother.

As I read further, I find that the book begins when the author also loses her mother, sometime in college. It begins with the author taking a trip to her ancestral country of Ireland, initially as a way to avoid her grief, but through this travel, finding solace in her interactions with her extended family.

I think if I had read this book back when Mom gave it to me it would not have had the impact it does now—that it would have just been about her. Waiting this long gave it an additional message, as though she was also saying to me, I know how hard it is to lose your mom, but I am right here still. I am always part of you, whether you know it or not. As far you go from "home" I am still there: in the people you meet, in the land you live in, in your hands and mind and heart.

Perhaps the question for me at the end of this year is, How would I live if I carried absolutely no more guilt about my relationship with my mother? If I accepted every part of it—her natural limitations, my natural limitations, the things each of us did or didn’t do—if I saw all of that as just the way it was, and knew instead the deeper connection between her and me and everything else, what would I do?

I can see now, in this ignored and forgotten book, how Mom was aware of what is most important to me—the sense of that perfection that exists right in the center of what is already. That reality that means that there is nothing you have to do or be or strive for or achieve—that what I am and you are is enough already, right now, in the midst of all of our imperfections. That doesn’t mean she (or I) always lived from this awareness, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is here, all the time, all around us, “costing not less than everything.”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

        from T.S. Elliot's "Little Gidding"

------------------------------

Tom and I have arrived in Salem, Oregon at our last planned destination of this year—his parent's house for the total solar eclipse. In the last couple months we have enjoyed time with my family on the farm near Spokane, a drive across Washington on Highway 20, and a brief visit to Seattle. Since being in Salem, I have finished reading Zen and the Art of Knitting, a book which now is a treasured reminder of Mom sitting in her favorite chair with her latest knitting project. Our year-long trip is officially over on September 5th. Now we just need to figure out what's next...

Day 280: What is home?

May 25: Bosque del Apache NWR, New Mexico

In a couple weeks, Tom and I plan to be at my family's farm near Spokane where I grew up. Even though I have not lived there for nearly 30 years, I have continued to call it home, something that always confused things when we would drive from “home” in Seattle to “home” on the farm. Sure, I knew it wasn’t where I lived at the time, but it was always a more fundamental kind of home—a place that I originated from, that defined me, and by which I measured all other things.  It was a kind of center of gravity; something that you never really left.

For months now I have thought of arriving back on the farm after all of our traveling this year, as going home. But it suddenly hit me tonight, completely out of the blue, as I was in the middle of cooking a sausage for dinner:  the farm is not my home.

I am not sure I can explain the impact of this thought to anyone who moved frequently as a child. Those of you who did, got this lesson long ago.  But for someone who lived in the same place growing up, a place that was such a force of life, a place which still exists essentially unchanged today, this idea felt like a small revolution in my mind.

The farm is not my home. Yes, it is the place I grew up. Yes, it will always be part of me. Yes, there are people I love there. But it is their home, and it seems important, at this point in my life in particular, that I stop calling it mine.

Which of course raises the question: What is home? Is home the structure I live in? Is this trailer, that we have now hauled around the West to 60 different places, home? It certainly is no small comfort to have this little island of familiarity to return to each day, but is that all that home is? Is home where the heart is—with the partner that I have chosen to live with? Or with family? Or with the community of people I work and share friendships with? In the past, I have associated home with a location—a piece of land or a kind of landscape. I remember when I first moved west of the Cascades in my early 20’s how utterly lost I felt immersed in unfamiliar weather and plants, and how long it took me to begin to recognize this new place as somewhere I belonged.

May 10: Winky at Sunny Flats Campground, Cave Creek Canyon, Chiricahua Mts, Arizona

This past year, though, has given me a new perspective. That perhaps it isn’t something on the outside that is home, but rather something inside myself. And that perhaps when I am in touch with this inner home, my outer home can expand. Perhaps (as I began to consider in earlier posts) the whole world is my home. Perhaps wherever I happen to live is part of a much larger whole. Perhaps this is another way to “hide the world in the world.”

And perhaps letting go of calling the farm home, and recognizing that I am a visitor there, is a step toward embracing a fundamental contradiction: that while I am at home everywhere I go, I am also a visitor everywhere I live. As my sense of belonging widens, perhaps my sense of possession can lighten. Perhaps I can learn to be a partner with the place I live rather than its master.

What I can be master of is myself. And that mastery brings with it confidence. The confidence to say: Where am I today? And to answer: Today I am at home, in myself and in the world.

Letting Go

You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you.
But suppose you were to hide the world in the world…

--Chuang Tzu

This trip began with a death and a theft.

The death was the death of my mother after a several-year decline. When she passed, not only was my care-giving no longer needed, but something I had taken for granted all my life suddenly disappeared. The resulting emptiness was both freeing and disorienting. I felt like a horse who had been hitched loosely to a post for a long time; now the post was gone and there was no guidance about where to go.

The theft came a few months later on a trip to the Oregon coast. We had parked at a trailhead early in the morning to walk on the sand dunes, and when I returned someone had stolen my bags full of all my clothes. All that was left was what I was wearing and my pajamas back in the tent. What was gone were the clothes I really liked—the soft ones or the perfect-color ones or the ones that I had adopted from Tom—or irreplaceable things like the last crocheting project my Mom labored over two months before she died. But though I felt bereft at first, I also noticed a new lightness at not having bags to carry, or having to decide what to wear the next day, or (ironically) worrying about stuff getting stolen. The freedom I felt made me wonder what price I was actually paying for ownership.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this trip is turning out to be about letting go. At first it was about letting go of physical things—cleaning out our house of 20 years and dispersing most of our belongings. Leaving my office and clients and our familiar surroundings in Seattle. Being separated for a time from friends and family. But I am finding that it is also about letting go of inner things. My plans. My strategies for belonging, like being helpful or busy, My old reactions and habitual responses.

This morning (May 1st) we are leaving yet another place that we have fallen in love with—another kind of letting go. Saying goodbye to the calming presence of Mt. Wrightson, to the Mexican jays, to the alligator junipers with their distinctive checkerboard bark, to the Rincon paintbrush and the sycamores. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and I feel this in my gut as a kind of ache at every leaving.

As I just feel this sadness—and let it go, too—I can feel a new Emptiness behind it. After having over 50 different “homes” this year, I am getting used to endings. I am beginning to see that grasping onto things to try to keep them the same creates a different kind of emptiness, one that is fearful and lonely. This new Emptiness is different. It resonates with energy. It is large enough to contain everything we have seen and done—and more. It is indefinable. And it requires trust.

Perhaps if we do not shut down when things are taken from us or when we are sad, there can be room for this. Perhaps this is one way of hiding the world in the world.

*****

This part of the trip is hard for me, as we don’t have plans for the coming months. In the absence of structure or purpose, I often find myself depressed. Or, to put it more exactly, I cycle between extremes: one day I feel awe or contentment. The next I find myself aimless and lost, unsure about myself or the point of anything.

Jim Corbett speaks to this difficulty in his book Goatwalking. He sees these feelings as the natural result of opening to Emptiness, which he calls detachment or selflessness. Detachment requires a loosening of our addiction to busyness, and in order to even see this addiction, it helps to step outside of the usual social structures for awhile. This, he says, is not easy.

“Wandering purposeless and without human companionship, one sometimes experiences emotional crises that are...similar to culture shock and cabin fever.... Society provides most of the make-believe that prevents one's hells from surfacing into full consciousness. But whoever leaves the world to wander alone...should be prepared to meet a devil or two, when busyness ceases to drown out the dream side.” (1)

This description helps me recognize the moods I feel for what they are—the natural outcome of wandering. Without this perspective I would have headed back to something familiar long ago. But this breaking open is the first step in receiving the world.

*****

A few weeks ago I took a nap in the trailer in the heat of the day and woke up thinking that I was a child again on the farm and that my family was just in the other room. Then I started having sense-memories of caring for Mom at Manor Care—the ammonia smell of the building, the long yellow hall, all those blank hours. I felt groggy and disoriented from sleep and had a jolt of empathy for her confusion there—how hard it was to not be able to get up and walk, to know where she was, or to go outside to find herself again in green things and rain and dirt. I was surprised at how fresh all of those memories still were for me, and how often these days I feel like I imagine Mom did during that time, as though I am still carrying her in my body. This is another kind of letting go—the need to let go of the past.

I think of all the letting go Mom had to do in her last years—of her memory, her ability to make sense of the world, her capacity to care for herself and make her own decisions, and most of what was fun for her in life. Eventually letting go of her body, of life itself.

When I think about this, I know I don’t yet understand the full implications of letting go. All I see now are the positive aspects of living lighter, along with a little collateral sadness. But when I think about Mom and consider losing parts of myself that are central to "Me"—memory, skills, home, work—I can feel the desire to clutch fiercely at these things, unwilling to give them up.

Then I feel the wind blow, I see the tips of all the trees move together like a green ocean, and I know that these trees are connected to the canyons of Utah, the sagebrush of Nevada, the pines of the eastern Cascades, the great fir trees of the Olympic Mountains, and on and on. I feel the whole earth breath. I feel the pull to keep trying to understand what it means to hide the world in the world. I know there is no going back.

When you let go
you relax
open your hand—
everything falls to the ground.
You don't have to choose
any more.
This does not mean, though,
that you are bereft—
that things won't choose you.
That things with wings
won't land on your open palm,
or that little feet
won’t make the long journey
from the ground to your lap.
Just wait.
Open.
Everything
is a part of you.

------------------
(1) p. 10 in Jim Corbett, Goatwalking (1991) New York: Viking.

Day 169: Friends with trees

As I was writing my post on cottonwoods, I noticed my reluctance to say that I felt these trees were my friends. Would I appear too emotional, too fanciful? Or perhaps not serious enough—as though seriousness is what’s required to be credible.

But how are we inspired to do difficult work or make hard changes? Our feelings show us what matters to us: what we value, what we love, what gives us delight, what distresses us. And our feelings let us know what we know we are related to.

At some level, we are related to everything, but we are wired for smaller scopes—to care about and protect the immediate family, clan, or tribe. And our feelings show us who we consider part of our tribe: who is worthy of our effort to protect, who we will risk our own comfort for.

To feel friendly toward something is a recognition that our fates are linked. For your friends you wish good health and a good life. You care about what happens to them. You share their joys and sorrows. You are willing to get involved when they need support, and ask for help when the situation is reversed.

Feeling friendly toward a tree is the first step in a deeper relationship. It may be, as we say, “only a feeling”—not in it for the long haul. But if that feeling is honored, trusted, and followed, it can also lead to deeper commitment and understanding.

Saying I feel the trees are my friends, also says something about me. This morning, with that eerie synchronicity that brings things to me when I need them, I picked up the other book of poetry I brought with me—H.D.’s selected poems—and opened to some of her words about trees. Most of it doesn’t quote well out of context, but this passage from her autobiographical novel HERmione gives a taste:

The woods parted to show a space of lawn, running level with branches that, in early summer, were white with flower. Dogwood blossom. Pennsylvania. Names are in people, people are in names. Sylvania. I was born here. People ought to think before they call a place Sylvania.

Pennsylvania. I am part of Sylvania. Trees. Trees. Trees. Dogwood, liriodendron with its green-yellow tulip blossoms. Trees are in people. People are in trees. Pennsylvania.

This intermingling of self and surroundings is something I have felt since I was very young. Trees are in people. People are in trees. There is a life-hum in the least grassy hillside. Even the gnats vibrate with shared life. Every rock has a say in the world.

Not to follow this sensibility—to hesitate to say something as simple as I felt a kinship with a tree—cuts off my strength. Plain and simple, it is hiding—in a time when we can’t afford to hide. H.D.’s editor says of her work:

What [she] is discovering in the pervasive earth, wood, and water imagery is the force of her natural love for all created beings: tree or flower, wave or meadow, man or woman. Her creative powers depend upon her ability to enter into the nature of other beings, other creatures, and to feel all the world about her endowed with powers…

I could say the same about myself: My creative powers depend upon my ability to enter into the nature of other beings… This could be a call to all of us who resonate with this knowing but keep it hidden, to wake up and have the courage to be ourselves, visibly ourselves.

To make a bold statement: This feeling of friendship with life is what we need most in our world right now. And being more open about my own natural love for all created beings is what I need most in mine.

Day 114-132: Rest

In the past month and a half—spent mostly in the Mohave Desert—we have settled into a habit of hiking. Whenever we have free time, we go out first thing and spend the day wandering through washes and along the network of desert trails and roads. Sometimes we talk about what we are seeing: rocks, birds, plants, tracks, butterflies, a view. Sometimes we discuss what route to take when we come to a junction or lose the trail altogether. But more often than not, we are just walking in silence, often each at our own pace, settling deeper into ourselves as the miles pass underfoot.

This quiet is deeply healing for me. It gets in my bones. I can feel it, down in my core. As these long silent hours accumulate I can feel space opening up inside me in places that I didn’t even realize were full. I can start to see all the ways my mind keeps busy—thoughts and emotions, all the little pushes and pulls of a lifetime of experiences, the activity of life with other people. These long quiet days in the desert have made me think that perhaps the main purpose of this year for me isn’t “being open” or “learning,” as I thought before I left—perhaps the point is simply starting to rest.

A dear friend of mine gave me a book for this trip called The Relaxed Mind, Dza Kilung Rinpoche's thoughts about deepening meditation practice. I am drawn to the language of this book, as it is so different from the constant subtle pushing that is always in my own mind: that perpetual effort to achieve a goal, plan for the future, evaluate something, be more efficient, or learn and grow. This contrast is helping me see clearly the ways in which my mind is nearly always active.

When I was talking about my plans for this year with people before I left I could hear how even my best intentions had a partially false note to them. I knew that at times I was saying something not because it was completely true, but in part to justify myself or to do the right thing. The idea that the only point of this year is for my mind to learn to rest—that everything else is optional—is perhaps the first idea about it that has felt true for me all the way to its core.

I can see that this rest will make my actions more sustainable. Like a plant, I am stronger when firmly rooted in something still and solid. When my mind reaches far down into the earth for nourishment it can also stretch up into the light with flowers and fruit.

And that stillness is also where I find my source, that link to a deeper and broader wisdom than my own small perspective. In order to address the kinds of issues that face myself and the world, I need this kind of spaciousness inside me, or even my best intentions will likely mirror and perpetuate the difficulties around me. If I want harmony outside, I need to start with harmony within.

It would seem that resting would be simple. But when I see the barriers between me and real relaxation of mind, I can understand how it can be a lifelong goal. I feel grateful for my friend who understood that I needed this book, for Tom’s ability for silence and his willingness to share it with me, and for the time and space to just be alone and begin to listen past the everyday noise of my mind to the spaciousness we are all a part of.

          DESERT WALKING

     Blown clean by the wind

     of my future plans,

     I can feel the emptiness

     I was born to.

     Worry drained out.

     No where to go. The past

     just some grass 

     in a far field.

     That thought gone—

     just this hollow body

     making this music,

     this slow life-song.

--------------------

(After we left Lake Havasu, we spent three days at Mohave National Preserve, a couple days exploring Barstow and surrounding areas with Tom’s sister and family, then moved to Joshua Tree National Park and stayed eleven days exploring the rocks and hills and washes. We then moved down to a resort community in the Coachella Valley for showers, laundry, groceries, a haircut, and a place for Tom to get some work done. If I could only pick one place, Mohave National Preserve might be my favorite so far. It is more subtle than Zion, but I loved its wide open spaces and the varied terrain and plants. Oddly, I don't have any pictures from my time there that I like well enough to post, as I found it hard to capture its spacious, dry beauty. All the pictures in this post are from Joshua Tree National Park, except the fourth and sixth which are from the Coachella Valley Nature Preserve, and the fifth which is from Bill Williams NWR.)

Day 81-91: Why Black Rock, Utah is NOT a National Park…

...and Zion is.

Ok, that is a cheap shot at Black Rock. After all, we didn't even get out of the car, and many things in this world are not all that interesting from a moving vehicle. But we were going south in a hurry to get out of the path of the first serious winter storm that was scheduled to hit Utah the next day (November 26.) The snow in Brigham City on November 17th that barely covered the grass blades and was gone by noon was just foreshadowing. This was the real thing. So we drove from Provo to Cedar City in one day, a long trip for us, then on to Zion the next. 

Oh. My. God.

I almost don't want to post pictures of Zion, because there is no way they can capture it. The scenery is spectacular, for sure. But it is so much more than just a pretty place. It is a place that inspires, challenges, and asks for deep reflection.

I think Zion affected me so strongly because I was unprepared. I knew it had something to do with rocks, but that was about it. I was not expecting such magnificence, and for the first few days, I swung between being breathless with wonder and flat-out depressed.

I think this intensity is something that comes with sacred spaces. When I say sacred, I don’t mean that God is more present here than in other places, as it seems to me that whatever we mean when we say God, is, by definition, everywhere. However, there are places where we become more aware of spirit and of our connection to the bigger picture. And this makes us ask questions. The big questions. Like what are we doing with our lives? And what do we spend our precious energy thinking about? And what is in our minds and our hearts? And who are we anyway?

Zion is someplace like that, and I think what its sheer canyons did for me was intensify what was already present inside me. My spirit, yes. My sense of awe and wonder, yes. But also all the sludge that I carry around, too—resentments, worries, fears. Heartaches and disappointments. All kinds of old news. I think this is partly where my depression came from. Zion helped me to see what was in my mind. All of it. And perhaps it helped me let go just a little.

I could see this the day we hiked Angel’s Landing (which after I saw the scramble we had to do at the end, I could only think of as “Angel’s Leap.”) This “hike” ends in a crawl up razor-edged ridges on slippery sandstone hung out over a few thousand feet of sheer-nothing drop off, with some occasional chains for assistance. Did I mention that I don’t like heights? Or that my overactive imagination can’t stop reminding me of what it would be like to fall? This next picture is the view down from the highest point I got to that day. These sheer cliffs were a good place to leave behind the extra baggage of any old, worn-out thoughts, so I could pay attention to my feet.

Zion also helped me drop further into poetry again. At Zion, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I went to the library and wrote. I sat outside and wrote. Even on hikes, I wrote, capturing lines of poetry that rose up as I walked. None of it seemed adequate to what I was seeing, but it didn’t really matter. It was just good to be immersed in language, to remember how important that is to me.

And there were surprises. One day after trying and trying without any success to describe the magnificence of the immense scenery, this poem came to me in a rush, almost complete. Like some gentle voice had said to me, in order to see the magnificence around you, you first have to see the magnificence in yourself.

LETTER TO MYSELF ON MY WEDDING DAY, OVER 28 YEARS AGO

Take root in the man of your life,

but grow your own branches—wistful as cedar,

fragrant as sage, joyous as penstemon

with its delighted rockets of sunshine.

Do not be dour. There is no time

for it, no matter the circumference

of the situation or the annihilation

of morning. You, girl, are enough

and more than enough, with your dual

lungs and your long eyes and the angle

of your reflection. Stand up straight.

We are waiting. Take

your whole heart and fling it upwards,

toward the dizzying cliffs, trusting its return,

faithful as an echo, fierce as an eagle

trained for the fist. Do not put yourself

away in your pocket when he walks by,

but wave ever more broadly in his passing,

like teasel, or fescue, or wheat—

filled up with sunlight, abundant with life.

(Note: Another post out of order--this one from November 15.)

Ever since our propane stopped working twice in the cold weather at Malheur, I have been feeling anxious about the approach of winter. We now have a new regulator, which should have fixed the problem, but the predicted winter storm that is supposed to hit tomorrow and Thursday with freezing temperatures, strong winds, and snow frightens me a little, as I am still not sure how robust our little trailer is.

Last night we stayed at a primitive campsite next to the Snake River just east of Twin Falls, Idaho. As we set up camp, I pick up the litter around the site—condom wrappers and their used contents, cigarette boxes, candy papers, beer cans, an empty bottle. After we crawl into bed a car turns into our pullout, stops for awhile with its motor still running, then drives down to the next pullout where it parks, stereo loud. Several times during the night a car or motorbike races by at full throttle on the narrow paved road leading to the campsites, tires humming over the cattle grate next to our pullout entrance. But somehow, unlike the predicted storm, this doesn’t bother me and I sleep soundly.

This morning when I wake there is a glorious sunrise over the blue-gray water of the river. Great balls of starlings flow over the sky in surging drifts. One flock lands momentarily in a tree next to me, then just as suddenly ricochets out again with a satiny, synchronized whir of wings. Across the river, just out of site over the basalt bank, I can hear sounds from a nearby feedlot—cows lowing, tractors grinding back and forth, several dogs barking sporadically. I sit by the river to try to calm my nerves about the coming storm.

As I listen to the sounds of the farm, I imagine the people out doing their chores and it occurs to me, This could be my home and this frosty morning could be just another ordinary day, and somehow this thought brings some peace. There is something comforting about realizing that any of the places we have been could be my home, and I could be here by the river on a short walk from my front door.

As I continue to listen to the invisible farm—the bawling of the cattle, a backup beeper, voices raised to be heard over the engines—I can imagine the life of the farm where I grew up, which is now run by two of my brothers. I can imagine them out in the fields or in the machine shop, taking care of the work of the day, adapting to whatever the weather brings. I imagine my father putting on his insulated coveralls to go out in the cold. I can smell the rich, cool smell of fresh earth in the fall when the fields are freshly plowed. Knowing that all the people I know and love are going about their usual days somewhere helps me get centered again. I can take a deep breath. And another. I can begin to realize that “home” is perhaps not just a place, but also a state of mind.

The question is, can I learn to be at home in the whole world? Can I learn to love it all? Snowstorms or sun, cold or hot, dusty or wet, smelling of cows or sweet sage—can I see that these are all part of life? And if I know this, perhaps I can feel at home wherever I go and whatever is happening.

This reminds me of a story the naturalist Tom Brown tells about asking his Native American mentor why he wasn’t cold in the winter or hot in the summer. His mentor replies:

“I am, but heat and cold do not bother me.“

I asked why not, and after a long pause in which he seemed to be weighing whether or not I was ready for his answer, he said, “Because they’re real.“

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A postscript: After this experience, I realized that the sounds I was hearing from the farm were of the cows being rounded up and herded into the truck to take them to slaughter. Whether something is comforting or frightening depends entirely on your perspective—what is nourishing to the owl is death to the vole. This is not to take away from the comfort I felt, only to add another dimension. Life and death are inextricably entwined.

A few days later, I ran across this poem in a collection of Gary Snyder’s that speaks to this uneasy polarity so well.

THOUGHTS ON LOOKING AT A SAMUEL PALMER ETCHING AT THE TATE

         by Gary Snyder

   Moonlight landscape, sheep,

        and shepherd watching eerie beauty

The broad sheep backs

        resting bunched up under leafy oaks

        or hid in black moon shadow,

Lives of cows and sheep—

        calf mouth that sucks your finger

        the steer that pokes his head through

        pipe iron gate

        to lick lapel, and lightly

        touch and taste

        the buttons of your coat,

Cows that trail you as you cross the meadow;

        silent sheep    slow heads turning

        solemn faces

        hooves fringed in dewy grass.

They stamp and steam in chilly morn

        and gaze at length on clouds and hills

                before they board the truck.

Day 78: Antelope Island meditation

Blue skies this morning after last night’s wind and rain, and I sit in the sun at our campsite facing Great Salt Lake.  It is nearly perfectly quiet here. If I hold my breath I can hear the faintest echo of a car on a distant road. A slight murmer of voices rises occasionally from another camp where three women are packing a tent into a car. Now and then a magpie chatters or there is a tiny tseep from a sparrow or the small flock of campground starlings passes through. But for long stretches of time there is no sound. If the salt flats and the wide stretches of rock and grass had a voice, this would be it—silence.

This silence is a palpable presence. Once I notice it, it becomes the steady backdrop to everything else. Every sound I hear falls into it like a light rain landing on the ocean.

A magpie makes a more determined squawk and draws my eye to what he is scolding—a single red-tan coyote moving in the red-tan field past my campsite as though the grass itself had grown legs and was trotting toward the water. In the distance, on the tawny hillside is a single bison, grazing. I have been told that “bison” is the correct word for this animal whereas “buffalo” is better used for Asian water buffaloes and such, but I still prefer the name “buffalo.”  I think of Janet Frame’s novel Daughter Buffalo and how different Turnlung’s long demented poetic ramblings about death would be if she had called it Daughter Bison. Sometimes the right word is the wrong one.

I draw my attention out of my thoughts and back to the landscape. Everywhere is space and more space. The brown grass fields sloping down to the flat plane of light-blue water which stretches away and away to the thinnest serrated edge of mountains. Overhead the blue sky reaches across the whole world, as if mirroring the lake below. Even the towering flank of the Wasach Mountains, with their long line of 11,000-foot peaks covered in fresh snow, seems insubstantial next to the land and sky opening out all around.

The space around me also opens up space on the inside. The constant activity of my mind—my fears and hopes and plans—dissolves into this great stretch of sky and lake and land. It is this spaciousness that has been tugging at me since the beginning of this trip, that has been half-hidden behind all the busy days. It is what I have been trying to capture in the hundreds of photographs I have been taking with my cell phone of the horizon line, wide bodies of water, and the sky at sunrise and sunset.

As I continue to sit, the space begins to fill again with daily life. The sun rises, warming the air and the back of my fleece jacket. With the warmth, the birds grow more active. Meadowlarks send their cascade of liquid notes back and forth from the tops of the sagebrush. The starlings have convened a heated committee meeting. Behind me a flock of chukars makes an escalating burbling like a pan of water slowly coming to a simmer. Two magpies pick charred remnants of food off the campfire grill, their bills clicking on the iron bars.

I am reminded of the stereopticon in my grandmother’s cupboard when I was a kid—a frame that held a piece of paper with two nearly identical photos at just the right distance from your eyes so that when you looked through it the two photos merged into one 3-D image. I used to be fascinated with how you could shift your focus back and forth to see either the two ordinary images or just the one image with its magical experience of depth. As I sit here I can feel that same shift happening inside me: how I can see in one moment my ordinary experience of life—planning and worrying and making sandwiches and folding the trailer and watching the birds—and then shift to this other experience of the silence and spaciousness that surrounds us all.

Like stereopticans, places like Antelope Island (or meditation retreats or temples) make it easier for us to make this switch. Hopefully, with enough time spent in places like this, I can also hear that silence and feel that spaciousness wherever I am and whatever I am doing—can see that there is no difference between the two pictures and the single image other than my point of focus.

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We stayed at Antelope Island on the east side of Great Salt Lake, Utah on Nov 20 – 22 and got to hang out with pronghorn antelope, bison, coyotes, mule deer, and a porcupine. There isn’t a large variety of birds here in this season, but tens of thousands of Northern Shovelers winter on the lake near the island and spend their days puttering back and forth in great rafts with their big bills in the water, filter feeding on the lake’s brine shrimp. A large flock will often take off all at once to move to another feeding area, and the sound of thousands of wings resounding like a jet engine or a distant landslide is always a thrill! We are spending Thanksgiving in Provo, Utah. Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family!

Day 65: Post-election Reflection

Chickahominy Reservoir, OregonAs I reflect today about what is important for me in the midst of this election, I come back to what supports us at all times no matter who or where we are: mother earth. I am reminded of all of her different landscapes, all of her plants and animals, the variety of her soil and rocks, the fluidity of her waters, and the vibrancy of her surrounding air and weather.

Being so close to the earth this year is helping me to learn how to honor the feminine that lives all around us. Today, the day after this election, feels like an especially good day for me to consider this, beginning with my own self as a woman. To feel my inner strength. To connect to the clarity of my mind and the power of my voice. To remember that the feminine is comfortable with not knowing, with waiting, and with patience. To re-commit to compassion as the core of my spirituality. And to know that I can choose to stand up for what matters.

I am thinking of my mother today. Of my girlfriends. Of my sisters and neices. Of the teenage daughter of my friend who is just learning who she is and how she fits into the world. And I am thinking of all the men we know and love. May we all live in safety and harmony with each other. May we all have respect for each other. May we all remember our common roots.

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I was planning to post a piece about our last few weeks on the road, but it didn't seem right to not acknowledge the election today, so I will save the update for later.  Right now we are staying with good friends in Caldwell, Idaho for rest and repairs. The above picture was from October 23, when we spent a couple days at this beautiful reservoir watching the many ducks and geese that use this as a stopover on their migration through the desert.