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. 

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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. 

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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.

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.

But wait...how long IS 25 feet?

So it turns out that our first parking spot for the trailer at my nephew’s house was picturesque. It was level, and looked out at a beautiful view of the trees in their front yard. It was also out of the way of the other cars in the driveway. How nice! However, HOWEVER…wait a minute!…it is too far away from the house to plug in the trailer to charge the batteries, or to hook up the water hose to fill the water tank! Lesson learned. This is the beginning of thinking about water and power in a way that I have never had to do in a house, unless a lightning storm shut everything down for a couple days.

In my mind, I want to just pick the trailer up and move it sideways a little closer to the house. But you can’t just carry a trailer around like a tent. It takes a laborious (for us beginners) process of folding up the trailer, backing up the truck, getting the tow hitch oriented and locked on, connecting the power to the truck, remembering to remove all the chocks and blocks and jacks and locks, backing into the new spot, and starting all over again. This is good practice, I think, as an antidote to the part of me that is calling me a dope for not even thinking about the length of the water hose and the placement of the electrical outlet on the outside of the house. And it is good practice. Both at the tasks themselves and with being patient—with each other and, just as importantly, with ourselves.

Because I am writing this over a month after the fact, I now know that it all gets easier the more times we do it. A year from now this will be so second-nature we won’t even think about it. Even now, only a month later, it is hard to remember what the big deal was. I think this is why it is so good for me to try things that are completely new now and then, if only to have empathy for those who are faced with difficulties that threaten to overwhelm their capacities to think and cope. A diagnosis of cancer, an accident, an injury, a loss of work, a death—and suddenly our minds don’t behave the way we want them to anymore. When I get frustrated with how hard it is for me to visualize something new, I think of my mother’s struggle at the rehab center after breaking her hip—and a possible stroke—with finding her way to the dining room. I realize that no matter how odd it seemed that she couldn’t reliably navigate the hundred yards of hallway by herself even after four months, there was no point in being frustrated with her. When my brother tried to help her orient herself by showing her the map with the red dot labeled “You are here,” her question was, How does it know where I am? After my recent experiences of being up to my neck in new information, I am starting to understand how she could think this.