Itineraries 2013 Vol. 1
Contents:
Pursuing the Classics: A Personal Journey and Beyond by Ann Kirkland
The Dogs of Bhutan by Dianne Shiner
Each Life, A Journey, Each Journey, A Way to Deepen Life by John G. Sullivan
The Art of Pilgrimage: Meeting Ancient Wisdom in Copper Canyon by Ron Pevny
Solo Journey in a Coupled World by Molly Brewer
One Man’s Search for Joy… or at Least a Guinness by Tom Trimbath
Change by the Way by Jan Phillips
The Mirror of Travel: Seeing Myself in The Face of Morocco by Kendall Dudley
The Long Journey Home: The Odyssey as a Parable of Male Aging by John C. Robinson
We Are the Ones — Working Together by Jan Hively and Moira Allan
How Far Must We Go? by Frances Wood
Writing Exercises to Engage the Spirit of Travel by Ellen B. Ryan
The Circumference of Home by Kurt Hoelting
from The Captain’s Table by Colin Stuart
Selected Poems by Linda L. Beeman
From the Editor, Bolton Anthony…
For this issue of Itineraries, ODYSSEYS FOR THE SOUL: TRAVEL AND TRANSFORMATION, writer, weaver, sculptor, and teacher Penelope Bourk has lovingly assembled “writings from travelers who have encountered spiritual emergence — and spiritual emergencies — in later life travel and who bring home some deeper understanding of where they have been, what they have become as a result of their travel, what it means, and how it matters.” Below she introduces the themes of the issue and the 17 “travelers” who have contributed articles and poems.
Additionally, scattered throughout are original drawings and photographs and a generous selection of sculptures taken from Penelope’s extraordinary “meditations” on the events portrayed in Homer’s Odyssey. (Place your cursor over my photo, and you’ll see a sample. Many of the images in this issue — like the travel we embark upon mindfully — hold hidden treasures!)
— Bolton Anthony, Founder Second Journey
From the Guest Editor, Penelope Bourk…
Travel, like love, invites the mystery of the other. To encounter the world beyond the familiar. To take account of difference. To recognize the amazing diversity of place, life forms, livelihood, limits, initiatives, possibilities. To carve out a more spacious and inclusive interior. To reintroduce ourselves to the larger community of all living beings, and to acknowledge the spectacular vistas, gifts, costs, and quality of being human — of being human here, now, in a world moving ever closer and, because of our collective attention, becoming ever dearer. Whether journeying far afield, rambling nearer to home, or as an armchair pilgrim, entranced by an exotic page-turner, at this crucial time in the history of the human and the more-than-human world, the elder traveler has a unique opportunity for discovery, contribution, profound integration, and the knitting of a truly global community.
In contrast to the previous issue of Itineraries, which looked at — and celebrated — an explosion of new options for how and where we grow old, ODYSSEYS FOR THE SOUL: TRAVEL AND TRANSFORMATION features stories and poems about the experience of travel. Travel as a change agent, a medium of exploration, even a mirror for self-reflection —in the later stages of life.
You’ll find within no review of packing lists, no display of nifty luggage innovations, no insider tips on bargain vacation spots. All we offer are thoughtful, sensitive writers who open their hearts, share their inner conversations, intentions, controversies, skill sacks, and the miracles of their travels. Their hope is that you too will “unpack” the meaning of your own explorations — the disappointments, necessary accommodations, and the celebration of life emergent in your own advancing lives, in your own experiences and conversations, and in tales of your own journeys. Whether on a pilgrimage to conscious aging, on the trip of a lifetime, or traveling in search of home, what does it mean to venture on this Earth, what does it take to abide, who is benevolent host, who welcomed as guest, of what land, of what people?
The juxtaposition of elder travel, transformation, quest, and spirit — all of these implicit in the title we have given the issue — provides such rich ground! Any one of these topics, all on its own, could fill volumes! Yet it is the overlap of all four and their relation to a recurring fifth theme, the journey home, that plays across almost all of the selections, which I have loosely grouped into three sections —Farther Afield, Nearing Home, and Skills and Trills for the Elder Rucksack (see below).
Bon Voyage!
— Penelope Stuart Bourk
February 1, 2013
Re-Entry by Margaret Bendet
At 21, with a new journalism degree and a hundred dollars in my pocket, I flew to Hawaii to be in a former roommate’s wedding. My plan was to start a new life, as far as possible from Evanston, Illinois, where I’d gone to school, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I’d spent my formative years and where my parents were then living. In Hawaii I faced survival challenges, joined the working press, embarked on romantic adventures, learned to snorkel, drank wine on the beach, married, bought a cottage, gardened, took in two cats . . . After eight years, even though my life seemed to be exactly what I’d set out to find, I came to the understanding that it wasn’t working for me. Why?
Let me tell you a little story. It comes from the Yoga Vasishtha, which, like other Indian scriptures, is full of tales describing the human condition. This one is called “The Story of the Great Forest.” In it a celestial being, walking in a vast wooded expanse, encounters a restless creature with a thousand arms and legs. Though there is no one else around, the creature is clearly frightened. He’s armed with a mace, and he’s hitting himself with it. The creature bellows and weeps and runs to hide — from himself!
Seeing this endless cycle of pain, the celestial takes compassion on the creature. With the strength of his will, he restrains the creature long enough to ask, “Who are you?” At this, the creature becomes frantic with terror. He turns his abuse on the celestial, calls him vile names, sneers at him. Left on his own again, the creature continues his self-destructive behavior.
Occasionally, in this forest the celestial encounters a creature who responds to the question and contemplates his own bleak condition. Such a one, the scripture says, can find freedom.
As with all parables, everything in the story is a symbol: The forest is the circumstance of our lives, and the creature is our own mind, the nervous trickster that creates enmity and strife for us where none need exist. That’s what my mind was doing to me.
I didn’t know this parable at the time, but I, by age 29, had come to understand that I was a primary cause of my own discontent. So, when I did an interview for the newspaper with a visiting master of meditation, I was ready to hear his wisdom, put down my mace (so to speak), and follow him. That journey, which became its own great forest — which became the new circumstance of my life — lasted for about 35 years. To still my mind, I meditated, chanted God’s name, read sacred texts, but I also edited a monthly magazine and later a Web site; I worked on course scripts and the sorts of written communications a nonprofit sends its various supporters.
Then at age 63, I embarked on a journey of re-entry. I left my teacher’s ashram and went to an island — not Hawaii this time but another island, in the Pacific Northwest — to begin yet another new life. This was an unexpected journey. There were a number of us in the ashram who had hoped to serve as pillars for the work, to give the whole of our lives for its support. Some are still in the ashram doing just that; others, like myself, found we needed to move on.
My departure from the ashram was even more of a pilgrimage than moving into it had been — I think because I now knew so much more about how to be on a journey of discovery, what to do so that I might better learn from it.
Listen
For me the most crucial step was realizing I would embark on a journey at all. This was a matter of listening. Leaving the ashram wasn’t a new topic for me. Over the years I’d had hundreds of conversations about leaving the ashram — about the possibility that I might leave and the fact that various other people were leaving. An ashram is a place of refuge, a place of spiritual practice and study, a place of service, but generally it isn’t a place where anyone other than a monk spends the rest of their life. At one point or another, most of my colleagues and closest friends had left the ashram to start new careers, care for parents, raise children, explore the arts, and so on. I sent them off with gifts and kisses and well wishes; in many cases I kept in touch, but my basic attitude was there but for the grace of God . . . I thought if I could be strong enough, I’d be able to stay.
One day before the noon chant I heard something else. My teacher — the successor to the first teacher I had followed — came to the chant and, walking to her seat, paused to question a four-year-old boy. The child’s best friend, a six-year-old, had recently left with her parents to return home to France. Did the boy miss his friend? Had he written to her? Oh, so he had called her. Was it fun to talk with her on the phone? Was it like being with her?
In this back-and-forth, I observed that my teacher was speaking about people who had just left the ashram. Then I heard, as a thought, It’s time for you to go.
This message was as clear as any oral or written instruction I have ever received. The inner direction may have come before, but this was the first time I’d heard it. If I hadn’t heard it on that day, I’m certain it would have come again . . . and again . . . each time more strongly until, finally, the message would be given in some way that I had to hear it.
In my observation, it’s easier to follow instructions that come from inside myself than it is those delivered aloud by virtually anyone else. It’s as if, for me, spoken words are a kind of bludgeon. I don’t know why that is. It isn’t that I thought I had any real choice about this inner message. I saw It’s time for you to go not as an invitation but as a command, a call to action.
At the same time, that’s all it was. With years of practice in meditation — practice in watching my own mind — I was able to take in this instruction without the emotional freight I might once have attached to it. It’s time for you to go didn’t mean I had failed or was less worthy than those who were staying; it didn’t raise in me a fear about what would happen to me next or flood me with questions about what I would do to support myself. And It’s time for you to go didn’t mean in this very minute!
Actually, that I was able to hear this instruction as I did, coming from inside, may have meant that I had a more gracious length of time to plan my journey. I spoke to my supervisor that afternoon and the human resources department the next morning, but it was fully a year before I drove away from the ashram in my capriciously overstuffed car. By then I’d had plenty of time to prepare — to decide, for instance, where I might go. For that I had to do a bit of looking.
Look
Many of my friends who’ve made a big move in their sixties have done so in order to be with family: parents, children, grandchildren. In other words, there was no question where they’d be going. This was not true for me. My own parents were gone; I had no children; I was fond of my only brother but not close to him. For years I’d thought of the ashram as home, and what I needed now was a new home. I needed to be able to support myself as well, but finding a place to live was my main task. The question was what to look for?
A New York couple I know tried the esoteric field of astrocartography, hiring someone to cast their astrological chart in reference to geography. They asked the astrologer, Where is the most auspicious place for us to live?
The answer was Brazil.
But if they moved to Brazil, my friends said, they wouldn’t know the language and, besides, they would never be able to see their grandchildren again.
“In that case,” they were told, “you could live in Nova Scotia.”
They scrapped astrocartography and opted for upstate New York, where they have lived happily for the last 15 years.
As I considered what was most important for me, I saw I wasn’t going to become someone else on this journey. What had mattered to me for the last 35 years was still going to matter: I needed a place where I’d be supported in my meditation. That meant the place should be beautiful but not so beautiful that hordes of people live there. It should be quiet but close to culture and not so small it’s provincial. And the local people should be friendly to others who aren’t exactly like themselves — to those, say, who’ve lived for three and a half decades in an ashram. They should be willing to think of such people as family.
In two trips, I looked at four places. By looking I mean that I stayed with friends, did some work, negotiated highways, went for walks, ate out, visited meditation centers, and asked everyone I met how they felt about living there. So, actually I looked and listened. When I told a young man behind an airport coffee counter I was thinking about moving to that city, he said, “Why would you want to do that?” He meant it.
In the last place I went — Whidbey Island in Washington State — I was just planning to visit a friend. I hadn’t seriously considered Whidbey. This forested island is exquisite but too small, too rural; I’d never be able to support myself there. And yet, ultimately, that was where I wanted to live. What clinched it was when my friend, a retired professor, told me, “If I were moving to a city today, I have no idea how I’d make new friends. On Whidbey you see someone at the post office, you see them at the market, you talk to them at a meeting — and suddenly you know that person. It’s organic.” That’s what I was looking for: organic.
Move
I was driving from New York to Washington by the northernmost U.S. route. I had driven cross-country before, several times and alone, but never in a car that groaned under its load; never with a backseat piled so high the rear-view mirror was useless for anything but putting on lipstick; never with a trunk full of electronics I didn’t yet know how to operate; never with a just-potted cutting from a night-blooming cereus; and never, never, never had I traveled with a cat.
That’s right: a cat. This was Softy, a stray who had been so named by her first ashram owner, a seven-year-old girl, and who had then adopted two successive patrons. Softy was a beauty: a long-haired, black-and-white “tuxedo” cat with a wide face and a regal manner. I was Softy’s last patron, and the ashram managers were eager that the cat leave when I did. I was delighted to take her along. We’d been together about two years, and I was bonded.
I got a wire carrier for her to travel in and left it out the week before our trip. Softy showed no interest. I arranged the carrier in a cozy spot in the backseat, wedged between decorative pillows and a blue and white vase with yellow silk forsythia. Softy was unimpressed. When I forcibly put her into the carrier — as I felt I had to do — it occurred to me that this was not in the agreement the cat and I’d had about living together. Never before had I shut her into a cage.
Softy was a vocal cat, and right away she let me know she didn’t share my sense of adventure about our road trip. For a while I tried holding her in my lap as I drove, but that turned out to be dangerous. We didn’t get far that first day; it was hard to drive with the wail from the backseat.
On the second morning, I pulled into a wooded rest stop in Pennsylvania with the idea that this was something Softy would enjoy. As soon as we stepped out of the car, a dog’s bark came from about ten yards away. In a split second, I was holding the new cat leash, the new cat halter hanging limply from the end. Softy was gone.
The rest stop was set in a forest and, except for the highway itself, all I could see were trees: Softy could be anywhere. At one end of the parking area was a phalanx of construction trucks with a roaring, rig-mounted jackhammer: no enticement for a frightened cat. Softy wasn’t going to come to me; so I looked for Softy. I raked the woods, peered behind bushes and up into branches; crooned, “Softy, here Softy” (as if she had ever come when called); reminded myself to breathe; attempted pacts with divine powers . . . It was my own version of “The Story of the Great Forest.” All the while there was an ache in the pit of my belly, as if a part of me had gone missing. Still, there came a point after about three hours when I knew I had to go on. Without Softy.
I don’t want to downplay my role in this drama. I had not taken adequate care of an animal for which I had responsibility, and, despite my anguish, it was the animal that would pay the greatest price. This aging housecat, tough and bright though she was, would not survive long in the forest. And yet I also knew I, myself, might not survive in the great forest. This was August 2008, and I was driving into what looked like the brink of a national economic meltdown. My resources were limited; I couldn’t afford to stay for days looking for Softy. If I was going to move, I had to do just that: I had to move on.
And I had to move on internally as well. Of course I’d made a mistake. I’d made several. But isn’t it our mistakes we’re most likely to beat ourselves up about? Mistakes are no reason to get out our mace. Mourning is one thing, self-castigation altogether another.
I spent a bleak second night on the road, by now in Ohio. The next morning I saw that I’d be ending that day’s drive in Chicago — where, with luck, I could stop and see a friend. I called her from the road. Yes, she would love to have me stay. That night I had the luxury of a warm, supportive shoulder as I recharged, replenished stores, and repacked the car. The following day, I was able to start my journey afresh.
Reach Out
I found that life on the road requires a precision with objects that I, a wordsmith, had never developed. I found that, to adapt a phrase, stuff happened. Stuff like losing my car keys in Ohio, dropping a credit card at a Starbucks in Minnesota, leaving my purse (with all my identification and money) on a picnic table in the badlands of North Dakota. With each mishap, my stomach would clench — and then, as one in the forest must, I did what was needed. Courtesy of AAA, I got the car towed to a dealer who could make new keys; I canceled the missing credit card and was glad I carried another; and the badlands didn’t turn out to be so bad after all. A woman who noticed me looking for my purse told me, “The park ranger has it; I turned it in at the office.”
After I’d been on Whidbey Island a couple of months, I fell and broke my arm, which, because I was living alone, I found to be a particular trial. About this time, I had a dream in which I was looking for a button to push. I needed to push a certain button, and I simply had to find this button. As I was coming out of sleep, I realized that I was looking for the button that would make everything all right. I woke up laughing — because, of course, there is no such button.
There was never a guarantee that my adventure would turn out “all right” — meaning, the way I wanted it to. But I’ve noticed that every time something goes “wrong,” I have an opportunity to become more conscious and — just as significant — to have a new kind of interaction with the people around me, sometimes with total strangers. When I broke my arm, members of the meditation group on Whidbey, several of whom I had just met, brought me meals; others went with me to my medical appointments. “This is what friends do,” one woman said to me, and she’s had occasion to say it several times since, because over the last few years she’s been an enormous help to me. Hopefully, from time to time, I have been for her as well.
So, my most significant strategy on this journey of discovery has been to reach out. To this end I took a part-time job in the local library; joined a community choir; moved to a village where I can walk to many of the things I like doing; and adopted a gregarious dog who takes me out for daily walks. These are choices I didn’t know to make in my twenties when I moved to that other island. This time I am finding what’s right for me. It’s a gift that is, I think, not uncommon for those who have sought, as we all must one day, a way to calm the creature in the great forest.
Years ago my meditation master said that each of us had come to the ashram in order to receive something — “something to take with you when you leave,” he said, “something you can eat along the way.” This is what we all want for our journeys.
//
Margaret Bendet, an award-winning writer and editor, who also teaches classes in memoir. For nine years the chief interviewer for an international oral history collection, she specializes in drawing out people’s best stories, helping them present those stories effectively and contemplate what the stories mean to them. Margaret has a degree in journalism from Northwestern University. For ten years she was a member of the working press, and in the past 30 years she has edited a monthly yoga magazine and a number of books. She can be contacted at MargaretBendet@gmail.com. Her Web site is at MargaretBendet.com.
Pursuing the Classics: A Personal Journey and Beyond by Ann Kirkland
I am, no doubt, like many St. John’s parents — adults who nudge their children towards the education they wish they had had. I went to a large Ivy League university where I sat at the back of cavernous lecture halls, sometimes scribbling down what the professor was saying and sometimes doodling and daydreaming. It is not an educational path I would encourage any young person to follow. By the time my own first-born was in her last years of high school in Toronto, I was a member of a Great Books group and had heard about St. John’s College. Both her teachers and I encouraged her to consider leaving her friends who were all gravitating to the University of Toronto or McGill to opt for a very different experience south of the border. She interviewed at the Annapolis campus but chose the Santa Fe campus. Her experience was tremendous, but it is mine I want to write about here.
At my first parents’ weekend in the fall of 1994, both students and parents were assigned to small seminars to discuss Sophocles’ Antigone. I was hooked. That one guided discussion made me sad about what might have been back when, but thrilled that this opportunity was open to me through Summer Classics. I became a devotée. Each year I eagerly awaited the arrival of the catalog and then for summer to roll around. My time at Summer Classics renewed and sharpened my curiosity and my ability to listen to others with an open mind. I fell in love — with literature, with learning, and with really good conversation.
Alas, years of unfavorable exchange rate between U.S. and Canadian dollars curtailed my annual trips to Santa Fe. I missed the experience. Was there some other way I could fill this gap? In a flash of blind inspiration, I got the idea of bringing the concept to Toronto. And that is how I began to turn this avocation, for which I never had enough time, into my vocation. I use the word “vocation” in both of its meanings, the more pedestrian “employment” and the more lofty “call” or as Fredrick Beuchner says, “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
Classical Pursuits
I abandoned a 30-year career in health administration to create opportunities for others to experience what I had come to cherish — reading difficult books on my own and then discussing them with others. Based on my own many happy experiences at Summer Classics and with the support of the Great Books Foundation in Chicago, I have created a program at University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College called Classical Pursuits. My aim is to bring together adults from across North America in an atmosphere of relaxation and camaraderie to read, discuss, and reflect on the enduring ideas in great works of literature, music, and art. The program started with four seminar options in 1999 — Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Inferno, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Since then, it has expanded to attract over 150 people to participate in one of 12 seminar options. Classical Pursuits now also includes a week-long program each spring (this year on The Dignity of Man) and evening programs for Toronto locals.
Travel Pursuits
In 2002, I launched Travel Pursuits with a group traveling to Italy to discuss Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and to explore aspects of medieval Italian life, arts, and thought. One of the discussion leaders on that trip was Jim Carey, from the Santa Fe campus, who was on sabbatical in Italy that year. The travel program was so successful that it has grown to a dozen annual trips, ranging from The Classical Moment in Greece (Homer, Sophocles, and Plato), to Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and prose in Savannah.
Convivium
In addition to organizing for others, I sometimes join the groups myself or take a journey on my own as preparation for some new group itinerary. A few years ago I began a blog, both to inform others and to support my own ongoing process of reflection about my own “pursuits.” My blog, “Convivium: A guide to adventures for the mind, travel for the soul” is accessible through the Travel Pursuits Web site.
From Question to Quest
It seems fitting to link this tale of my decades-long continuing quest in response to my own “how to” question years before with the theme of so much great and not so great literature — the pilgrimage or quest story.
Whether it is Odysseus trying to get home to his high-roofed house in Ithaca; Aeneas dutifully pursuing a quest that was not initially his own; Parsifal seeking the Holy Grail; the pilgrim Dante trying to save himself; or Faust in search of eternity — one of the pulls of literature is that it recognizes that we are creatures whose natures cause us to long, to seek. Like many others setting out on a quest, I was no youth but in the second half of life, and like the archetype, I had become disenchanted with earlier successes, conscious of failures, and increasingly aware of the finiteness of life. I am writing this article as a status report from “midway along the journey.”
If I must pick a single core text that closely describes my own quest, I think it might be T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”:
“A cold coming we had of it…A hard time we had of it…Such a long journey.”
What seemed to me at first a straightforward and fail-safe plan turned out to be fraught with all kinds of unanticipated obstacles. Most difficult at the outset was finding the right leaders. I knew, from my experience at St. John’s, that I was not seeking professors to profess; I had been the beneficiary of guided conversation based on genuine questioning and probing. I selected four local academics who seemed keen to try what I described. Still, most teachers know how to impart their knowledge to students, rather than helping students to discover for themselves. After that inaugural year, I initiated a partnership with the Great Books Foundation in Chicago that has proved of great value. The foundation provides leaders and regularly offers training in the Shared Inquiry method for others. I have now developed a growing collegium of these leaders who have learned well.
“There were times we regretted, … That this was all folly.”
There still are times like that. Without wanting to sound melodramatic, there have been moments when I have been tempted to abandon this mission, and more than a few dark nights of fear. Especially after I burned all my previous professional bridges in the healthcare field and realized I could not turn back.
“Then at dawn we came down into a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation…”
There have been many encouragements along the way, all from eager supporters, hungry and grateful. These often come just when I have felt ready to throw in the towel. But also this,
“Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different . . . ”
The birth has been the creation of a growing enterprise that is enriching those associated with it, enhancing the public visibility and reputation of St. Michael’s College way beyond the Catholic community in Canada, and feeling the personal satisfaction of using my skills and interests to make a small contribution to public discourse. Death is really too strong a word to use here, but there has been a price for my chosen path. I knew it would involve a significant cut in personal income, but I had no idea how difficult it would be to make this enterprise economically viable. And I did not anticipate that, instead of having more time to read deeply and leisurely, I have less. I have become a marginal entrepreneur, sometimes more absorbed in serving hot coffee on time, where people will park, which credit cards we will accept, and all the time the bottom line — great literature and ideas. Somehow my own quest to find myself in books has been subordinated to being of service to others who will find themselves in books.
“Set down this set down this,…I would do it again. … And I would do it again…”
Without doubt I would do it again. I don’t think that I have ever enjoyed my work so much. Having previously worked in management and policy, I had little evidence that anything I did made a difference to anybody. My greatest satisfaction now comes from the times I am able to disinhibit the curious who have never been serious readers and who fear embarrassing themselves. They are often professionals, like accountants, dentists, or engineers, who are used to excelling at what they do but are not at home in the world of literature or philosophy. As others retire, I retain the zeal of the missionary — believing that what I am doing is contributing in a small way to improving the quality of reflective thinking and public discourse — essential ingredients for both meaningful lives and a civilized society.
Since most quest stories are ultimately circular, beginning and ending with home, albeit transformed, I would like to end with an early childhood memory. My grandfather was a Classicist and Lucretius scholar. He lived with us when I was very young. I remember him as a very old and formidable man, sitting on our front porch swing in his three-piece suit, instructing my brother, sister, and me to recite a lot of nonsense syllables — “hic, haec, hoc, huius, huius, huius” “Veni, vedi, vici.” I was afraid of him and never even considered studying Latin later at school. But how I would love to be back on that porch swing beside him now. What conversations we would have, as we rocked back and forth, about our pursuit of wisdom and pleasure found in the classics.
//
Ann Kirkland is the founder of Classical Pursuits. Visit the Web site at classicalpursuits.com/.
The Dogs of Bhutan by Dianne Shiner
The millions of us who are searching for a more balanced inner life and who hunger for a vibrant connection with the natural world need Bhutan to prosper. There may be no place on earth that can better teach us wiser ways to live.
— Carpenter, The Blessings of Bhutan
No matter how well-prepared, brilliant, and guided a traveler may be, it is foolish to believe that one can come to really know a place in a brief sojourn. In my initiating culture shock in India more than 40 years ago, I found that the longer I stayed, the less I knew about India, and the more I learned about myself. The British essayist, Alain de Botton, in The Art of Travel, has said that travel agents ask the wrong question when they ask, “Where would you like to go?” but rather should say, “What is it that you would like to change about your life?” Though we may anticipate, we do not really know what changes will befall us on the road; in fact, most travel rarely goes according to plan, and it is often the spontaneous and incidental that will have the most impact. The dogs of Bhutan surely fall into this category.
In 1961, I “discovered” Bhutan in a National Geographic article in my college library. A desire to visit was planted deep in my heart, even though this Himalayan kingdom was closed to the outside world. As part of my second journey, I am reawakening and exploring those nascent intentions, the spiritual bucket list. So, a year ago, after two weeks of travel in Bhutan, I found myself in a closing circle near Paro with three guides, two drivers, and 13 guests (never once referred to as tourists).(1) Having just returned from an arduous trek to Taktshang Goemba (the Tigers Nest Monastery), we gathered, weary and reflective, for an intimate tea. As we shared our gratitude and highlights of the trip, four people commented that the dogs were most remarkable. Now, in a spectacular country once known as the Forbidden Kingdom, the last Shangri-La, the Land of Gross National Happiness, it is surprising, to say the least, that Bhutanese dogs would emerge as singularly cherished in our memories. What about them spoke so deeply to us?
My comments on Bhutan come from limited, but liminal, experience. I must acknowledge that somewhere in Bhutan, perhaps in the capital city of Thimphu, there exist mangy stray dogs who are shooed away as dangerous, flea-bitten rascals. I only know we never saw any. We never heard a dog bark. Never followed a chase. Never saw a territorial fight. Never had a dog beg, even when they sat amiably among us while we picnicked by a river or snacked on a trail. They certainly noticed the food, but were never aggressive or pitiful in obtaining it. They sometimes volunteered as companions up steep hikes to monasteries, waiting patiently to bring us back or simply ignoring us. Guardians, perhaps, but hardly guard dogs.
Well-cared-for pets? Not really. There appeared to be only a few pet owners; in fact, I think the very idea of “owning” a dog is alien to most Bhutanese, and the pet obsessiveness of my culture funny indeed. Yet these dogs were healthy, calm, and everywhere. More than man’s best friend, dogs embody religious symbolism in Tibetan Buddhism. Bhutanese believe that, from among sentient beings, dogs have the best opportunity to be reborn as humans. In Garth Stein’s wonderful novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain, the storytelling dog Enzo says in his dying: “Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.”
Dogs are also said to be helpful in the afterlife, leading us through the darkness with a light glowing on their tails to a better place. In ancient Bhutanese folklore with which Buddhism is intertwined, dogs interceded with the gods who were displeased with human greed and decided to withhold the natural bounty of the earth. Because of their pleading, the food left behind for the dogs is what we survive on today. Many Himalayan Buddhist saints had close dog companions, and monks integrate the care of dogs into their daily spiritual practice. No wonder that the novice pilgrim in Bhutan finds the dogs awesome.
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In the opening tea circle, our leader Karma Dorji welcomed us to Bhutan by saying that “Buddhism is the air we breathe.” Every day, we experienced the freshness of a culture still immersed in a lively and shared sense of the holy. The sheer lightheartedness of the Bhutanese people, manifested in easy smiles and twinkling eyes, is ever the “most infallible sign of the presence of God” (Teilhard de Chardin). Early in the trip, I witnessed our hotel clerk being berated by a dissatisfied guest. Never have I seen a young man with such gracious boundaries; he was neither stressed nor defensive nor obeisant. I came to find that this odd combination of amusement and respect was indeed the cultural norm, whether with children or with the wizened.
At the other end of the scale, even government policy is deeply informed by an authentic religious view. For example, their spectacular Himalayan peaks will never be scaled, and perhaps trashed, by mountain climbing expeditions, because villagers asked the government to protect the sanctity of the peaks, the home of the deities, from intrusion. National parks and biological corridors comprise over 40 percent of the country, preserving Bhutan’s amazing biodiversity. Economic development is intended to be slow, sustainable, and balanced by priorities in art, education, health care, and ecology (some of the measurable goals of concrete Gross National Happiness). The Dzongs (magnificent fortresses) equally house each district’s monastic body AND government offices. Prayer and devotion punctuate the day whether in golden rice fields, domestic temples, numerous monasteries, or casual businesses. Even the one and only golf course asks that you circle and apologize to a tree if your ball should strike it!
Bhutan is certainly not perfect; and indeed this very cohesiveness is at risk from modernization, however carefully and intelligently it is managed. To some, this homogeneity is naïve, even dangerous. For others, there is conflict between piety and progress. Yet I found myself more than just nostalgic for the cultural Catholicism of my childhood. As early as 1904, Max Weber (in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) was writing about the disenchantment of a secularized world, as opposed to traditional society where, for Weber, “the world remains a great enchanted garden.” For a brief 18 days, we were invited to reenter that garden of everyday mysticism, and to return changed by its vigor and delight.
What does all this have to do with dogs? Indeed, they are different in Bhutan. Like the canary in the mineshaft, they manifest the quality of “the air we breathe.” In entering another culture, it is easier to see the pattern and influence of the “atmosphere” on individual lives and values. If I live in a world of fear, I am more likely to be afraid. If I live in a world of kindness, I am more likely to be kind, or trusting, or compassionate. If I live in an enchanted or re-enchanted world, I am more likely to “see visions and dream dreams” (Joel 2:28). As I age, these simple truths become more profound….and urgent.
In my journal, I noted an irony: The Buddhist understanding of karma seems to place huge responsibility on the individual, yet its practice of interdependence is imbued with a communal identity with all living beings. In a Christian milieu as I have known it, the doctrine itself is definitively corporeal (the Incarnation, Corpus Christ, the Body of Christ), but its practice has often been very individualistic with an emphasis on my soul being saved. My favorite Bible scholar, Dan Erlander (in Manna and Mercy), says that the message of Exodus is clear: We do not go to God as individuals, but as a people. For me, this vision was transparent and embodied in my brief time in Bhutan.
Doctrinal differences of the many spiritual paths are no longer that important to me, but the sharing of the path is essential. In Bhutan, for all its isolation, communal spiritual consciousness is a given. I returned to cherish our church community, my women’s circle, our couples’ group, and the other anam cara of my life with new appreciation for the way we inspire, challenge, and cocreate the quality of our lives. For me, these are mutual lifelines to the holy, even, and particularly when there is no single word to describe the “air we breathe.”
As a college freshman, I did not realize that I was about to lose my religious naïveté and walk the foggy path of disenchantment, never able to go “home again.” But Bhutan was planted then as a way back, so to speak, to my first language, beyond words, where my dog and I understood each other perfectly. “ The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (T.S. Eliot)
I do not live in such a cohesive nation as Bhutan; here, dogs are both abused and pampered in the same city. We do not have a milieu of common values and practices, let alone devotion. I both long for and fear such unity of spirit; wanting to hold both diversity and single-heartedness in my hands. I only know that the experience of a deeply spiritual culture is transforming for all beings, including, and perhaps especially, the dogs.
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Notes
1 The excellent tour company I used in Bhutan is Skykingdom Adventures
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Dianne Shiner, M.A., M.S.W, lives on Whidbey Island, WA, with her husband, David Sellers. During her formative years, experience in a Benedictine community imbedded the integration of contemplation and action deep in her heart. Now retired, she was formerly the Executive Director of Lutheran Social Services, Holden Village, and the Whidbey Institute at Chinook. She has been blessed by travel with purpose and is regularly committed to volunteering at Escuela de la Calle, a school for street children in Guatemala.
Each Life, A Journey, Each Journey, A Way to Deepen Life by John G. Sullivan
I see my life as a journey. I pass from stage to stage on my way from birth to death. In the ancient pattern of India, I go from Spring Student to Summer Householder on the arc of ascent, and from Autumn Forest Dweller to Winter Sage on the arc of descent. (1)
And I see the importance of how I relate to whatever comes. Whatever arrives at my doorway — whether appearing as gift or wound — still can be treated as a guest. (2) Yet, to do so means I must be prepared, again and again, to let go of — to die to — one way of being and rise to another way of being. The choice I have is how to release from old stories, old emotional patterns, old expectations, and to choose afresh in each moment. Releasing and responding — that is the rhythm of the spiritual path. Receiving and giving — that is the rhythm of the spiritual path. Stillness and silence encourage receiving; awareness of our shared life opens the way to giving — from sufficiency — with a cheerful heart.
Attentiveness takes root as conscious, committed practice. Practice combines doing and deepening, service and stillness. I am drawn to this way of living; I see each day as itself a journey (embedded in a larger journey). I see each journey as a way to deepen my life. What can the spiritual path bring to my life and the larger life in which I dwell? I suggest four qualities: love, compassion, joy, and peace. (3)When I frame it thus and commit to such a way of living, I am already choosing to live a spiritual life.
The religions of the book — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — all include the notion of pilgrimage. Next year in Jerusalem. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Or, closer to home for Europeans, pilgrimages to Canterbury in England, to St. James of Compostela in Spain, to Lourdes in France, or to Rome itself. In Islam, the key pilgrimage is the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, recommended to all who can do so at least once in a lifetime.
To speak of pilgrimage in these traditions is already to evoke a worldview where God is present, where life is seen as holy. Life, it is said, is a journey, not a destination. Yet I believe it is both journey and destination. The destination is somehow to merge into the greater Wholeness. Saint Iraneaus tells us that God became human so we could become God. Eastern Orthodox Christianity names the goal as theosis, becoming divine by participation in the life of the Holy One. Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi speaks of our life as theotropic. As the sunflower seeks the sun and is called heliotropic, so Reb Zalman sees humans as designed to seek God (Theos), thus being theotropic. (4)
But suppose that the trip is not explicitly a pilgrimage, but simply a trip we take. Can that also become a journey open to the great mystery and attentive to the uniqueness that is all around and about us? Having been asked to reflect on such matters, I decided to make an upcoming trip a kind of experiment. My wife Gregg and I had decided to take a coach tour of the New England states in early October of 2012, an autumn tour with emphasis on the turning leaves. Could such a “secular” adventure also be a way of nourishing the soul? How might I bring to it such an added dimension?
As prelude, I must reveal that, like my mother and father, I was born and grew up in Newport, Rhode Island. I count myself a Newporter. My attachment to place is strong. And so it was that I had visited the six New England states before — often multiple times over the years. (5) This trip would be a homecoming of sorts and that — on a deeper level — is what pilgrimages are.
In preparing, I brought a journal, a book with poems of the spirit, and a few other books for spiritual readings. (6) I was not sure whether I would have much occasion for spiritual reading, but because such reading is part of my regular daily practice, I could not leave home without it.
Each morning I would begin with a prayerful intention: “May I rise with and in the Great Life. May I increase my love and compassion, my gratitude and deep joy. May I return often to stillness, to meditative mind where equanimity can flourish. May I welcome whatever arrives this day with patience and a cheerful heart.”
Each evening, in my journaling, I would note some things that had touched me. More precisely, I would notice people, places, or events that became a prompt to choose life, increase my love, deepen my compassion, awaken my gratitude, and increase my joy. I also wished in a contentious time of presidential campaigns to go beyond labels and see my fellow travelers as unique humans, deeper than any labels, worthy of full respect and usually in need of a little help from their friends.
I remembered a quote from a spiritual teacher in North Carolina, Bo Lozoff:
Love people [and other creatures] and love your own life.
Take it easy on God’s creation and help out whenever you can. (7)
Good words to travel with!
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Boston and its environs — the city plus Lexington and Concord (8)
A history-drenched city, Boston reminds us of the beginnings of our Republic, of our Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. Leaving the city itself, we travel to nearby Lexington and Concord. We are still in the spirit of 1776. In Concord we are reminded of early authors — Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts. Nature and art dwell here, as well as the love of freedom with its courage, suffering, and sacrifices.
Cape Cod — Plymouth, Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard
To arrive in Plymouth on Cape Cod Bay is to recall a still earlier time. Plymouth Rock bears the date 1620, the landing of the Mayflower. I think of Pilgrims and later the colony at Boston with a Puritan stamp. Religious freedom was often sought for one’s own but not for others. I remember how long it has taken to see tolerance as rooted in freedom of conscience and thus, as a true good, whoever may be in power.
Newport, Rhode Island
Rhode Island, founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, would offer tolerance. Newport, founded three years later, boasts the second oldest Jewish congregation and the oldest standing synagogue, Touro Synagogue — with its prized letter on religious freedom from George Washington. Newport also has the oldest Quaker meeting house in Rhode Island as well as the magnificent Trinity Episcopal Church (after a design by Christopher Wren), with its stunning triple-level pulpit in the center aisle.
For me, the coastline and the sea draw me still. Only in the names are there echoes of what came before — the island of Aquidneck where Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth lie, is an American Indian name, as is Narragansett Bay.
On this trip, the tour does not focus on colonial Newport but goes directly to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s so-called “summer cottage”! Here we are in the 1890s and reminded of the titans of industry with their taste for conspicuous consumption.
As we travel around the Twelve Mile Ocean Drive, I am filled with memories from many seasons of my life. All too soon, we leave Rhode Island behind to drive on into Connecticut.
Connecticut and Western Massachusetts
We travel from Mystic seaport through western Massachusetts to the Norman Rockwell Museum near lovely Stockbridge. Rockwell is pure Americana, seeing us as we wished to be seen, and hoped we were. Through World War II all the way to the struggle for civil rights, he shows both the basic goodness in people while at the same time glimpsing the darkness that also dwells therein.
Vermont and New Hampshire
In these states the fall foliage was king. History too. The Green Mountain boys. The home place of Calvin Coolidge. The lovely Vermont town of Woodstock. The famous Vermont Store. And just a touch of New Hampshire at the end of a long day.
Maine — Portland and Kennebunkport
In Portland, Maine, we are again on the coast. So too at Kennebunkport, the principal residence of President George H. W. Bush and his family. Indeed we are very close to York Harbor, Maine, where my best friend from high school lives. Alas, because of our schedule, I can only visit him in spirit. (9)
Return to Carolina, and some lessons learned
We fly home again from Boston. After regaining some normalcy, I think of lessons learned. Here are a few:
We live our life in circles, as the poet Rilke says. (10) I have circled the sun 75 times. And I have known these places (or many of them) at different ages. They change and I change. I reflect on what changes and what remains (to some extent) constant. Surely all my ages live in me still.
I am struck by how often, as I travel now, I practice returning to stillness, to meditative mind. I also practice reopening my senses and encountering the natural world with gratefulness (great fullness). . .
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I return — perhaps with a touch of Norman Rockwell — to a sense of our solidarity as human beings in the great family of life. I learn to see my fellow passengers in their unique humanity and refrain from political (or other kinds of) labeling. At moments unbidden, great compassion rises.
I think of spirituality as living mindfully and being open to mystery. The mystery is in the great beauty of nature — the tree-covered mountains, the vastness of the sea, the companionship of rivers. The mystery also resides in the beauty of things made by human hands. And, finally, in those movements of the human spirit that elevate, liberate, and inspire us all.
In the 1960s Simon and Garfunkel sang: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” (11) Perhaps the words of the prophets are also written on the Edgartown Deli on Martha’s Vineyard, whose sign reads: “We wish you true joys — nature, the arts, and human love.”
As you make each day a journey and each journey a way of deepening, I echo that sentiment:
I wish you true joys — nature, the arts and human love.
May it be so for all of us and all our kin
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Notes
1 For more on the four stages of life in the ancient pattern of India, see my book, The Spiral of the Seasons: Welcoming the Gifts of Later Life (Chapel Hill, NC: Second Journey Publications, 2009).
2 See Rumi’s poem “The Guest House” in The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A.J. Arberry, and Reynold Nicholson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 109.
3 For more on these virtues or modes of divine dwelling, see my The Fourfold Path to Wholeness: A Compass for the Heart — Cultivating Love, Compassion, Joy, and Peace for All Our Kin. (Chapel Hill, NC: Second Journey Publications, 2010.)
4 See Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi with Joel Segel, Jewish With Feeling (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 30.
5 The only place I had not visited before was Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod.
6 Specifically, I brought along Roger Housden’s For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics (New York: Hay House, Inc., 2009), Father Thomas Keating’s Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation (New York: Continuum, 2002), plus a small copy of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Chingand a small copy of the New Testament.
7 See Bo Lozoff, It’s a Meaningful Life — It Just Takes Practice (New York: Penguin Viking Arkana, 2000), p. 264. The addition of “and other creatures” is mine.
8 The tour ran from October 2, 2012 through October 9, 2012 and was offered by Caravan Tours. Our skilled driver was Gary Forcier, and our exemplary tour guide was Barbara Weis.
9 Since circumstances prevented our getting together, I want to acknowledge here my longtime friend, Don Russell.
10 I am thinking of Rilke’s poem:”I live my life in widening circles.” See Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), p. 48.
11 See the song “The Sound of Silence” on the album: Sounds of Silence, released in 1966.
The Art of Pilgrimage: Meeting Ancient Wisdom in Copper Canyon by Ron Pevny
As the Giver of Life touched the eastern horizon above Barranca del Cobre and began to pierce the darkness and winter chill with its light and warmth, the drumbeats sounded in the rugged canyons below. The ancient inhabitants of Copper Canyon, the Raramuri (Tarahumara), were greeting the sun, as they have done during late winter since time immemorial, in anticipation of Spring Equinox and the renewal of life for the earth and all of her beings.
High above on the canyon rim, other drums were sounding their prayers of gratitude as the promise of a new day touched the 16 pilgrims from all across the United States who were seated there among the boulders, yucca, and ponderosa pine. The drumbeats from below and above pulsed through one corner of Copper Canyon, Mexico, as those visitors from the U.S. imagined the heartbeats of two very different cultures, separated by distance, world view, and pain-tinged history, beating as one.
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The Raramuri, whom many authorities consider to be relatives of the Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans) of the southwestern U.S., experienced their first contact with Europeans when Spanish expeditions came to north-central Mexico in the 16th century in search of gold. Having difficulty pronouncing “Raramuri,” which roughly translates as “people of light feet,” the Spanish called them “Tarahumara,” and this corruption of their preferred name is how the Raramuri are commonly known today. The ensuing 200 years of Spanish influence were painful for the Raramuri, who at times were brutally persecuted as the Spaniards attempted to impose European values. Jesuits and Franciscans brought Christianity to the Raramuri around 1600. The Jesuits were removed from Mexico by the Spanish king 150 years later, and then they returned in 125 years to find a people who had integrated various Christian symbols and beliefs into their rich indigenous nature-based spirituality.
Today the Raramuri number between 50,000 and 70,000, approximately the same as their estimated numbers 300 years ago. Probably the most unmixed of any of the North American Indians (more than 95 percent have pure Raramuri blood), they are among the least changed by modern civilization of the indigenous peoples of this continent. They are best known to the outside world as long-distance runners for whom running up and down the steep canyons, for sport as well as transportation and communication, is integral to life. Most live in small wood or stone houses or large caves in isolated family units or small settlements. Thirty-two Raramuri dialects are spoken throughout the Sierra Madre and its magnificent Copper Canyon complex.
The Copper Canyon area — Barranca del Cobre — is a complex of several majestic canyons, most deeper and larger than the Grand Canyon, with each continuing to be sculpted by wild rivers that eventually join and empty into the Gulf of California. It is estimated that the volume of these canyons is ten times that of the Grand Canyon. Over the years the mining of silver and gold has played an important role in the history of these canyons and their inhabitants, whereas copper mining has been relatively insignificant. The canyon system gets its name not from the metal, but from the brilliant copper color that frequently suffuses canyon walls and sky above as sunset gives way to twilight.
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As the colors of dawn gave way to bright sunlight, and the drums and rattles from above and below went silent on that February morning, we drummers descended from the canyon rim to our awaiting vans and proceeded on the next leg of what for us was a journey undertaken in the spirit of pilgrimage. Ever since we committed to “Meeting Ancient Wisdom, Growing Into Elderhood” months before, we 16 Americans, ranging in age from 50 to 76, had prepared to come to the magnificent homeland of the Raramuri as pilgrims rather than tourists. Our guides to Copper Canyon and the Raramuri were Jan and Mireya Milburn, who through their Milburn Foundation have devoted decades of their lives to the preservation of Raramuri culture.
The difference between a tour and a pilgrimage is huge. A tour is a trip to an exotic locale to see beautiful natural or human-made features and to learn about the culture and history of the place. The focus is on doing this and that with each step planned and the experiences and learnings mostly predictable. The tour leaders strive to offer a “controlled” experience where little is left to chance.
In contrast, a pilgrimage is a journey to touch and be touched by the sacred; as such, it is deeply grounded not in doing, but in being. The known must be left behind, and Mystery surrendered to and embraced. It is journeying with the intention of being fully alive and present to the guidance, mystery, magic, and transformative potential of each moment and each experience. One must let go of expectations and welcome the unexpected. One must trust that a greater Wisdom travels with us and opens us to experiences that — with acceptance, reflection, and intention — will further our psychological and spiritual growth.
Coming from widely diverse professional and spiritual backgrounds, what our group of pilgrims held in common was a sense of calling to claim and live the role of elder in our senior years. We all believed that becoming an elder is not the same as becoming older. How to understand and honor this calling to elderhood can be very difficult in a modern world where the importance of elders is forgotten and their role denigrated.
In stark contrast, until the Industrial Revolution, in most societies the role of elder was a critical one held in high esteem. Elders have been the nurturers of community, the spiritual leaders, the guardians of the traditions, the teachers, initiators, and mentors of the young. They have been the storytellers who have helped their people remember the enduring wisdom and deeper meanings that persist through life’s changes. They have been the ones who, over long lives, have transformed experience into wisdom and whose revered role is to model this wisdom.
Among indigenous peoples this ancient tradition is still vital, playing a critical role in their survival and health. The Raramuri respect all people with gray hair and honor their experience and contribution to their community, but they reserve the designation of Mayori, the fullest expression of elderhood, for those who have undergone years of intense training, spiritual practice, and deep commitment to their own personal growth. Mayori must know everything about the tribe and the way of life that have long made survival possible. They know the songs, legends, dances, ceremonies, and healing practices. They serve as counselors and teachers. They teach their people how to receive and understand spiritual guidance and to use heightened awareness to court the synchronicities and miracles that are central to the spiritual lives of their people.
It is the Mayori who hold the cultural fabric of the Raramuri together, a fabric that has as its source an ongoing experience of relationship with the living earth and the Mystery that created and sustains it and them. We pilgrims from the “modern” world believe also that the wisdom of true elders is necessary in our world, if our civilization is to successfully face the momentous challenges that lie before us.
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The “Meeting Ancient Wisdom, Growing Into Elderhood” pilgrimage wove together four strands as we sought to move forward on our quests to define and live the role of elder in the modern world. We spent time in solitude on the heights above Barranca del Cobre and in the depths of one of its canyons to strengthen our experience of the sacredness of our relationship to the earth. We explored sites of historical and cultural interest. We engaged in practices, such as sharing councils, drumming circles, guided imagery, dreamwork, and give-away ceremonies, to share the joys and struggles of our quests to become elders, to open ourselves to our own creativity and intuition, and to deepen our bonding as a community. And we spent time with Raramuri and their elders, trusting that the impact of being in the presence of indigenous people for whom the archetypal role of elder is alive and strong would serve as a catalyst in our own journeys toward full elderhood.
Many Raramuri still experience their lives through an expanded consciousness (what some scholars call “indigenous soul”) in which they are able to be present for, and creative in, worlds other than the material. When choosing how, or even if, to relate to outsiders, they read the energy of the group even before meeting them. We knew that, if we approached them full of expectations, projections, and judgments, they might well not interact with us at all, or if they did, their interactions would be superficial. On the other hand, if we went to Copper Canyon with true humility and a beginner’s mind — if we allowed ourselves to be in each moment without expectation — we would come with an energy they could resonate with. And in befriending them in this way, we hoped to befriend a basic part of our own human nature — a state of consciousness that enables us, like them, to have living experience of our relationship to all of creation and its Creator and to know our unique roles as elders in supporting the health of earth and the human community.
We began to recognize this shift of consciousness early in our pilgrimage as we experienced our first striking example of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. When we left El Paso for the five-hour drive to Chihuahua, a major storm was passing through the area, with the weather forecasters predicting strong, dangerous winds that could very well cover the highway with sand and close it for hours. We offered our prayers for protection, visualized a safe journey, and began the drive in our caravan of two vans and one truck. Five hours later we arrived at the Westin Hotel in the city of Chihuahua, having passed through miles of barren, sand dune landscape with little wind.
Several days after our drumming session on the canyon rim, another wonderful “coincidence” resulted in an unexpected, powerful experience for our group. We had the rare opportunity to spend the morning with an 83-year-old Raramuri shaman named Lorenzo and his wife Conchita, who is a healer talented in the medicinal use of plants and herbs. Mireya Milburn, who is Raramuri, spent much time in her childhood with her family’s neighbors, Lorenzo and Conchita. She introduced them to Jan 30 years ago, but Jan and Mireya had not seen these friends in 15 years. One morning Jan learned that Lorenzo, who is often away from his home doing his healing work, would be at home that day and eager to offer his blessings to our group. All it took was a brief handshake with each of us to enable this lifelong shaman to gather information about imbalances in our physical and spiritual selves and to prescribe for several of us practices or herbal remedies that would help restore balance. Then, using both Christian prayer and sage incense, he performed a cleansing ceremony to remove the energies of fear that so many people carry these days, so that we could more fully embrace the trust that is a critical doorway to indigenous soul.
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Later, for some of us, trust was a valuable resource on the seven-hour drive from Cusarare at 7,500 feet down to the former silver- and gold-mining town of Batopilas at 1,200 feet. We envisioned this descent as both a journey into the depths of Copper Canyon and into the depths of ourselves. The dirt road down into Batopilas Canyon is a one-lane ribbon of rock and dirt, full of switchbacks, awe-inspiring and for some, frightening. Burros and goats roamed the hillsides and meandered along the road. We passed Raramuri families, dressed in their multicolored traditional dress which lent brilliant color to a starkly beautiful landscape of gray and brown volcanic rock. With spring and summer rains, a riot of greens, reds, and yellows would brighten the landscape, but not so during February as we descended into the canyon.
We spent three days basking in the 75-degree warmth of the canyon bottom and the quaint town of Batopilas. In the early 1900s, Batopilas was the largest silver producer in the world. Now a town of 1,100 residents, mostly of Indian–Mexican (Mestizo) heritage, Batopilas boasts a charming hotel, the Riverside Lodge, that was a magnificent hacienda during the silver boom. With every room different and having its own small courtyard, this hotel provided us with elegant yet simple comfort and an inspiring place to meet as a group for sharing circles. Our excellent traditional Mexican meals were enjoyed on the front porch of the home of a Milburn friend named Maria, who cooked for us on a small stove in her kitchen.
On our first morning in the canyon, a four-mile hike along the Batopilas River led us to the Lost Cathedral of Satevo, a large church formerly of red brick but now in the process of being renovated and covered with cream-colored stucco. The history of the church remains a mystery lost in the mists of time. It is commonly believed that this cathedral was already in a state of decay when the Jesuits arrived around 1600. Its architecture is unlike that seen in mission churches built by the Jesuits and Franciscans throughout Mexico and the southwestern U.S. Rather, it contains prominent characteristics associated with churches and monasteries found in Austria and Bavaria, leading to Jan’s theory that Austrian monks from one of Columbus’s expeditions had settled here a century before the Spanish missionaries.
Our focus shifted from exploration back to inner work the next day as each of us spent a morning in solitude and silence along the Batopilas River. This watercourse was a small, placid stream at this time, in contrast to its rainy season face as a raging, rock-rolling torrent. Our individual and communal prayer was to use this time to more deeply open ourselves to indigenous soul and its guidance for our lives.
My own most powerful personal experience of the pilgrimage occurred during this time. As I waded a small channel, reflecting on events of the past few years, I came to understand my dream of the previous night in which the key symbol was a boy being baptized. I suddenly “knew” that I needed, with Jan’s participation, to create a personal ceremony to mark the end of one chapter in my life and baptize myself, with the waters of the Batopilas River, into full commitment to the next stage. I related to my dream as the Raramuri do to theirs, as an important vehicle through which indigenous soul makes itself known. Such a relationship with their dreams is integral to the psychological and spiritual lives of the Raramuri and other indigenous people, and it is one that all of us can cultivate. To honor this relationship, Raramuri believe it is essential to tell one’s dreams upon awakening, and, in certain cases, to translate dream images into personal ceremonies or commitments.
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We felt that our experiences in the canyon were instrumental in preparing us for our ascent out of the canyon to Cusarare and what for most was the defining moment of our pilgrimage, the opportunity to spend time with Raramuri elders. Throughout the journey, we knew this meeting, though a possibility, was not guaranteed. Months earlier, Jan Milburn had invited several of the elders, including Mayori, to spend an afternoon with our group. These are leaders with whom he had close relationships during those years when he lived and worked with the Raramuri building schools and health clinics, creating work opportunities, and winning back the millions of acres that had been stolen from them by timber and hotel interests. He had not seen most of them for several years and did not know if they would choose to join us. His two closest mentors had died in the previous year. He told us that the others whom he invited were, like most Raramuri, naturally shy and also not eager to spend their time with whites.
It was not until the morning of the scheduled day that Jan learned that 16 of the elders had accepted his invitation to join us for an afternoon meal in the cave home of friends of the Milburns. It seemed fitting that we begin that day with the future of the Raramuri, their children, by visiting the local school, hearing them recite their lessons, delighting in their laughter and smiles, sharing their nervousness, and presenting them with markers, pens and pencils, and notebooks. Then we drove on to the cave home.
The elders who greeted us at the cave home — governors of communal lands called ejidos, two Mayoris, a healer, and several others — all had dark, weathered faces lined with age. The men dressed in western clothing — jeans, shirts, and hats, with several wearing handmade sandals. The women were dressed in brilliantly colored ruffled skirts, blouses, and head scarves, and wore sandals. Curious children whose school day had just ended shyly watched us from behind large boulders above the cave. We suspected that the Raramuri shared our nervousness, like us not knowing what to expect. Jan advised us to become comfortable being with the elders in silence, sharing all those many elements of communication that are nonverbal. He told us that a slight brushing of their fingers against ours would be the appropriate form of greeting. To be offered a firmer handshake at some point would be a special gift. Try to feel their energy, he told us, as surely they would be feeling ours — let Raramuri indigenous soul touch ours, and trust that to be enough.
In the spacious, smoky cave home, we and these elders and children shared a large meal of tamales and blue corn tortillas, prepared by Mireya’s mother and relatives the night before (probably all night!). As some of us played with the children, their smiles and laughter began to relieve the mutual nervousness. Then we went outside to a circular grassy area bordered by large boulders, where we sat alternating Raramuri with white visitors. Using Jan as their translator, several of the elders made short welcoming speeches and extended their blessings toward us. As is customary when meeting elders of all indigenous cultures, we offered gifts that they value: beautiful cloth and sewing materials for the women, flashlights and Leatherman tools for the men. Each of us gave our gifts to an elder with whom we felt connection, evidenced by a smile shared or one of those subtle yet tangible feelings of being in relationship. And then Jan asked if the elders would accept a blessing from our group.
The pulse of our drums and rattling of our shakers carried our prayers for the well-being of the Raramuri. With the drumming, we were bringing healing to the old, pain-tinged relationship between these humble people and the often-not-humble white man. It touched us deeply to have several of these elders offer us full handshakes as we were leaving. When the elder who best knew Jan asked if we would/could come back, our feelings were confirmed that our unique overture to Raramuri elders was also valued by them and seen as an important beginning. Unlike tourists, we had not come just to get something for ourselves. We had done our best to meet and honor them without judgment or projection. Our innate goodness had met theirs — the indigenous soul that is the essence of our shared humanity had shone forth and was felt by and enriched all.
As I write this account in mid-March, it is now the beginning of the season of renewal in the northern hemisphere. The Life-Giver rises and sets each day to the sound of Raramuri drums beating deep in the canyons. The starkness of the winter landscape is giving way to the lush colors of spring. The spiritual practices and beliefs that are the life of Raramuri culture live on, grounded in both Christianity and an indigenous tradition of deep reverence for the earth.
Out of the canyon and many miles to the north, the heartbeats of a group of 16 aspiring elders continue to beat in resonance with those of our Raramuri brothers and sisters. We still have much to learn of the fullness of our potential to serve as true elders in our communities. But we have made a beginning. We and others like us are on the leading edge of a necessary paradigm shift in how aging is viewed in America. As we learned from the Raramuri, aging need not be defined by decline, loss, and withdrawal from active contribution to the community. Aging done consciously, with intention and inner work, can be a time when, like finely aged wine, we are at our best, giving our gifts and sharing our wisdom as we fulfill a role that since time immemorial has been vital in the lives of communities — that of the elder.
Our pilgrimage to Barranca del Cobre was a practice in the art of pilgrimage, demonstrating to us our potential for honoring and living each day as another day on our pilgrimages through life. We now can journey through our days carrying trust that a greater Wisdom, and its gift of indigenous soul, is traveling with us. The Giver of Life rises each day to remind us, as it does the Raramuri, that all life is sacred and interdependent.
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Ron Pevny, M.A., has for forty years been dedicated to assisting people in negotiating life transitions as they create lives of purpose and passion. He is Founding Director of the Center for Conscious Eldering, based in Durango, Colorado. He is also a Certified Sage-ing® Leader, was the creator and administrator of the twelve-organization Conscious Aging Alliance, and has served as the host/interviewer for the 2015, 2016 and 2017 Transforming Aging Summits presented by The Shift Network. He is author of Conscious Living, Conscious Aging: embrace and savor your next chapter, published in 2014 by Beyond Words/Atria Books. Ron has presented many conscious eldering programs at Ghost Ranch and other retreat centers around North America over the past fifteen years.
Solo Journey in a Coupled World by Molly Brewer
Thirty-four years of marriage — over — in the blink of an eye, “I’m leaving” rolling off the tongue, connected to the increasing discontent that had left only this option. Despite the rightness of the decision, shock and grief become my new companions as I gather my resources and begin to let go, to heal, to move on. Four years later, moving on has taken on a look I could never have imagined.
What does a life evolve into after so many years of partnership, after imagining into the elder years with your life companion, sharing decisions together and caring for each other as the body ages? Can loneliness transform into essential aloneness, and can this be embraced? And where and how does a solo life fit into a coupled world? All new territory, for sure.
To begin with, I have realized there is no such thing as “starting over.” Perhaps the most fundamental and healing opportunity that has emerged is a gathering of all parts of myself, especially the parts I unknowingly gave away in the process of holding onto a marriage that no longer served either of us. As I have discovered this soul loss, I have invited and welcomed back those lost parts, and now, as I turn 65, I am experiencing a “coming home to myself,” a sense of wholeness that fills my very being. When thoughts or feelings of lack surface, I can remind myself I have everything I need, which has actually always been true but so easily forgotten, and I come back home to myself once again. I know that the universe, or spirit, or God, or whatever you call the life force, provides all I need, allowing me to more easily open to the unfolding of life as it presents itself.
It is in this spirit that T@DA showed up last Thanksgiving Day — a shiny bright red retro-looking little travel trailer on the side of the road with a For Sale sign on her. I asked my son to stop the car as I said: “That’s it!” — an instant knowing that this was my new traveling companion. About a year before, I began considering the idea of a little travel trailer but I had not begun an active search, though the idea was percolating. I also had learned about a group called “Sisters on the Fly,”(1) a growing gathering of women who have refurbished old trailers and come together to share and support each other in the fun, sisterhood, and independence of owning and caring for their own trailers. Spunky women! So am I, with just enough wildness left in me to live into that part of myself that yearns for more adventure. Yes! Yes! Yes!
And so the adventures with T@DA have begun. The first time out with her this spring, feeling both excited and quite intimidated, I thought, “I have no clue what I am doing.” This one-night maiden voyage, though, went well, and I was even able to back her into a parking space with little difficulty. Whew! First hurdle conquered. Second time out was at the Washington coast for a rally with other small-trailer owners, which proved to be a huge resource of information and collective experience, wisdom, and know-how. The third time out was to a small national forest campground on a raging river at the foot of Mt. Baker. It rained and didn’t matter, as I had a dry, cozy shelter and time to write this reflection. A solo hike, romping at the river’s edge with my Australian shepherd Brodie, and a deep sense of well-being all filled my heart.
I can have a rich, solo journey in a partnered world and not feel outside of things, but rather feel deeply connected to myself. Oddly enough, T@DA and I seem to be a magnet wherever we go, and I am connecting with people in the most unexpected ways. I am learning that I am enough, life is enough, there is plenty of joy to go around, and I truly do have everything I need. I am adding to the basket that holds all of my life experiences and, ironically, that basket feels a lot lighter than it ever did before. I am thriving in this new adventure and, as Robert Frost said, “I have miles to go before I sleep.”(2)
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Notes
1 To find out more about “Sisters on the Fly,” go to www.sistersonthefly.com.
2 From Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
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Molly Brewer lives on Whidbey Island near Seattle, Washington, where she tends her woodland garden, hikes, works as a physical therapist specializing in craniosacral therapy, and travels as much as possible in her T@DA. She is currently exploring and becoming a “Mama sin dolo,” one of a global group of older women dedicated to nurturing “beyond pain” toward healing and wholeness.
One Man’s Search for Joy… or at Least a Guinness by Tom Trimbath
Excerpts from Walking, Thinking, Drinking Across Scotland by Tom Trimbath
September 21
Sunny beaches? Ha! I was headed to misty Scotland for my autumn vacation. What was I thinking? My friends wondered about that too. So did I, but I trust my intuition. I knew I needed a change of scenery and a different routine.
We build ruts. We build them out of habits and for a purpose, even if we don’t realize it. Our ruts keep us in the vicinity of what we think we need and aim us towards a goal we expect to reach. A rut is a person’s self-built one-dimensional maze that includes walls and a picture of cheese. If it is a deep enough rut, the horizon becomes the top of the trench that we can’t see over. The world shrinks to something that seems controllable where everything except the end is within reach. We humans are very good at putting ourselves into silly situations.
I knew I was in a rut, and that my horizons to either side had become a bit too near. I’d been there before, and I’d found a way out of it. I had to do something completely different. My desire to walk across Scotland was a desire to see my rut from another perspective, even if it meant creating a new rut.
I did something similar ten years earlier, but that time I was just trying to lose weight. For eight weeks in September and October of 2000 I bicycled from Washington State to Florida: a corner-to-corner bicycle ride partly intended as weight reduction, partly to get out of the house, partly to see if I could.
September 28
As I closed the garden gate, I looked down the lane. The morning light made it look like less of a dead-end. The path diving into the dark tunnel of the underpass was not very encouraging. It looked like an opportunity for Joseph Campbell to begin a lecture on the hero’s journey. What lay within and beyond the darkness?
From light, to dark, and back to light as I crossed over to the other side was like a Wizard of Oz moment. The sky was lightly overcast. The contrast was bright and welcome. A regular road roughly paralleled the heavy traffic and steered away from the highway. Soon the road noise drifted away. As a bonus, instead of a sidewalk, shoulder, or bit of paint defining a lane there was a wide concrete median guarding a paved path wide enough for bicycles to ride abreast. I had a mini-road all to myself and a bigger barrier to traffic than I imagined. Fenwick was luxurious.
I also had a lot of country to myself. Instead of finding more density closer to the metropolis of Glasgow, I chose to walk through more farmland. Only 17 miles from downtown Glasgow is a big emptiness. The motorway speeds everyone through the terrain with little effect except noise and exhausts. Credit goes to car companies that the exhausts weren’t bad. Thirty years earlier the air was probably much fouler. My route was far enough away that I was more likely to smell the cow fumes than the car fumes. They both came from tailpipes, but I had a preference.
Congratulations, Scots! One farm crop was odor-free: wind. Individual houses had turbines. Forests of titans gathered on the ridges slicing energy from the air. Unlike America, where the wind and the cities can be far apart, in Scotland the turbines were within a 20-minute drive of downtown. The energy didn’t have far to go.
The lands rolled up and down. I saw more trout farms than people. A bicyclist startled me, which made me laugh at myself. How inattentive, how relaxed must I be to jump when a person rides by? Maybe he cursed the pedestrian that took up the entire bike lane. Maybe he cheered my obviously long walk. Probably he forgot about me within a mile. I passed through a land without making a mark.
I laughed because I was embarrassed. I’d finally relaxed enough to not worry about what others would think when they saw me. Hours spent surrounded by no one were an opportunity to have those conversations I was rarely brave enough to have in person. They were one-sided conversations, but I talked to people who’d died, people I hadn’t seen in years, friends who were also always too busy to sit and talk.
Emotions had a chance to arise without someone telling me how I should feel or having to worry about how I should respond. Manners, politeness, diplomacy could all be ignored. I said thank-yous to people who usually have to be convinced to take a compliment, or I talked about something that bugged me without having to defend or justify my emotion. They never answered back, I wasn’t that tired (and if they started talking back either I was more exhausted than I knew or had mentally gone somewhere I shouldn’t), but I could pretend that they were listening. The cattle didn’t seem to care, and I was less likely to scare the sheep because they had a chance to hear me coming. When the cyclist rolled by I was so deep in my own world that I didn’t know if I had been talking out loud. Oh well, rather than worry about my image I decided I could always claim to just be a crazy Yank tourist.
Somewhere in there something else happened. There was a moment that wouldn’t show up in a video. I was walking one moment, and was walking the next. Yet between those moments was a flash of a powerful emotion. I glimpsed joy.
For the infinitesimal time between two moments, I somehow opened myself up and met an emotion I thought I knew. After being properly introduced, I was humbled by how little I knew about it. Amidst the arguments and expressive outbursts, I realized why I was walking across Scotland. Yes, I should take a vacation for my health. Yes, I wanted to get away from my chores for a while. But I suddenly realized that I was walking across Scotland because I could enjoy it. Such a simple thing as walking could be described as mobile meditation or low-impact aerobics or many other multisyllabic rationalizations — but the real reason I was walking across Scotland was because I enjoyed walking, and travel, and unstructured time, and having a straightforward goal. I was enjoying myself.
I saw joy and recognized it in a real sense, and realized that I’d only known it in an ideal sense until then. I recognized that joy was in every moment, and that it was always waiting for me. I simply had to choose it. For over 50 years I’d never witnessed the purity of that feeling nor learned that simple truth. I’d done well in school, behaved myself, graduated from college with a respectable degree, got a good job, got a better degree, got a better job, saved my money, managed the suburban lifestyle, and ended up single again because I should. Nowhere in there did I spend much time learning to enjoy. I acted responsibly and learned to do the things that people said were enjoyable, and believed that what I experienced was joy. But I was wrong. For one moment, without a break in the clouds, or finding money at my feet, or seeing a beautiful smile, I felt full of joy. I was walking across Scotland because I enjoyed walking across Scotland. There was no need for any further discussion.
The next moment arrived and the feeling was gone. Yet, a tendril remained. An emotional thread tied me to the awareness that I could have that feeling and the memory of the real instead of the ideal emotion. I tried snapping back into joy, but could tell it didn’t work that way. I’d spent so little time experiencing real joy that I would require practice to get that feeling back. Slipping back into familiar feelings was inevitable. Chastising myself for it wouldn’t help. I decided to keep a tender mental hold on that emotional thread and slowly reel in that treasure. Within a few minutes I was back to my conversations, but there was a lightness to my face. My jaw and forehead relaxed. I’d turned a corner into a long and eagerly anticipated journey and the promising prospect of an ongoing education in deep delight.
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Tom Trimbath is the author of the nature essay series “Twelve Months at Barclay Lake, Lake Valhalla, and Merritt Lake”; the cultural essay “Just Keep Pedaling”; Dream. Invest. Live., a book about frugal personal finance; and now, Walking, Thinking, Drinking Across Scotland.
“My walk across Scotland commemorated the tenth year anniversary of my corner-to-corner bicycle ride across America, Just Keep Pedaling. That ride changed my life, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Ten years later I needed a vacation and wanted a nice, long walk, not a life-altering experience. What I got was both.”
For more, visit http://walkthinkdrinkscotland.wordpress.com/photos/.
Change by the Way by Jan Phillips
Every transformation in my life so far has something to do with travel. Every journey has led to the uprooting of some ideas and the seeding of some others. It happens predictably, whether I’m staying within the confines of my own country or venturing out where visas and passports are required. It seems to be the rule of movement: If I leave behind the known for a jaunt into the unknown — and keep my eyes and ears opened — again and again I am changed by the act of moving through the mystery.
A few years ago, I headed off to Nigeria at the request of Sister Rita, a Dominican sister who wanted me to facilitate a weekend retreat in visionary leadership for 40 African sisters from her congregation. In return, I would get to visit some of the villages that Sr. Rita’s non-governmental organization (NGO) serves in the state of Kaduna.
I arranged to go for three weeks to give myself plenty of time for visits to the villages. One day, at one of those villages, something happened that changed the course of my life. We arrived by Jeep in the parking lot of a schoolyard where children of every age stood lined up in rows. It was early afternoon, and when we emerged from the vehicle dozens of children ran up to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward their classroom. “Please be our teacher! Please be our teacher!” they pleaded all the way.
The children quickly filled the classroom. They set me at the front of the room and settled quietly on the dusty floor. I had never taught in a classroom full of kids. I had no idea what to do. I looked around. There were no chairs, no desks, no books, no blackboard, no paper, pens or pencils — only an irresistible eagerness to learn exuding from every pore of the faces of the children sitting in crooked rows before me.
“What’s two plus two?” I asked.
“Four! they shouted back.
“What’s eight plus seven?”
“Fifteen!” they proudly responded.
“Where is your teacher?” I asked.
The children shrugged their shoulders. They had no idea why their teachers had stopped coming, but I was determined to find out.
I asked the staff from the NGO why there were no teachers at the school. An ongoing problem, they responded. Corruption in the government. Transportation problems. Housing issues. Low salaries. Few resources. No accountability. Teachers were hired because of who they knew or were related to, and they were paid whether they showed up or not. Because it was such a long and difficult journey to the rural villages, along often impassable roads, with no local housing to ameliorate the burden of long daily travel, there simply was not incentive enough to get the teachers up to the village schools with any regularity.
When I went to bed that night, I cried. My heart broke for those children. How could it be that we have created a world where the education of our children is not yet a global priority? I felt like the problem was mine — as much mine as it was the children’s — and I vowed to make a difference. I met with Sr. Rita to explore options. She would have to meet with the chief of the village, but we came up with a proposal to bring to him.
We would work together to build a home for four teachers next to the buildings that housed four classrooms in that village. We would raise funds for iPads with educational programs and create partnerships with solar energy innovators to bring electrical power to the school. We would increase the chances of teachers being there every day by eliminating their need to commute, AND we would have a backup plan for the students to learn even if the teachers were not present.
After three weeks I came home and started a charitable foundation based on the notion of small contributions from grassroots contributors to build homes for teachers in 20 villages in the state of Kaduna. We would appeal to artists, activists, and cultural creators who are excited about the idea of every child getting an education, and we would raise money through our creative endeavors. The organization, called the Livingkindness Foundation, has raised more than half of the money we need to build the teachers’ housing unit in that first village. We have identified a solar power company that we want to work with and are making connections with educators who are using the iPads in their classrooms.
That one day, that one image of so many children waiting in line for teachers who would never show up, was enough to turn my life upside down. For the first time in my life, I did not think, “They have a problem. Too bad!” I thought, “WE have a problem,” and I set about creating a system where we could work together to solve that problem.
As a result of that trip, hundreds of people are looking into their own lives to see how they can be of use. They have visited the Web site (livingkindness.org), donated money, purchased photos, spread the word on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. In a tiny village thousands of miles from my home, I looked at a scene that broke my heart open.
I can never unsee that image. I can never pretend it doesn’t matter. My life was altered irrevocably by that one trip, that one day, that one village.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I travel not to get places, but to climb down off the featherbed of civilization.” I feel that’s what happened on my journey to Africa. I experienced the unfairness of a civilization in trouble, and it changed my life. Like the Nigerian chief said, “If you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you.” The poverty of that village spilled over my life and covered me like a blanket. I fell off the featherbed of a privileged civilization onto the dirt floor of a dirt-poor community. And I thank my lucky stars for that day of awakening, for that stark and stirring reminder that we are all in this together. I may be choosing the road less traveled, but I know it is leading me home.
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Jan Phillips is a writer and retreat director who connects the dots between creativity, spirituality, and social action. Her most recent books include No Ordinary Time — The Rise of Spiritual Intelligence and Evolutionary Creativity; The Art of Original Thinking — The Making of a Thought Leader; Divining the Body; God Is at Eye Level — Photography as a Healing Art; and Marry Your Muse — Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity. She has taught in over 25 countries, and her work appears in many newspapers and journals. You can sign up for her monthly newsletter and see her books, CDs, videos, and learn more about her Livingkindness Foundation at www.janphillips.com.
The Mirror of Travel: Seeing Myself in The Face of Morocco by Kendall Dudley
We travel to lose ourselves and find ourselves again.(1)
— Pico Iyer
If we’re lucky, we get to take advantage of times of change and uncertainty to make course corrections. Travel — whether in the outer world by foot, bus, or plane, or through an inner process of journal writing using travel metaphors — provides a creative lens to see our changes.
What follows is my record of taking a group of eight to Morocco in 2012. Everyone was over 50, employed in a variety of occupations including law, mental health, the arts, community service, and medicine. What they had in common was a desire to look below the trappings of culture and established roles and see what ticked. Our goal was to see what the land and people might evoke in us and how, through mindful attention and creating a journal record, we might live more fully. Here is my experience of those 12 days.
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My first night in Fes, I’m standing at the head of a dark alleyway staring at an illegible sign that may say Riad Dar Tamo, site of my room for the night. It is late, maybe 9 p.m., and weak street lamps give the stucco walls a shadowy B-movie look while I fight back urban instincts to use my cell phone for some kind of bailout. I push forward down the dark path. I’m in Fes, after all, to do this exact thing, to push the edges, to see and do what I don’t do at home and to learn from whatever I encounter. The alleyway is not wider than a donkey and a half, and it weaves, with wires and the juttings-out of the upper stories of houses above. I don’t feel in danger, just on unfamiliar, stony ground.
I knock on the heavy wood door marked #89 and a man (I guess, age 50) in a grey shirt looks at me, white guy (he guesses, 60?) in a blue vest. I confess, “My name is Dudley. I have a reservation.” For a moment I think I’ve disoriented him, but he ad libs, “Dudley, yes, the Internet. Come.” He leads me along the tiled vestibule to the three-story atrium, where a French woman is dragging herself from the TV and says, “Welcome. You are Dudley.” “Yes,” though suddenly I’m not sure I want to be Dudley at this minute. “Would you sign here?” she asks. I scan my options: flee, chill, trust fate . . . I go with trust fate. She peers at my words. “You are Kendall, not Dudley?” she says not unkindly. “I am both. I have two names.” “Just so,” she says.
She has nailed it directly. I do have two names, one I know well (the Kendall), but the other is still less familiar to me (Dudley) for it’s the name of my father who I know too little about. Already I’m alerted to a task I hadn’t realized lay before me, to fill in the missing parts of my father’s life. She hands me the key to the room at the top. “My husband, he will help you with the bag, and breakfast is anytime. Just come down.”
As I follow husband up the steep irregular steps of this tenth-century house, I realize I am climbing steps that people have been climbing for 1100 years! I am astounded, and with each step, I think of the children who grew old in this house and passed on, yet the steps remain. I am but one more step climber, one more traveler wooed, one more pilgrim who has found his way to Fes not knowing fully why he has come . . . and that is the point. To have just enough intention to make the trip but not so much knowledge as to create “spoilers” that dampen surprise.
So why have I come, and why in this manner? There are many reasons I know about. My deep interest in Islamic architecture and Middle East culture nurtured from my Peace Corps years in Iran . . . my interest in the life cycle and the voyages implicit with each life stage . . . my belief in the vivid language of color and form to convey meaning . . . and my professional yakking to life-design clients and program participants about the advantages of intentional travel. For these “known” reasons I have come to Morocco while suspecting that others lie out of reach. Perhaps there lies my real motivation: to see beneath the surface of my known intentions.
Pico Iyer says, “We search not so much for answers but better questions.” (2) Indeed, living the questions, as Rilke suggests, (3) is a form of the high ideal. Better to set in motion that next life chapter with good questions, or at least some that may take you to the right ones. For me, “Why am I really here?” is a good enough question.
The next morning, I go up more of those same steep steps to the roof, where I am breathtakingly surrounded by the 10th through 21st centuries — soft distant mountains, minarets, grey-brown houses, and alleyways, roof gardens, plane trees, telephone poles, hundreds of satellite dishes, and the insistent drone of Egyptian soap operas. This is the oldest part of Fes . . . . time has burnished it with additions woven in throughout the years: a house renovation in Andalusian style, an Ottoman influence here, a choice of colors from a French colonial palette there. Like the houses, we bear the markings of our journey even if we’ve forgotten their origins.
Some part of me is aware that it’s raining and I’m getting really wet! I take a quick last look knowing that I will not see this specific sight again. The image saturates my eyes, and as I head carefully down the steps, each one requiring a strategy of its own, I hear Frost(4) and Hallmark Cards saying “I may not go this way again.” Hey, it’s also true I may never get to Zabar’s on Broadway again . . . but I haven’t heard this internal voice before. Hmm, for all my dismissive banter about birthdays being a cultural phenomenon hyped by the card industry, my body has its own wisdom and has been keeping track — there will be just so many Fesian moments to record on my life passport!
As I make my way with my roller bag and overweight backpack through the tenth, fourteenth, and more “modern” centuries of Fes to our rendezvous at the Dar Batha Hotel, I feel the vibrancy of the city and its many arresting sights. Is it traveler’s eyes that let me find fascination in the way the rain stains the earthen walls and flows quietly along the stone walking paths? A bicyclist slaloms by me. I note the way that fiber optic and electric cables are pinned to available wooden structures and electric meters like large watches are fitted into the carvable walls. Here centuries are colliding. Men in bright blue suits pick up discrete amounts of garbage from houses, while others in yellow are making repairs to the twisty walkways. No signs saying Danger! Cuidado! or Men Working Above! No, everyone watches where they’re going — they have Fesian eyes that tell them to pay attention to the moment. At home, they have to contemplate each step, whereas in Boston, codes and the anticipation of lawsuits have lessened the need for “paying attention.”
I land at our hotel meeting place and find out that two of our members are stuck in the Rome airport, the result of djinns in the form of labor strikes and cancelled flights somewhere along the line. A nice event to show the irony of careful planning, but I quickly catch myself. When people are upset and losing a day at Fes is not the time to enter the on ramp of philosophical musings. Already, even getting to Fes is providing us friction for defining our edges and recalibrating our tolerances.
I am having to switch from being the traveler through personal space to the leader of a group of eight through a maze of schedules, hotel arrivals, long van rides, weather changes, grumbles and exasperations, mis-timings, the disappointing of some to maximize what I hope is the group’s benefit. We see much, perhaps too much, and while most of us are gluttons for this kind of thing, each of us has our limits for ups and downs, and our own individual capacity for delight. When we are in sync, it is marvelous. When not, we take our council and learn from many sources: pleasure and disappointment, physical comfort and irritation, the sweetness of the tea and the risks inherent in food experimentation, as we each stretch our own zones of routine, comfort, and curiosity.
I am both watching and participating, trying to monitor the shape of each person’s experience and judging when to say what. I am up late reviewing each day and what has spilled out of people’s mouths, trying to discern what needs attention and intervention and what is part of the natural, if complex, unrolling of experience. I discover a distressing need to please everyone and take it hard when someone runs aground. This takes me back 40 years to times I was my mother’s mainstay and guardian, a memory that keeps me up late in Morocco all these years later. The past is not really past, it is merely lying low for the moment.
Our guide Mark Gordon — an ex-pat American who lives in Morocco and runs tours on his own and for a travel company — is a font of knowledge of the facts and the bizarre. He is bright and knows his way around the people and monuments we encounter. He is also a lightning rod for anxieties and countertransference. This guy (age maybe 55?) is more accustomed to saving adventure travelers from the jaws of hypothermia and bravado than he is to divining the needs of a quirky group of 50–70 somethings who poke their heads into journals and talk about process and meaning. Some of whom want miracles! “It is now raining, will it rain tomorrow when we are in the desert riding camels?” one woman asks. He responds, “Yahoo says there is a 60 percent chance of rain near there. But it rarely rains in the desert.” She counters, “But are you sure it won’t rain while we’re riding — if it does rain I don’t want to go!” I remind people they are asking for a degree of prediction that is impossible to offer even in Kansas.
What is really happening here, at this moment? We are midway through our trip. It has rained more than we expected, it’s been colder than we thought . . . people are resilient, but a little disappointed in the weather. Then there is the desert. We have talked about it as one of the lures of the trip, a highlight, but it has many elements to it. For most of us, it represents the unknown. It is literal, storied, iconic, psychological. We are all embarking on this voyage with awareness that we are, to varying degrees, going to an edge. It will be fun, but the shape of that fun cannot be known without our having done it. Discussions of weather and requests for guarantees are largely a sign of a collective anxiety. In polling a few people, it seems clear that the group as a whole feels more anxious than the individuals in it do.
Nonetheless, rain or not, we are heading to the desert, and though it is hard to see it yet from our van, we know it is coming. The land is thinning and, interestingly, we start to talk as if no one will remember what we say. “Are you happy?” turns out to be a provocative question as we pass the roadside farms and villages of the Saharan rim. We take turns listening and speaking of the hopes we had and have for love, the present station of those feelings, and the shifts we’ve made to hold these realities.
At times the thrum of the engine acts as our drone instrument, signaling the passage of time and the eternal aspects of our questions. For some, we are telling one another what we have come to Morocco to hear ourselves say. And in the very saying, perhaps we make that real and manageable and changeable if need be. That I am recently divorced rings louder here in me than it does in the U.S. and the word ripples in me as I flash through the vast history of divorces in my family . . . and the reasons why I know so little about my father.
During a lull, I suggest we ride in silence and make notes in our journals. I draw a picture of my father. In my imagined re-creation of his leaving when I was five, I give him a bent back. Perhaps it is the movement of the van that produces that exaggerated line and this wounded interpretation of his departure, but my drawing radiates through me and I feel immensely sad at the loss to him and to me of our decades of separation.
And then the desert. We are mounting our padded saddles and holding onto the pommel as we wait for all of us to similarly be seated before “standing up” — camels take cues from one another, and if one gets up, its neighbor may get the same idea, whether the rider is ready or not. I am starting the odd three-stage standing-up process when I hear Anna moan in terror as her camel starts its ascent. “Hold on tight, you’ll be fine!” our guide calls out. He knows adventure after all. She wails and hugs the saddle. Her camel is paying little attention to her anxiety, but we are all concerned. “You can walk,” I say, “others are choosing to walk.” “No, no. I have to do this,” she manages to say.
This is the desert. The slow endless turning of dunes, pushed by the wind, reconfiguring themselves every day. There is nothing to say. I am in the thrall of the moment, aware of time being measured in eons. I sense a letting go . . . and I experience what it is to be totally present. Every sense is alive. My mind flickers to T. E. Lawrence, the Camel Corps, Rommel, Nilotic slaves, and the trade in dyes, salt, and metals. After my cavalcade of nonsense, I come back to the reality of the chafing sound of camel pads on sands and the steady beat of my heart.
It is night and we are in our Bedouin tent being served couscous with goat, chickpeas, and carrots and drinking wine we have sacredly carried with us. “I need to tell you something,” Anna says. “I came on this trip…to ride that camel.” Her voice rises. “When I was a child, I was trampled by wild horses and have been terrified of large animals ever since. I had to get on that camel.” Her story chills me. What immense courage it took for her to do this. The air is alive as it was in the bus. I say, “This makes me want to tackle my own fear of water — I feel imprisoned by it . . .” Another says, “I have been anxious this whole trip. It is what I do. But I am not anxious about a thing right now. Just being here is all that matters. And I wouldn’t have known that it could be so, without coming.”
I sleep in the presence of the wind and the awareness of stars covering me. (5) I get up around 4 a.m. to pee and watch myself in moonlight standing in the dunes. It is chilly, and gusts of wind blow through me. I take a handful of sand and hold it. I have the idea of taking some home and being buried with it. It is only when I am out of the wind that I realize tears have formed in my eyes.
We see ruined fortresses and sleep one night in a hotel carved out of rock at the base of a vertical gorge. We see immense long valleys of fig, almond, and palm trees with towns scattered in their midst. And then we arrive at the fantastic hill village of Ait Ben Haddou, site of movie backdrops and UNESCO’s protection. (6)
It is mid afternoon. The sun plays on the adobe houses and tapering towers carved with enigmatic signs and symbols. As we walk towards the village, the towers appear to shoot up from thick walls that hug the hillside. Like the desert, this village evokes iconic forms taken from an alternate mindset. Tracing its architectural roots to sub-Saharan and Malian architecture only fuels my thinking that West Africa has links to knowledge systems that the West has lost or perhaps has yet to encounter. (7)
We come upon men and women outfitted in North Face, filming Jesus and Mary for Moroccan TV. As I watch these storied roles being played out, I wonder how I would tell my own story. How would I divide my chapters, and which ones would I have to rewrite before they yielded fresh insight? I realize I get invested in interpreting events in certain ways. And as long as I do that, I can’t see into the nuances of my life, overshadowed as they are by fixed ideas.
The next day we spend moments in silence as we time-travel over the Atlas Mountains past stone villages, flocks of sheep, cell towers, and women’s rural co-ops. It is on these longish bus rides we collect our thoughts that we may later share during the collective journal writing we do each evening. In this way, we see what others saw and learn from the differences in how we’re wired and how our wiring may be shifting. My own wires seem to be scanning for the meaning that lies behind what I see . . . I am looking more for signs than at the color and surface of things.
We hit Marrakech, drop our bags at Riad Dar Saad on the outskirts of the bazaar, and head for the Djemaa-al-Fna. We are in high gear. This is the finale of our trip and the Assembly of the Dead is calling us, or at least that’s one Arabic translation for the place we are about to see! Electrical and plumbing stalls flash by us as do butchers, hanging meat, and vegetable stalls, each with its own sounds and pungency. The market for painted drums and stringed instruments pulls at us and then come the spice, cloth, and souvenir merchants.
Finally, we are released into the wide sea of space and people that forms the Djemaa-al-Fna! School’s out and many people are milling and roaming, scanning the juice wagons and food stalls. Circles form around palmists and storytellers, snake charmers and acrobats. Japanese in facemasks consider land snails and broth. An animal trainer is almost clipped by a biker, whose black veil balloons out behind her. Actors, some in drag, lure us into being their audience, while drummers, horn, and string players vie for our attention by drawing us away with their rapid twisting beat. Women in black sequin veils sit by pillows with cards that see into the future. This is theater on a grand scale, full of history, ritual, invention, reality, and suggestions of the occult. But which is which, and what does all that mean?
Our last hours together, we meet to write of what we will remember of this trip. We discuss moments we stepped out of ourselves or took on unfamiliar roles. We look at emerging skills and tastes and dreams and pause to capture flickers of the future. We start to say “Goodbye” but change it to, “Be seeing you.” Much is in flux as we make our way towards more familiar shores.
I head back to the Djemaa-al-Fna and seek out the amulet maker. Seeing the low facades of the shops, restaurants, hotels, and parking areas that define the edges of the Djemaa, I’m aware of the “planning” behind all this. During twentieth-century colonial rule, the French decided that Morocco would become a culture park and Marrakech its tourist home. This meant old Marrakech had to retain its antique qualities so that it appeared “oriental” to travelers. What’s more, writers say that Morocco partially came to define itself through the images foreigners created of it. (8)
At first appalled to think of these manipulations of culture, I realize they provide a segue to seeing the effects of my own culture on me. Culture is often invisible from the inside. It is by traveling, in part, by getting on the outside, that I see the system of beliefs that defines me and keeps me bound to feeling “at home” in my culture. (9) And though I know why there are few palmists, card readers, and bibliomancers in America , it doesn’t stop me from believing that there is something of imperturbable value here. My task as a traveler and seeker is to see through the cultural distortions to what may still exist at the heart of things.
This impulse has me talking to the amulet maker who sits on a stool near the used clothing sellers. In his yellow robes, he looks like a shaman as he asks me what protection I desire. I tell him I want health for myself and my loved ones and peace for this troubled world. He pauses and then takes a small brass object the shape of an amphora and sets about breaking and selecting bits of bird wing, ginger, and myrrh, along with pinches of what appear to be herbs, mineral powders, and silver dust. He pauses and the Square falls silent. I watch him open a small blue box. He takes out a pinch of red earth and inserts it into the capsule. He then carefully twists closed the top with a brass stopper and presents it to me in his palm.
While culture strongly determines what it is we value, it is ultimately up to me to sift through the forces shaping belief to see what may be true for me. In the work of the amulet maker, I’m choosing to find great value and to see — in the choices he made — links to belief systems and a cultural heritage I may never understand. But he is teaching me to imagine a larger, more multisourced palette from which to frame my life. Coming to Morocco is not enough! I will have to travel further by reading, reflecting, writing, and conversation. All along I’ll be trying to name those life tasks, the sacred and sublime, that I have yet to undertake. I see them forming a kind of map into the future that shapes my choices, time, and resources. This trip helps me see my unfinished “work” with my father. It sensitizes me to wider spheres of knowledge. Above all, it is helping me pay attention to my life and surroundings in such a way that every day can be a travel day if I’m willing to look at life with those eyes.
One thing I’ve learned is that travel provides a necessary friction that helps me encounter myself in unanticipated ways. It clarifies my interests, fears, values, and desires. Even to make the trip in my armchair and not on the road, I need ways to introduce friction. I use the imagery of travel to describe the inner journey I am to make. I want to be able to identify the “stops” along the way before the train reaches its final destination. (Engage with my father’s memory, explore Islamic folk beliefs and architecture, draw freely every day, experiment with alternative forms of knowing such as tarot and I Ch’ing, etc.) This may mean confronting the border guards that don’t want me snooping around my past or looking foolish. It may mean emptying from the suitcase of the heart a host of outgrown roles, responsibilities, and identities, creating a packing list of “mysteries to explore,” denying visas to sacred cows, and safekeeping insights gleaned from roads already traveled. By whatever means I and others may undertake our journeys, recording it not only in words, but also including questions and images, reveals what we know and gives shape to it. If we are ultimately travelers seeking our right road, let us renew the search with creativity and courage!
//
Notes
1 Pico Iyer, Why We Travel, Salon.com; March 18, 2000.
2 Ibid.
3 See Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1903), Modern Library, 2001.
4 See Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Latham. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
5 See Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, Harcourt, 2002.
6 Ait Ben Haddou has appeared in Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator among other movies and is a recognized World Heritage site by UNESCO.
7 See René Gardi, Indigenous African Architecture, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973.
8 See Assia Lamzeh, The Impact of the French Protectorate on Cultural Heritage Management in Morocco: The Case of Marrakech, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011.
9 See Albert Camus, The Stranger (L’Étranger), Everyman Library, 1993, and Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, Pantheon, 1984.
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After Penn (BS), Columbia (MA), and the Peace Corps in Iran, I became forever fascinated by Islam and Islamic architecture. My work, however, took me into the field of career and life design, that grew to include teaching, life story writing, painting, leading programs in life direction using writing and art, stinting at Harvard for 15 years, presenting at national conferences, winning grants for my public art and social justice projects, and leading life-direction programs to Morocco. I run Lifeworks Career & Life Design in Belmont, MA where I have a private practice while also consulting to myriad organizations. And because I trade in new ideas, I’m drawn to adventures that lead me to them. — Kendall Dudley
Embarkation by Tony Whedon
He was a very big kid, and black, blue black, and quite smart, but he struggled to make himself understood. He was from the Georgia sea islands, and spoke a Geechee/Gullah dialect; he said he was a Salt-water Geechee, whatever that was; and he was fond of a painting by Antoine Watteau, “The Embarkation to the Isle of Cythera.” Was there a connection between his fascination with eighteenth-century French art and his home place? How had he learned about art before college? After class one afternoon, he came to my dungeon of an office at Morehouse College where I’d been teaching only a couple of months.
“I won’t stay in Atlanta — the students, they don’t get me, and I don’t get them.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“We go other ways — we’re different, me and them.”
I recall the story he told of the island he’d come from. Until college he’d rarely gone to the mainland, but despite his isolation, the high school he attended had been a good one. Sapelo was a small farming and fishing community. Those living there were descendants of the island’s original slaves. They kept to themselves. They retained a dialect that had much in common with West African languages. I was intrigued by his background, and he was eager to show me his work. He wanted to do more than I expected of him. But — why Watteau and this painting? Nothing was more removed from the problems he’d confronted since he came from his island, and he had no answer except that he really loved the dramatic sweep of it, the suggestion of luminous vistas, of yet-to-be-explored horizons. Watteau was innocent the way my student was innocent, and dreamy like he was. He mooned over the painting, couldn’t get enough of it. My ignorance and my indifference concerning the young man’s background — the island he was from and who lived there — wouldn’t be clear to me ‘til years later.
That student played but a small part in my memory of my first teaching job. There was getting to know my colleagues and the nightly news of Vietnam; there was the burgeoning Black Power movement and its effect on my students. Many of the issues I addressed in the classroom were with me then: how responsible was I to the past? How difficult was it for a young man from an out-of-the-way island on the Georgia coast to adjust to this new life? To come to Atlanta and Morehouse was to assume a responsibility, to be thrust into a present he might not have been ready for. His peers would assume positions as doctors and lawyers, mayors and civic leaders — while others, like him, would go back home as teachers and preachers. In the recent past, the successful blacks, the up-and-coming (the “uppity” who “deserved to learn a lesson”) became lynching targets — they were the ones in whom a fear of violence was especially strong.
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I hadn’t puzzled out these things ‘til I saw James Allen’s book Without Sanctuary, a collection of ancient postcards and news pictures assembled by Allen and recently published by Twin Palms Press — a book that spotlights the lurid fascination whites in the early twentieth century, both south and north, took in lynching photos.
My wife Suzanne and I ran into Allen at the antique shop he runs in Darien near Sapelo Island, where my student had come from and where we intended to spend a short vacation. Allen calls himself a “picker,” a word that denotes a collector of odd or antique things; and he’s dedicated much of his life to collecting lynching photographs.
The first photograph to catch my attention was of — the bludgeoned body of an African American male, propped in rocking chair, blood-splattered clothes, white and dark paint applied to face, circular disks glued to cheeks, cotton glued to face and head, shadow of man using rod to prop up the victim’s head. Circa 1900, location unknown. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 5-3/8 X 2-7/8.
There’s a grotesque formality to the man’s attire: In a long-sleeved white shirt, vest, and trousers, he’s in church-going clothes — his painted face looks minstrel-like. The wrenching part is that he’s been arranged, composed, turned into a work of art. The devastation evoked by this photo is brutally final. And it’s all done in obscene slapstick. That’s what this collection communicates — a reveling in shame, a brazen mocking of human life.
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Sapelo Island, the third largest of Georgia’s barrier islands, is estuarial and mysterious: a world that looks to be half-water, half-land, an oozy admixture of sea green and dirt brown. The story goes that when the first slave ship arrived, the African cargo had a collective vision of what lay ahead — a hundred years of slavery, another hundred of Jim Crow — and waded into the Atlantic Ocean and drowned swimming back to Africa. Others arrived and stayed. Because they lived on an island, they weren’t apt to flee, and they were given small plots where they grew their own food. They fished the tidal marshes and hunted the island. And they remained as families and practiced their religion — Christian, Moslem, and a little of both — and kept their language which remained with them until yesterday. After the Civil War they were given a measure of prosperity and freedom; then came post-Reconstruction and draconian laws that enticed white plantation owners to reclaim their land and their former slaves they now called “tenant farmers.”
The burial grounds and graveyards of Sapelo would provide the islanders a vague tracery back to the first arrivals. Collective memory would do the rest.
//
Sapelo is ten miles long, three miles wide, and flanked by little Sapelo and Blackbeard Islands (named after the pirate whose treasure is said to be buried there). It is defined by salt marshes, upland maritime forests, beach and dune systems, and the Atlantic Ocean. Like other Georgia sea islands, it rides low in the water and is vulnerable to ocean storms. Save for the village of Hog Hammock, most of it is unpopulated. Until you come on it, all you see is a widening channel and waist-high spartina grass, a shrimp boat in the distance — a marginal world of 8-foot tides, land that’s slowly becoming water, and a wide horizon.
We disembark at a splintery dock at Marsh Landing where a half-dozen pickups are off-loading beer and soda. We’re met by the brother-in-law of Cornelia Bailey, the lady renting us our cottage. On our way to Hog Hammock, the last remaining island settlement, he tells us his son Allen Bailey has just been drafted by the NFL (after graduating from the University of Miami). The island’s in a state of excitement over that news and the upcoming 150th anniversary celebration of the African Baptist Church.
We’ve made the trip once before — last fall for the yearly Island Homecoming for hundreds of former islanders and a few tourists. We were moved by the celebration and through the Vermont winter talked about a return. This late April day the village feels African; the houses are haphazardly arranged and are all painted blue: My impression is of plainness, neatness, and a spare dignity. There’s a spiffy looking Sapelo Community Center, a new and apparently well-funded library, two churches, a poorly stocked convenience store run by our landlady, and a B and B she runs, too. Cornelia’s been written about by historians and anthropologists and is the author of a beautiful Sapelo memoir: She has traveled to Sierra Leone to visit her ancestral village. The corn in her back garden is knee-high; there are collards and turnip greens for picking, and a screened chicken house, a grape arbor, already leafed-out, and a pecan tree, just past flowering. We sit for a while on lawn chairs beneath the pecan tree. A garter snake idles along in the short grass. You can hear surf a mile away to our east and a woodpecker banging himself senseless on a dead oak nearby.
Plate 78. Corpse of black male slumped to his knees, tied to trunk of pine tree by leather strap around neck. Bicycle with coat neatly folded leans against fence post. Covered hack with two well-dressed white men in the background. Pre-1915 southern United States. Gelatin silver print. Real photo-postcard. 5-½ x 3-½.
According to the text in Without Sanctuary, “The victim was shot in the eyes, ears, mouth and torso. He was shot in the groin, at very close range, as he attempted to protect his genitals with his bound hands. Palmetto scrub, a lack of mature trees and the growth of Spanish moss suggest a coastal region, possibly an abandoned plantation.”
No painting or photo terrifies and disgusts me as much as this. The trees are spindly-tall, ghostly and eviscerated, and straggly Spanish bayonets poke around the man like daggers. All the lynching photographs in Without Sanctuary come with a harrowing narrative; this one (plate 78) is thick with it: The waiting hack (or buckboard) at right suggests its passenger is eager to be on his way; the bicycle with neatly folded jacket on its handlebars is emblematic of an ordinary life interrupted. Unlike others in the Allen collection, the photo projects an air of desertion; and there’s the ghastly pornography of turning the man’s death into a postcard. Are photographer and executioner the same? Both understood the image would become a print (lynching photo-postcards were a tradition in the South), and clearly the photographer and onlookers experienced no shame. It wasn’t enough for the black man to be killed once. He had to be shot over and over.
And he had to know he was being photographed.
//
Cornelia Bailey drove us to our one-room “cottage.” It had a wide screened porch with an unspectacular view of an overgrown lawn and pine woods. Hummingbirds flitted around. Behind us in a ramshackle trailer beneath towering live oaks lived Stanley, Cornelia’s son, and Stanley’s wife and a terrified little mutt cowering on the porch when we came to visit. It was a quiet place, not particularly beautiful like other parts of the island. The African Baptist Church and a lovely campground were a half-mile down the road. North of us was the great mass of island owned by the University of Georgia, off limits without a permit to go there.
Cornelia said she worried about one of her foster kids who had disciplinary problems, and we talked about how kids grow up, the good and bad points of raising them on islands. Until a short time ago there weren’t many single mom families. “Mostly we are pretty tight knit,” she said. “Meaning, we take care of our own. Everyone knows everybody else’s business.” I said I had no kids. “You mean you have no one to follow you?” she asked. I said no — it was just as well — and she laughed. That’s how the afternoon passed. We sat there a long while, the sun setting behind us, everything still and quiet.
//
Over the next few days, I studied Allen’s compilation of lynching photographs. As far as I knew, no such violence had been visited on Sapelo. But how was I to know? My fascination with the place will always be linked by memory association with Without Sanctuary. Until three decades ago, there’d been several small communities on the island: Bel Marsh, Raccoon Bluff, Chocolat, and Hog Hammock, but they’re gone now save for the Hammock. Islanders tend think they’re sufficient unto themselves and they conceal things; their affairs are left for the “outside” to figure out. On Sapelo their insularity is enhanced by them being black, and mistrustful.
Every island frets over land issues: On Sapelo these go back three-quarters of a century to when tobacco king R.J. Reynolds bought the estate of Hudson Auto manufacturer Howard Coffin and took over a mansion built on the foundations of Thomas Spalding’s original 1803 plantation house. (The stock market crash of 1929 and The Great Depression resulted in the financial and emotional ruin of Coffin, who sold Sapelo to tobacco king R.J. Reynolds in 1934, in order to keep his Sea Island Company solvent. Coffin died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1937.) When Reynolds moved in, there were four black communities, and after he was done offering a pittance to buy out the islanders (and forcing others to move by closing roads he claimed to own) only Hog Hammock was left north of Reynolds’ estate on the south side of the island.
Today Reynolds’ Mediterranean-style villa is managed by the University of Georgia, sold to them by Reynolds’ widow. It is rented on weekends to tourist groups; the outbuildings are occupied by U. of Georgia marine biologists. Outside the mansion, placed around crumbling fountains and abutments, are a half dozen statues of pubescent girls, a bizarre pair of turkey statues — Reynolds’ last wife, his fourth, was fond of them — and mossy live oaks, their serpentine limbs over-arching winding gravel paths.
“Yes, Reynolds gave us jobs and now the Institute gives us jobs,” Cornelia said in a defeated tone. “One thing we can say about us, and that is we survived, we may not have prospered — some of us did — but we did all right for ourselves.”
She didn’t say that the islanders were paid just minimum wage, as I learned later, and that they were still treated like “hired help.” The folks I’d met at the October homecoming, many teachers, social workers, and business people, were success stories by anyone’s standards. We talked about church — the two in Hog Hammock, St. Luke’s and the African Baptist Church, were the island’s social hubs — but while she took part in their gatherings she wasn’t a staunch believer.
“No, never was,” Cornelia said. “You know I died once — was brought back to life, and everyone thought I should be able to see things. But I was just an ordinary kid.”
The story, as she tells it in her beautiful memoir God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man, is that when she was around five, after she and her older brother Asberry ate some green pears at their home in Bel Marsh, she got deathly ill: “Mama and Papa tried every remedy they could and nothing worked. There’s a plant here called the fever bush because you could make a tea out of it to lower your temperature, but that bush isn’t ready to pick until late summer, so they had to try something else.”
Cornelia’s mother bathed her in tepid water but that had no effect, so her father went out and picked some leaves from the beauty berry bush, another plant growing on the island. “In the fall of the year the beauty berry bush has clusters of bright purple berries and that’s why it’s called the beauty berry bush, but it’s the leaves that you use and they’re out in the spring. Mama crushed the leaves, mixed them with vinegar and slathered it all over my body to make the fever go down. But that didn’t work either.”
Too scared to sleep, her parents stayed up all night. Her mother watched and prayed, acknowledging Cornelia’s fate was in the Lord’s hands. Then, as she says, “A little before daybreak, I died.” Her story continues with her father measuring her for a casket and her mother plaiting her hair and placing her limp body into a Sunday dress. It was the only dress she had that wasn’t handmade. “It was a little frilly dress with ruffles and lace. Then Mama laid me out on the double bed in the living room that Papa and she slept in, a brown-colored iron bed.
“I was dead and Mama was crying.”
No one believed the little girl was dead, and they checked for a heartbeat, couldn’t find a pulse, and even did the “mirror test,” holding a mirror over her mouth to see if it fogged up, and there was no sign that she was breathing. No sign of breath. She was dead.
I was struck reading Cornelia’s book by the rich details throughout. I loved her digressions — she had an indelible memory, a brilliant imagination, and an artful way of weaving together her story. Rather than move to its anticipated climax, that she lived to tell the tale, she shows how just before she “died” her father went off to her uncle’s house to have a drink. When he and Uncle Nero returned, they were told she’d died. Both the uncle and her father were there and Uncle Nero kept saying, “Bury the chile, whatcha y’all waitin’ for? Bury the chile.”
“So it was time for the cemetery,” Cornelia tells us.
She was saved by a Cousin Dorothy who instructed her mother to insert garlic poultices in her nose and mouth, and that brought her back to life. From then on she was expected by the village to have visions. While she insists she was just an “ordinary” child, the expectation has stayed with her: Her vivid storytelling connects us not only to her childhood but to the island’s past.
//
As more and more folks leave the island, the past is reclaimed, memory is enhanced by desertion, a paradox that obtains in all abandoned places. We speak of spots reclaimed by nature, but less often of them being reinhabited by the past. There are spots on the island whose deep-forested isolation defies description. A walk down Dog Patch Road has a kind of haunting monotony: The deeper you go, the dreamier the landscape becomes. Live oaks bearded with Spanish moss, a mist rising from the drainage ditches, and a rhapsodic silence. On island walks I’ve seen the scat of wild Sapelo island boar, the shit of wild cows. Century-old accounts mention hosts of poisonous snakes — coral snakes, water moccasins — and flocks of pestering mosquitoes. Freshwater sloughs are scattered about the island containing bottomland hardwoods like maple and sweet gum. There are gators too, I’ve seen one behind our cottage, and armadillos; I literally bumped into one on a wooded path where it was shoveling its snoot into the earth for grubs. Birds are the main attraction. Shore birds and semitropical species in stands of slash, loblolly, longleaf, and pond pine and of course in the live oak climax forest. The legendary Ivory Billed Woodpecker is rumored to survive in the hardwood swamps of the barrier islands — I’ve seen its pileated cousin hammeringaway across from our cabin; and of course, there’s pelicans on dock pilings where the ferry puts in; and the occasional soaring eagle and hordes of wattle-necked buzzards and wild turkeys.
The second day on Sapelo I took a long walk up to Cabretta beach, an expanse of dunes and spartina grass with no one on it but me. A shallow lagoon with minnows lay in front of the beach, and more than a quarter mile off there were low breakers. I walked the beach, picking shells, and came on carcasses of jellyfish and horseshoe crabs. The gentle slope to the ocean meant that there was a long way for the tide to come in.
//
That evening a storm blew through, one of a violent line raking the southeast this spring. The sky went black, the power cut off, and lightning struck several times a bit too close. After the storm we walked down to the African Baptist Church where an anniversary service was underway. I was surprised how few people were attending, but there was a good-sized choir and a guest minister from the mainland. I learned that Reverend Ronnie Legget was a part-time actor and had appeared in a Hollywood movie. His sermon on Matthew III was admonitory.
“Would God be proud of you, his son?” Legget asked.
He was a robust-looking man not much over 40, but he had a grandson he hoped to be proud of one day.
“But it works both ways,” he said. “He needs to be proud of me, understand, to see in me something he might one day become!”
After the service we wandered into the church’s rectory, a small kitchen/dining area (we were invited by one of the women parishioners), surprised to find ourselves almost alone. Outside the churchgoers were climbing into a school bus; actually they were from off-island and were heading to the ferry back to the mainland. If church attendance is a symptom of a community’s health, Hog Hammock didn’t pass the exam.
A guy named Bill Grovener introduced himself and it was just him — a good-sized man in a well-pressed suit with a military style haircut and a pushed-in no-nonsense face — and us. He’d been away from the island several decades, had worked in security at Boston’s Mass General Hospital and then moved to DC where he’d been a cop for more than ten years. A descendant of the island’s slaves now back here and living alone, he said he felt lonely. Later I heard from Cornelia that Grovener hadn’t “fit in” — didn’t get together and drink Saturday nights with the men but was here to find something, maybe in himself, maybe in the island, who knows which?
59. The charred torso of an African American male hung in a coastal Georgia swamp, onlookers. 1902 Gelatin silver print 2-1/4 x 1-7/8.
60. Reverse of photograph (plate 59) depicting warning note on pine tree. Inscription: “Warning, The answer of the Anglo Saxon race to black brutes who would attack the womanhood of the south.”
Unlike other lynching photos where the photographer makes the victim an identifiable person by placing him front and center and memorializing his vulnerability, plates 59 and 60 show a corpse charred beyond recognition. Slung on a rope some 20 feet above the mob, nothing’s recognizable about him, he’s a ragged torso; his limbs are half burnt off, and wrenched from his humanity he becomes every victim of mob violence while the men below — their stupidity is breathtaking.
Allen tells us these snapshots bought “by a flea market trader” [Allen himself?] had been stored in the trunk of a prominent family during the dispersal of an estate.” As memorabilia of what whites in the south still call a simpler life and time, they expose The Mind of the South in complete debasement. Did a family member watch the burning and the lynching? What sort of emotion (shame, remorse?) was attached to the pictures? According to the Chicago Record Herald, “A bright bonfire was seen in the swamp in the direction the posse went Friday night and the members of the posse returned stating that they were satisfied with the night’s work. It now develops, however, that their victim may not have been Richard Young, for whom the officers of the law are still searching. The remains of the burned negro were brought before the mother of Richard Young who says that they resemble her son in no particular.”
Jimmy Allen tells us lynching in the southeast wasn’t as frequent as elsewhere because blacks were relatively well off: They had their own property and political power; and with lots of middle-class blacks in a region, it would’ve been hard for whites to stir up trouble. But even in relatively benign black settlements the inhabitants were slow to return after the Civil War — they didn’t want to be reminded of slavery. It might be argued that in a black middle-class environment, where denial runs deep, folks don’t want to be reminded of lynching and their Jim Crow past either.
//
African–Americans have been on Sapelo since the eighteenth century. At one point, they exceeded 1,000: the ancestors of those now living in Hog Hammock and others scattered across the lowlands were brought by Georgia planter Thomas Spalding. Before him there was a Spanish mission, Mission San Joseph de Sapala (ca. 1605–1684), on the island. Afterward and before the Revolution two private owners from English families grew crops there. At the close of the 18th century, a French aristocrat and pirate, Christophe Poulain DuBignon, and four French countrymen settled on the island, bringing slaves and cattle and intending to sell slaves. The name of his boat — The Sapelo. But their involvement on Sapelo was ill-fated: In 1795, not long after they’d settled in, the six-man partnership ended with a duel between two of the Frenchmen in which one of them was killed; another died that same year from yellow fever.
Barrier islands are more open to change than others — history happens there because they hug the mainland and are open to the sea. Marginal places where land and water merge, because of the tides, they’re immersed in change — their populations are often spicy gumbos of history and culture. We see this on Sapelo with its French, English, and West African dialects and in its layered history. The first known practicing Muslim in America, a Bilali (or Ben Allah), was Thomas Spalding’s right-hand man acting as boss man and a sort of deputy-governor of slaves. He’s thought to have studied at a West African Islamic University before his capture in his teens when he was brought to America. After his death, a seven-page manuscript detailing rules of prayer, dress, and ablution were found among his belongings. Because of the condition of Bilali’s papers, it’s hard to know the extent of his literacy, but he’s honored by many American Muslims as Islam’s father in America. Most islanders consider themselves his descendants. At the Sapelo Homecoming, I saw a replica of the “Bilali papers,” tattered and brown, the Arabic script barely legible.
Thomas Spalding, like the island world he’d lived in his entire life (he was born the son of a cotton planter from Scotland on St. Simon Island), was full of political and philosophical contradictions. He was a slave owner and a freethinker, an innovator (he reintroduced adobe-like tabby construction to the island) and a banker in the town of Darien; a Georgia State Representative, he was enlightened by science and contributed to farm journals of his day. Oddly — he was a Union advocate and espoused “liberal and humane” ideas about slavery and utilized the task system of labor, giving slaves free time to do what they wished. (Actually, they had no choice but to stay put. They’d have starved in the malarial marshes bordering the island if they escaped.)
Spalding imported his slaves — rice and indigo cultivators — from today’s Sierra Leone. It’s thought that after a U.S. embargo was put on slave trading in the early 19th century, he continued importing slaves illegally from the Spanish in northern Florida. After his death, his son Randolph led a dissolute southern gentleman’s life, throwing wild parties in the mansion and letting his holdings go to seed. He was disgraced as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War by failing to lead his regiment in the defense of Port Royal in South Carolina — being too drunk to do so.
After Reconstruction, what remained of his family went into steep decline. (Randolph’s daughter ended up being the island’s postmistress.)
71. Badly beaten corpse of William Brooks, his clothes ripped and torn, a branch fastened to his left leg. July 22, 1901, Elkins, West Virginia. Card-mounted gelatin silver print. 4-1/4 x 5-3/4. Printed on mount: “William Brooks, Who was lynched at Elkins, July 22, 190, For the Murder of Chief-of-Police Robert Lily. While Attempting to Arrest him. PHOTO BY VON ALLMEN.”
According to a short news item in the Elkins Record Herald, Brooks was “lynched . . . by a maddened mob of 500” not long after he shot and killed the chief of police who tried to arrest him for making a disturbance. The Record Herald goes on to report: “Brooks then jumped from a window and was instantly pursued by the crowd which had been attracted by the fight. He was captured after a chase of half a mile and carried to a park, where his body was soon swinging from a tree.”
I’m struck by the upbeat — if not jubilant — tone of that last sentence. Contrast it to the formally bordered, sepia-toned photograph of Brooks “swinging from a tree.” His face is a mask of suffering, his clothes are partially torn from his body, and there’s the hangman’s rope, the leafy trees behind him . . . a white fence and woods in Elkins, West Virginia, where 500 townspeople gathered to hang someone they probably knew.
The postcard follows the tradition of a well-recognized genre, but unless one was from that era and from the south, it’s hard to understand the pleasure gained from it.
//
In 1861 the Spaldings had moved most slaves north to near Macon where they stayed until the war was over. The South vanquished and the land and crops burned through Georgia to the coast, black islanders made the harrowing trek back to Sapelo. Their 300-mile walk is a Biblical narrative of suffering and deliverance: With no one to guide them and the land and crops decimated by Sherman’s “march to the sea,” they wandered for months through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Some died, others made their home in towns along the way. As Sherman’s army gave them little assistance, they fended for themselves. On their return, they abandoned their former slave quarters and established new homesteads.
No longer owned, they were owners themselves.
Historian William S. McFeely in Sapelo’s People writes:
In a cruel reworking of [Robert] Frost’s sense of his own forbears’ first hold on the land, the Sapelo people first came to their island as possessions themselves — they were the Spaldings’ before they were the island’s, but they shifted the possessive. Places have a way of defying being property; ownership, in fact, is not as secure a concept as owners’ think. The Spaldings may have thought they owned those thousand human beings whom they called their people — they had legal title to them — but they were wrong. By working the island’s land, by laughing, weeping, praying on it, the former slaves traded possessors and became the island, and it became theirs.
As McFeely shows, the years after 1871 were ones of betrayal for the ex-slaves. During Reconstruction, schools had been built, blacks were enfranchised, 40-acre land parcels were apportioned, but the lot of it would be stolen back when Andrew Johnson rescinded the reforms established by Congress after the Civil War.
//
Behavior Cemetery
When Suzanne and I visited the place the gate was padlocked and spooky; even as cemeteries go, it was spooky. The graves weren’t lined up in rows, but looked disorganized, scattered. But you could see a pattern. As in the helter-skelter of houses in Hog Hammock, the graves of Behavior communed silently with each other beneath the live oaks.
Cornelia’s own great grandmother is buried there:
REBECCA BAILEY: 8/13/1874 — 12/29/1938
NO ONE KNOWS HOW MUCH
WE MISS YOU NO ONE KNOWS THE
BITTER PAIN WE HAVE SUFFERED
SINCE WE LOST YOU LIFE HAS NEVER BEEN THE SAME.
brushed cement, hard to read, dark colored, writing tilted up slightly, handwritten; blank footstone.
It’s not a stretch to compare the organization of the Behavior graveyard with that of black church services — the call-and-response in the African Baptist Church is non-hierarchical; preacher and congregation, God and man, engage in a rapturous conversation and are on equal footing. In Behavior Cemetery no obelisk towers over a tombstone; I was struck by the democracy of the place. Burial records don’t go back before the Civil War, but interviews and careful digging indicate slave burials went on before Behavior became an official cemetery. Those without the money to buy gravestones placed the beloved’s belongings at the gravesite — a toy, a small farm implement, a tea kettle.
You can tell a lot about a town by the order or disorder of its cemetery.
No one’s a stauncher unbeliever than Cornelia Bailey.
But she did see The Dog — she mentioned it to me and has written about the black dog “big as a cow” that haunts Behavior Cemetery: She says she saw it more than once — it chased her down the path from the graveyard.
“And when I looked back a second time, he was gone.”
There were other places, she said, haunted woods and beaches, but Behavior Cemetery, that’s where the giant dog could be found.
“But it has to be twilight, near dark, to see him.”
Hellhounds are the ghosts of giant black dogs who guard the entrances to the world of the dead. In Old English myths, seeing one or hearing one howl was an omen of death. In Dante’s Inferno, Canto VI, the hound Cerberus is found in the Third Circle of Hell where he rends to pieces those who’ve succumbed to gluttony. In Latin America a big black dog with burning coal-like eye is a satanic shapeshifter. Sometimes the dog is a well-meaning spirit which accompanies a woman home acting as her protector. But in African–American culture, the Hellhound is plainly evil.
Mississippi drifter-blues singer of the 1930’s Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads for musical immortality, sings:
I got to keep movinnnn’, I got to keep movinnnn’,
Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail,
Mmmmm-mm-mm-mm, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail,
And the day keeps on worrin’ me, there’s a hell-hound on my trail,
Hell-hound on my trail, hell-hound on my trail.
//
86. The lynching of Bunk Richardson, his body suspended over the Coosa River, stripped to long johns. February 11, 1906. Gadsen Alabama. Card-mounted gelatin silver print. 2-½ x 3-7/8. Pencil Inscription on border: “Bunk Richardson 1/06.”
87. The corpse of Bunk Richardson, propped up for photographer on plank walk of bridge spanning the Coosa River, severely beaten, stripped to long johns. Onlookers hold handkerchiefs to cover nose and mouths. February 11, Gadsen, Alabama. Card-mountain gelatin silver print, 2-1/2 X 3-7/8.
I can’t help but connect Johnson’s blues with the twin postcards of Bunk Richardson who’s portrayed like a piece of bad meat. (Two river pictures, no less, the Coosa River flowing on.) He’s not just hunted, but hunted to his grave. One photo depicts a lynching, the other the lynched man’s rotting corpse. Each picture affects us through the stink of the lynchers themselves — in plate 87, it’s their own stink that they turn away from. As Prof. Leon F. Litwack says in his introduction to the Allen collection, these are both depictions of unimaginable brutality and portraits of abject cowardice.
Are these suffering black folk saints? There’s no such thing as a saint without a sinner. Likewise there’s no hagiography without a hagiographer — in this case it’s the photographer.
Here’s Jimmy Allen again:
“I believe the photographer was more than a spectator at lynchings. Too often they compulsively composed silvery tableaux (natures mortes) positioning and lighting corpses as if they were game birds shot on the wing. Indeed, the photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual as torturer or souvenir-grabbing — creating a sort of two-dimensional biblical swine, a receptacle for the collective sinful self. Lust propelled the commercial reproduction and distribution of the images, facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary.”
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The island after a rain: the trees ring with birds, an air of freshness infuses everything.
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Down at the Hog Hammock Library, Michelle Johnson is working on a new computerized catalog system: no more cards. Before we’d come to the island, I’d read her book Sapelo Island’s Hog Hammock, a narrative about the island presented through Sapelo Island photographs dating back to the 19th century. The book gave me a sense of life on Sapelo and complemented Cornelia’s memoir, highlighting leisure and work on the island. Michelle came here five years ago after marrying the island’s ferryboat captain. Before Sapelo, she’d worked as a journalist and artist in South Carolina. Now she lives in Johnson Hammock south of Hog Hammock. She’s not just a librarian. As an archivist, she helps keep the past alive. I caught a sadness in her as there is in anyone salvaging the past. A large, lovely woman in her early forties with an infectious smile, she’s deeply connected with her husband’s family and to the families — the Halls, Groveners, Baileys, and Johnsons — and to the old ways she brings to life in her book.
A few hours later on Nanny Goat Beach we again ran into Michelle Johnson with her 12-year-old visiting nephew. We sat on a dune, looking down at the ocean. I asked if there were conflicts on the island (any island secrets?) and she said no — but there were problems with zoning laws, she remarked drily. The integrity of the Hammock’s modest homes will be compromised if rich white folks have their way and build houses larger than those allotted by law. Presently a suit by Reginal Hogg/Hall is threatened involving Georgia Governor Perdue and the Hog Hammock community. (The name Hog was given to an island slave family who cared for hogs — an appellation changed to Hall by Reginal’s great-grandfather.) The lavish new houses have identical designs: Built on stilts several feet off the ground with oversized wrap-around screened porches, they aspire to being modest plantation villas.
According to a letter to the Georgia governor — paraphrased by Craig Considine of wordpress.com — Perdue has been responsible for the illegal transfer of land, all of it pricey, to off-island developers. The standoff with the State of Georgia arises from decades-long resentments against University of Georgia Marine Institute (UGMI), which has been operating on the island since 1959. All this despite a campaign of relentless self-promotion by the State of Georgia and the UGMI. (To UGMI’s credit, it’s the first eco-study project of its kind, dating back to when R.J. Reynolds bequeathed much of his holdings to the university.)
“In its 52 years of activities,” says Considine,
The UGMI has unfortunately never once hosted an educational open house for the community in which it thrives . . . Not only are the Saltwater Geechee people not invited into the academic realm of the institution, but they are hired as menial labour work force at minimum wage rates. Furthermore, as Hall adds, the UGMI has not supplied any economic development of the Saltwater Geechee community or the people. The University of Georgia has exhausted over $600 million dollars in gifts and donations in 2009.” Hall asks: “ . . . is the effort of bridging the gap with the community of the Saltwater Geechee people on Sapelo not important to UGMI or the University of Georgia?”
According to Hall, the community of Hog Hammock lacks decent roads, potable drinking water, and workable irrigation systems. It has no medical facility. By far, the biggest threat to island life is a rise in land values leveraged by investors who are skirting zoning regulations. To date, the islanders have lost nearly 2,700 acres which translates into nearly $810,000,000. The way they and the UGMI interact (or don’t) is not untypical — but you’d expect the latter to acknowledge people they share the island with.
Marine biologists catalog meadows of wax myrtle, Spanish bayonet, morning glory, and butterfly peas, to “manage” them, while locals see a system that has sustained them for centuries: These two approaches should complement each. But both the islanders and UGMI are threatened by land investors who feed off a beauty that’s cursed by a history of displacement.
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Conversation between two middle-aged black women overheard on the ferry from Sapelo to the mainland:
“Well, now that Obama’s shown us his birth certificate, they’ll find something else.”
“Always do.”
Then laughter.
“They’ll look up his grades.”
“But he was a good student!”
“Never mind, they’ll find something.”
More laughter.
Photograph of a woman using a wooden pestle to pound rice as a child stays close by. The woman, Rachel Dunham, was the wife of Reverend John Dunham (c. 1858–1946) who performed many of the island weddings during this time as a preacher. Reverend Dunham, also known as “Sawney,” was also an accomplished chef and was known for his beautiful wedding cakes. Women often sang as they did their chores. There were work songs for practically every task. When the rice was being threshed on the floor, the women might sing, “Peas an’ rice, peas a’ rice, peas an’ the rice done done done. “ (Sapelo Island’s Hog Hammock)
I look back on my own Morehouse experience and my student’s take on Watteau’s painting (and he was just two or three years younger than I ) as a cautionary lesson. But what’s the lesson? That we ought to moderate our expectations — or that in the end we are islands unto ourselves? After the Civil War and until Jim Crow, there were no limits to the islanders’ dream. What strikes me about their struggle is the five-year sliver of time between the war’s end and their rising hopes and despair. No art — neither Robert Johnson’s dark blues chords or Antoine Watteau’s sweeping vistas — can capture this.
On the ferry to the mainland, seabirds follow our wake. At eleven a.m. it’s already hot. I assume from their dusty rucksacks and wind-burnt faces that the white passengers heading with us to the mainland are marine biologists. The black folks are islanders. Though they live and work on the same marsh and swampland, there seems to be no relationship between the two. Flanked by the brown waters of Dolboy Sound and the murky green of Sapelo, it’s too easy to say they’re separated by race and history. I try to link the postcards in Allen’s Without Sanctuarywith the photos in Michelle Johnson’s book, with little but the memory of a student I taught many decades ago connecting them: He must have heard many lynching stories from parents and grandparents. Stories that crossed the Sound to their island.
We stop off at Jimmy Allen’s antique shop in a Darien shopping mall on our way back to Jacksonville. He’s just come back from a “picking” trip to Texas and is worn out. He’s bearded, a little paunchy, hard-bitten and aristocratic; something of a talker, he’s angry with the South but can’t imagine leaving the area for any reason, can’t imagine living anywhere there aren’t black people.
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Tony Whedon’s essays and poetry have appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and over one hundred other literary magazines. He is the author of A Language Dark Enough: Essays on Exileand the recently published poetry collection Things to Pray to in Vermont, both from Mid-List Press. Tony is co-founder of Green Mountains Review out of Vermont’s Johnson State College.
The Long Journey Home: The Odyssey as a Parable of Male Aging by John C. Robinson
Come, my friends. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . .
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”(1)
Atrial fibrillation — rapid and irregular heart rhythm — brought me into the Emergency Room. The doc said I needed cardioversion — you know, those electric paddles you see on TV dramas. I don’t have time for this. I’m a psychologist, husband, father, and breadwinner. I need to get back to work. After the procedure, I assume all is well and resume my busy life. But something now leaks in this tightly woven fabric, a dark stain spreading from an unknown source. I feel terror, anguish, and foreboding. I feel like I’m being taken down into a dark and horrific underworld. This descent will end my world as I know it.
This issue of Itineraries makes reference to Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, as a metaphor for soulful travels in the outer world. We may also be called to take a soul journey within. “The Long Journey Home” follows Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War as an allegory for my own unexpected retirement and for aging men in general. If you are male, it is an invitation to explore your own interior journey home; if you are female, take a peek at the struggles facing the men in your life. Sometimes the most profound “odysseys for the soul” are the ones we take within.
The Odyssey
As you may recall from high school, The Odyssey is a book-length poem purportedly transcribed by Homer some 2700 years ago. It tells the story of a famous Greek warrior returning home from the Trojan War. The war began when Paris kidnapped the beautiful Helen and brought her back to Troy, inciting her Greek husband and his countrymen to lay siege to the city. After a decade of violent warfare, the Greeks finally win, and Odysseus begins a ten-year voyage home to his long-suffering wife Penelope and their son Telemachus. During his absence, Odysseus’ kingdom has been invaded by hoards of greedy suitors hoping to marry Penelope to acquire his wealth. His son has grown into manhood without a father’s guidance. It is a desperate and deteriorating situation.
Odysseus’ travels take him to many lands and peoples. He battles men and monsters, makes many foolish decisions, finds and surrenders paradise several times, and eventually loses everything — his ships, crew, belongings, clothes, and nearly his life before the gods ordain that he is ready to reach home. All along his harrowing voyage, however, Odysseus is guided by the whispered instructions and shape-shifting intercessions of the goddess Athena.
Whether you read the book, watched the made-for-TV Emmy Award-winning movie, or simply remember hearing the tales of Odysseus’ battle with the giant Cyclops, his confrontation with Circe the witch who turns men into pigs, or his escape from the dangerously alluring Sirens, you may still wonder what this story has to do with our theme “travel and transformation.” We certainly don’t meet such fantastic characters in the outer world! And yet that is the point — they exist inside, in the fertile land of the mythic imagination, there to inspire new voyages of transformation. The Odyssey is not only a wonderfully entertaining story, it is a psychological map for men of the inner journey home from the wars of adult life — to family, love, and a new place in the world as a wise elder.
Men and the War of Life
Men go off to war in every generation. Not necessarily wars with guns, bombs, and armies, but the wars of adult life. At first, using our imagination, we play war as children, but our warfare begins in earnest in school as we navigate the biologically driven “alpha male” pecking order. This competition for power, status, sex, and love cuts as sharply and dangerously as a sword and continues on into the world of work, where we quest for other spoils — sex, relationships, jobs, income, advancement, and power. These battles continue for decades.
Ask almost any man to talk about his experience in the war of adult life, and he will eventually spin out tales of his own warrior years. I remember good friends in elementary school abruptly moving onto new cliques of athletes, high achievers, and popular in-crowds while I coughed in the dust of their abandonment. I remember wondering where I fit in these new hierarchies and resenting the requirement to fit at all. The competitive pressure kept building — looks, clothes, grades, SAT scores, college, more grades, graduate school, and employment applications — all the hurdles I jumped to secure a place in the world. The bugle called me ever onward, ever upward, at times exhilarating and at times bitter. There were also times when its shrill notes echoed with the shame I felt at my pleasure in surpassing others. Without realizing it, I traded innocence for ego. Years passed — marriage, children, college funds, family vacations, increasing income, increasing debt.
By the fifties and sixties, many men weary of this war. They dream vaguely of laying down their swords and shields and retiring to a happily-ever-after vacation of reading, fishing, golf, travel, hobbies, projects, and grandkids. My heart was tired of running a practice, caring for people, dealing with crises, but I saw no way out of my responsibilities. Like Odysseus, I wanted to come home to love, renewal, perhaps even new horizons, but like Odysseus, I had no idea how to get there, and I would never have believed the journey I eventually took.
Coming Home from the War
Odysseus’ voyage home covers ten long and hard years! Along the way, he encounters numerous dramatic and often bizarre adventures. As I began to examine his struggles from the perspective of depth psychology — the psychology of dream symbols and unconscious archetypes — and my own experience of retirement and aging, I suddenly understood the reason his journey took so long: Each adventure symbolizes a psychological task we men need to work through to drop our warrior armor, awaken our underdeveloped capacity to love, reconcile with long-ignored spouse and family, and find a spiritual path forward. Despite the ubiquitous boomer fantasy of stress-free retirement, it is rarely easy coming home.
By the time I finished rereading The Odyssey,(2) I had identified 18 challenges men face in the journey of aging. Four sequential categories emerged: Early Mistakes, Transformational Experiences, Homecoming, and Final Challenges. As space limitations preclude a full retelling of the story here, I will present very condensed versions of four adventures, one from each category, and I will illustrate this inner journey with examples from my own life.
Early Mistakes
Raid on the Cicones — The Trojan War has ended, and Odysseus and his crew depart for home. The wind takes them first to Thrace, north of present-day Greece, to a land populated by the Cicones. Odysseus raids a seaport, slaying most of the men, taking women as slaves, and acquiring considerable plunder. Rather than leaving quickly as Odysseus advises, his crew elects to hang around drinking and slaughtering animals, thereby giving the Cicones time to send for help. A fierce fighting force soon arrives, greatly outnumbering Odysseus’ men. In the ensuing battle, Odysseus loses six men from each of his 12 ships. The surviving crews set sail frantically, barely escaping alive.
In this beginning adventure, Odysseus resumes the same old pattern of pillage, plunder, and sexual objectification that marked his time at war. A personification of the compulsive warrior, he has not learned anything new and simply continues his warrior ways. Though he seems to know when to leave, his men do not, symbolizing an early conflict within the male psyche between moving on from the warrior life and getting drunk on more conquests and victories. The men who die may symbolize the possibilities lost by foolishly delaying maturity.
Most of us aging men initially behave like Odysseus’ crew. Never questioning our lifelong warrior ways, we continue pushing ahead in our accustomed warrior mode, because it is all we know. Trying to reinvent myself too quickly after retiring from psychology, I resumed all my compulsive habits of achievement and productivity with workshops, writing, and classes. However, changing the content didn’t change the pattern. I was scheduling myself as if I still had a schedule to keep. Worse, I felt moody and restless, my work rarely felt right or satisfying, my head just wasn’t on this path. But most importantly, I was resisting the growing undertow of that darkness within.
Transformational Experiences
Visiting Hades — Directed by Circe the witch, Odysseus travels to Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology populated by the deceased. He pours offerings of milk, wine, honey, and water to the dead and cuts the throats of a ram and a black ewe to pour in a blood offering. Immediately the souls of the dead swarm upward in a frenzy. He meets the blind prophet Teiresias, who gives him a mysterious prophesy of a “second journey” he will undertake after he arrives at home. Odysseus then converses with his deceased mother, asking about his wife, son, and father. Hearing of their dire circumstances and how desperately they miss him, Odysseus’ sorrow intensifies greatly. His mother also confides that she died of a broken heart caused by his long absence. Wounded by this crushing announcement, Odysseus tries to embrace his mother but fails because, as a ghost, she is completely insubstantial.
Odysseus then visits a seemingly endless series of deceased heroes and their wives, including Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek army in the Trojan War, who was murdered by his wife’s lover; Achilles, no longer the fearless seeker of glory who now laments his own death; and several other famous heroes and heroines suffering their own unique punishments, like Oedipus’ mother who committed suicide for the monstrous act of mistakenly sleeping with her son, and Sisyphus, punished with the task of forever pushing a boulder up a hill. As hordes of dead spirits clamor desperately around him, Odysseus flees in terror to his ship, commanding his crew to sail quickly away.
My own visit to Hades came as I began a terrifying descent into that inky stain growing across my soul and a memory of my death. At 14, I had undergone open-heart surgery. During that surgery I woke up from the anesthesia to experience hands working inside my heart: Think living autopsy in an utterly unprepared boy. Forty years to the month later, the whole repressed nightmare returned, triggered by that atrial defibrillation in the emergency room. I was descending back to the horror of “anesthesia awareness.”(3)I know the horror Odysseus felt looking down into that terrifying swarm of demons.
Few of us choose to revisit the Hades within, the dark unconscious that holds so many unfinished emotional memories. Sometimes, prompted by a funeral, some vague melancholy, or frank psychological distress, we recall past relationships, wrong turns, losses, and failures. Hades is the painful and sobering process of exploring our own story, its wounds and mistakes, and listening for its deeper meanings, implications, and emotions. Taking stock so profoundly, we grow genuine maturity and wisdom. Hades also represents the reality of personal death. With death approaching, our values and goals change radically. In sum, at one time or another in the aging process, men need to “go deep,” to tell and feel their story, and return transformed — the ultimate meaning of initiation.(4
Homecoming
Leaving Calypso — After losing his ships, his crew, and nearly his life on this difficult voyage home, Odysseus drifts alone and desperate for days, clinging to a small raft he constructed by twining together the ship’s rudder and mast. He washes ashore on Calypso’s island where he remains for seven years. This beautiful goddess falls in love with him, promising immortality if he will stay and be her husband. Although the relationship works for a while, Odysseus grows increasingly homesick instead. He misses his wife, his son, and his father, desperately wants to come home, but has neither vessel nor crew to resume his journey.
Motivated by concern and compassion, the goddess Athena pleads with her father to intercede for Odysseus. Zeus relents and sends the messenger god Hermes to Calypso’s island to arrange for his release. Hermes finds Odysseus sitting on the beach weeping, his heart breaking in sorrow. Odysseus finally tells Calypso that while Penelope could never equal her beauty nor promise immortality, he wants to go home to his mortal wife. Though bitter at first, Calypso grows sympathetic, releases her hold on Odysseus, and helps him build and provision another sturdier raft to carry him home.
I, too, lost much on this journey — my identity, career, income, colleagues, schedule, even my home. Apart from my family, the journey progressively stole nearly everything that mattered to me. I thought moving to an incredibly beautiful island in Washington would somehow replace the anesthesia awareness nightmare I was living in Sacramento. Instead, I brought the demons with me. In my anguish, I was Odysseus crying on the shores of paradise.
The goddess Calypso rescues, heals, and renews Odysseus. She falls in love with him offering both immortality and paradise. She is the embodiment of the goddess archetype, the feminine face of God, the divine feminine. But Calypso herself cannot replace the human feminine. As long as we are mortal and still working out this life, we must find love with a real person and complete the journey home. Calypso may be “perfect” but she is not Odysseus’ wife; her island may be “paradise” but it is not his paradise nor is it his home. Though my new island home was idyllic and my wife supportive, I was not done with my inner journey. Like Athena, Calypso is the goddess men find within their psyches, offering a new capacity for tenderness, compassion, and love. She is not meant to be real, and so Odysseus moves on.
As we age, we sometimes believe we’ve found paradise in gated villas, expensive cars, second homes, fancy restaurants, ocean cruises, or transient romances. But such “solutions” can only last so long before we pine for real relationships and a real home in the mended heart. There is no short cut to personal growth.
Final Challenges
Visit with Laertes — At this point in the story, Odysseus has defeated the suitors controlling his kingdomon the island of Ithaca, and he has reconciled with Penelope. Then, accompanied by his son, Odysseus seeks out his father, Laertes. Traveling to his father’s home on the periphery of his large estate, Odysseus marvels at the well-maintained and abundant orchards. At first glance, he assumes that his father must be the poor servant of another because he is dressed in rags and works at labor.
Coming upon his father, Odysseus pretends to be an old friend of his long-lost son. Laertes immediately breaks down in grief-filled tears, pouring dirt over his own face and head in a display of terrible sorrow, which provokes Odysseus to reveal his true identity. Laertes asks for proof of his identity, and Odysseus reveals a scar sustained from a childhood wild boar attack. More poignantly, he recalls happy times shared with his father as they worked together in the orchard, even naming the trees they planted together. A weeping reunion takes place, and Telemachus joins them in Laertes’ home to celebrate. They bathe and dress, and Athena renders Laertes handsome again. Another old and devoted servant and his sons are warmly received as well. All share a festive and happy dinner.
With our joints increasingly affected by traditional exercise, my wife and I recently joined a water aerobics class at the “Y” attended by very nice “old” people with sagging bodies. I used to chuckle at these geriatrics doing easy pool therapy — until I became one of them. Hey, those exercises are not so easy! But I also see something else now. I see people like myself coping with health problems, the loss of careers, even the deaths of loved ones but who still thrive in the warm company of others and the goodness of life as it is. This is aging. We laugh with these new friends, update our “organ recitals,” and share pictures of the grandchildren. In this old folks’ class, my wife and I are bouncing around like everyone else; we welcome this time and enjoy making new friends. As he settles into old age, Odysseus needs this lesson, too.
Once he finds his father, Odysseus mistakes the dirty clothes of a devoted gardener for a state of destitution. Though he may look impoverished, and surely misses his son, Laertes is actually doing very well. He cares lovingly for his thriving orchards, supporting life, beauty, and the future. This orchard metaphor refers to the way a man gathers the fruits of his life in its final season. He discovers which seeds have blossomed and which have not — a harvest that no man can really predict. Laertes also cares for the divine Orchard, the holy ground of human existence, which the awakened elder finds in old age as the imminence of death heightens his awareness of the Earth’s beauty and abundant grace. He has returned to the Garden of Eden witnessing divinity everywhere. Implicitly, he shares this new consciousness with his son and grandson in a new and multigenerational friendship. Laertes has made a healthy adjustment to old age, reminding us that aging is not about money or clothes but the connection to life, meaningful work, and love of family — though dared by circumstance, he too can return, in the blink of an eye, to his outgrown but deeply internalized warrior stance. Though rocked by ambivalence in a few instances, this part of the story also finds the male lineage healing — grandfather, son, and grandson — restoring an archetypal order in the psyche previously torn apart by war.
Aging is not what we think it is. What appears on the outside — old bodies, old faces, and old clothes — hides a natural but profoundly meaningful process taking us along a transformational inner path. This inner journey will bring a deep understanding of life, prepare us for death, and awaken intuitions of what comes next — if we pursue this unfolding process with interest, awareness, and compassion. I feel myself changing as I age — slowing down, ripening into love, and grateful for so much.
The Role of Athena
Supported by her father, the great and powerful Zeus, the goddess Athena accompanies Odysseus on every step of his journey. A symbol of Odysseus’ inner feminine, she guides him with whispered intuitions, transformative experiences, and direct instruction. With her tacit approval, Odysseus consorts with various strong and divine women, like Circe and Calypso, learning much from these inner experiences. As his understanding of the feminine grows, so grows his capacity to love, respect, and appreciate Penelope, his real and mortal wife.
I have learned much from my wife, Mallow. Watching the way she remembers birthdays, sends thoughtful gifts, stays in touch with the children and friends, plans family vacations — I see how love works at the practical level. I love just as deeply, but I’m still more of a single-track-one-sided warrior kind of guy. Yet I have found new male-like avenues of love that open my heart spontaneously — like playing “train tracks” for hours with my six-year-old grandson, snooping for bugs in the garden with my two-year-old granddaughter, listening to music with my two-year-old grandson, writing love songs to my wife and family, and attending my eight-year-old granddaughter’s hip-hop dance class. I have learned that I don’t love in the same way as my wife, but I love nonetheless, though perhaps more like a man. I believe Athena has taught me to draw on my own strengths as I tend my garden of age.
With her skillful guidance, Athena also draws Odysseus into the sacred marriage of the mortal masculine and divine feminine, a merging that not only awakens his capacity to love but may, in time, also divinize his perception of the world. The symbols of the divine marriage can be found in all mythologies — the union of spirit and matter, Samsara and Nirvana, Shiva and Shakti, head and heart, sacred and profane, particle and wave, consciousness and contents. Put differently, our spiritual task in aging may be to support this divinization of the world, bringing Heaven down to Earth, and healing the split between humanity and divinity.(5) What better task for an aging population!
Conclusions
While this paper visits only four of Odysseus’ many profound and growth-promoting adventures, I hope it illustrates the way a myth can bring meaning to our personal journeys and, in this particular instance, how it illuminates the path we take as aging men on the voyage home to love. Indeed, I believe that The Odyssey represents the Iron John(6) of male aging, a myth to guide men home from the long war of life.(7)
Likely, few will begin the journey of age with an event as dramatic as a four-decade-delayed surgical PTSD, yet whatever shocks you into realizing that things have changed is your initiation. It could be retirement, joint pain, senior discounts, illness, new prescriptions, or your image in photographs, but suddenly you understand that everything has changed, that you have left the old world of middle-aged goals and values for a completely new and unknown land. You have begun an unexpected adventure in consciousness. While aging may represent the end of our old life, it is also the beginning of a new one
My journey? I eventually healed the pain of my anesthesia awareness trauma and went back to school for a second doctorate in interfaith spirituality, ordination as an interfaith minister, and finally a new life as a writer (and occasional celebrant for family weddings and funerals — a wonderful role for an elder!). The kids have grown up, grandchildren keep arriving, and the body’s still changing. My passage from busy mental health professional to author and minister took ten years, just like Odysseus — I know what he went through! This journey has taken away so much, and yet I feel so full. And, of course, it continues onward. For the island is as much a state of mind as a final destination.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
— C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”(8)
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Notes
1 Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Ulysses”. Accessed June 20, 2012, from http://www.portablepoetry.com/poems/alfredlord_tennyson/ulysses.html.
2 The version of The Odyssey I used for this study was the 1999 translation by Richmond Lattimore, The Odyssey of Homer. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
3 “Anesthesia awareness” occurs when anesthesia levels drop too low to prevent awareness, but other neuromuscular blocking agents hold the surgical patient in a chemical paralysis, preventing him from communicating his distress. The effects can range from mild distress to unbearable terror. In the latter instances, the patient either awakens in acute emotional distress resulting in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or blocks the trauma with psychological defenses that may later be triggered as a delayed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. You can learn more about my experience in The Three Secrets of Aging and Bedtime Stories for Elders found at www.johnrobinson.org.
4 Initiation rituals are rites of passage symbolizing and ritualizing the movement from one life stage to another. They always involve the archetype of death and rebirth — death of the old life and rebirth in a new one. While life itself initiates men, it is an incomplete initiation for it lacks ritual, community, and new identity. While men in our culture lack effective elder initiation rituals, aging men’s groups can create them. I provide a template for a male elder ritual in the appendix of The Three Secrets of Aging.
5 Mystics from every religion and era have described the return of the divine creating a new and sacred world. To hear their many voices and consider ways you might begin to awaken this vision, see Finding Heaven Here found at www.johnrobinson.org.
6 The poet Robert Bly based his bestselling book Iron John (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1990) on a story of the same name taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He used this simple tale as a parable of midlife men struggling to find the authentic masculine in the depths of their personality. It touched a whole generation of men, including me.
7 My complete psychological interpretation of The Odyssey will be published in 2013 with John Hunt Publishing titled What Aging Men Want.
8 Cavafy, C. P. “Ithaka”. Accessed June 20, 2012, from http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=204&cat=1
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John Robinson, Ph.D., D.Min., is a clinical psychologist with a second doctorate in ministry, an ordained interfaith minister, and the author of seven books on the interface of psychology and spirituality. His recent works include The Three Secrets of Aging; Bedtime Stories for Elders: What Fairy Tales Can Teach Us About the New Aging; and the forthcoming What Aging Men Want: Homer’s Odyssey as a Parable of Male Aging. You can learn more about John at www.johnrobinson.org.
We Are the Ones — Working Together by Jan Hively and Moira Allan
Jan’s Story
I progress in life from one “Aha!” to another as I read or hear wise words that speak to my experience and generate a new way of looking at the world. Thirty years ago, in my fifties, as a community planner, I felt deeply moved when I read these words from a Hopi Elder: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” I wrote them on a scrap of paper that I’d pull out at often sparsely attended workshops. I’d read the quote, and say, “However many of us are here, we are the ones we have been waiting for.” The words framed a challenge for the session and boosted collaboration.
Later, in my sixties, for my PhD dissertation, I decided to look at how older adults in rural communities were coping with the fact that young people had moved to the cities, leaving them behind to care for themselves in old age. If and when they needed help, who was taking care of them? State officials talked about rapid aging as the biggest problem facing rural America.
Vital Aging
My survey findings were amazing. Up into their 80s, three-fourths of the older adults in rural areas reported being healthy and active, and over 90 percent said that they were self-sufficient, in control of their lives, and feeling positive about life. In comparison with older adults in the cities and suburbs, those in rural areas were staying on the job longer, volunteering more, spending more time caring for their grandchildren, and doing more caregiving for the sick and disabled. These productive elders in rural communities were sharing their strengths to help themselves, each other, and their communities. They were the only ones there to do the job. They were the ones they had been waiting for! What a contrast to the scene of elderhood in Thomas Cole’s nineteenth-century series of paintings, “The Voyage of Life,” where the image of the fourth stage of life is represented as a lonely old man, becalmed in a battered boat, eyes directed only toward the afterlife in the Kingdom of Heaven — as if life on Earth no longer had anything to offer!
Armed with the survey results and a PhD, I started a statewide Vital Aging Network in 2001 to work with older adults and promote what was most important to them: self-determination, self-sufficiency, and community participation. Fortunately, leaders of the needs-based senior services system saw that our efforts to build on the strengths of older adults were complementary to theirs. Generated by older adult leadership, energy flowed through an expanding network of programs supporting and advocating productive aging.
Travel to Paris
In July 2009, in my new-found career as a gerontologist, I traveled to Paris along with 6,000 others attending the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG) conference. One big reason for my attending was to spend time with a friend and colleague, Moira Allan, in her totally charming rooftop flat looking out at the Eiffel Tower on one side and at Les Invalides on the other. Another was to find like-minded colleagues who shared my interest in engaging older adult leadership for positive aging.
For four days, I trudged up and down stairs and in and out of Metro trains to attend conference sessions in the huge Palais de Congrès. Although full-time employment kept her from attending the conference, Moira is an eager advocate for positive aging as a life planning coach and coordinator for the European 2Young2Retire Network. Each evening, Moira listened to me rant about the absence of conference presentations about the assets and productivity of older adults. I mentioned that a few older adults had stood up in workshops and asked for information about programs building on older adult strengths and/or encouraging older adult leadership. The panelists appeared to be surprised by these requests and distanced from collaboration with older adults.
“We Are the Ones” Network
Moira responded to my complaints by saying that she wasn’t surprised by my conference experience. “Ageism is even more stifling in Europe than in the U.S. What are we going to do about it?”
Moira went on to say that she had been struck by the Hopi Elder statement, “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” that I’d quoted at the Positive Aging Conference in Florida in 2007, where the two of us had met. Then age 63, she said, “We are the ones! Let’s invite older adults throughout the world to join us in a global network that transforms expectations for aging!”
And so we spent the next few days brainstorming ideas and then clarifying our answers to these questions:
- Who are “we”?
- What are our values?
- What do we expect?
- What resources do we need to support an international network?
- What is the program?
- What will be the products and outcomes for participants?
The answers that I took back to the U.S. are shown on the table at the end of this article. They fit with our mission statement for the We Are the Ones Network:
We are an international network of people in midlife and beyond who are willing to step forward as life-affirming leaders to work on team projects that strengthen local communities and raise expectations for generativity in later life.
Lots of blanks needed to be filled in. Both Moira and I worked on a proposal for a network that would collect information about best practices related to our mission, and then disseminate replication guides via a Web site and a liaison in each country. As a flat, peer-to-peer network, relationships and information should flow freely based on the energy and commitment of participants. A Leadership Group would link key connectors in a number of starter locations. The operating language would be English.
European Voices for Active Aging (EVAA)
Moira and I circulated a “We Are the Ones Network” proposal for Europe early in 2010 for review and comment. Based on our interest in hosting conversations about positive aging with older adults and community leaders throughout Europe, we added a partner, Patricia Munro, Munich resident and founding board member of World Café Europe. Working through World Café Europe, we submitted a proposal to the European Commission for organizing World Cafés in six European countries during 2012, the Year of Active Aging and Intergenerational Solidarity as designated by the European Union.
Titled “European Voices for Active Aging,” the project was one of seven proposals funded by the European Commission. Working with partner organizations in each country, using both English and the home language in each location, World Café Europe collected perspectives on six topics foundational to Active Aging:
- Bilbao, Spain: Social Innovation
- Bonn, Germany: Civic Engagement
- Prague, Czechoslovakia: Age-Friendly Communities
- London, UK: Ageism
- Bologna, Italy: Work/Productivity
- Strasbourg, France: Exercise, Creativity, and Wellness
Representatives from the six countries reviewed the ideas that were generated by the World Cafés. At a summary session, they discussed what steps they wanted to take toward formation of a European active aging network. As Pat Munro put it, looking into the future the EVAA project is just the beginning of a wave of change that we hope to help occur in Europe developing the ideas, projects, and visions that have emerged from the six World Cafés.
What’s next?
Moira and I have talked about other overtures that would fit with the mission of the We Are the Ones Network. We would like to create an innovations toolbox of free program replication guides, in collaboration with the directors of programs that are proven to be successful in promoting self-determination, civic engagement, and personal enrichment for and with older adults age 55+. The guides would be posted on a Web site with translations available in several languages. So far, we’ve identified a half dozen community-based projects and a few curricula for experiential learning for the online toolkit. Another proposed initiative is a worldwide inquiry into changing expectations for later life involving videotaped interviews that would be repeated at three-year intervals between now and 2030.
Lessons along the Way
Before traveling to Paris in 2009, I never would have dreamed about creating a global network. “Who? Me? Isn’t that grandiose?” I’ve thought about what led to my taking on that huge challenge. Here are some reasons I’ve thought of:
- I was challenged. “So what can we do about it?”
- I had someone with complementary ideas to talk over the details . . . . The conversation flowed!
- We put it on paper and sent it to other people for review, thus declaring a commitment.
- Technology has made global communication easy. Moira has an international phone line with all the phone time she wants for one monthly fee. We can Skype and set up conference calls with network liaisons around the world. And e-mail makes communication between countries as easy as between the coasts.
- I am very, very fortunate to speak English. What a luxury it is to have everyone else do the translating!
- Paris sets the scene for doing something exciting!
I want to emphasize the basic message of “We are the ones.” It’s all about trusting that what we have to offer is enough — which is not to say we couldn’t use a few allies — but it’s important to know ourselves and trust who we are. If we older adults work together, sharing our strengths, we can dramatically improve expectations for aging worldwide.
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Hopi Elder Speaks
You have been telling the people that this is the eleventh hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the hour
And there are things to be considered…
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth,
To create your communities,
To be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for a leader.
Then he clasped his hands together and laughed and said,
This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift, that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore—
push off into the middle of the river,
keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves;
Banish the word “struggle” from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!
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Moira’s Story
I’d love to add a few words on the magic of traveling with purpose — both virtually and actually — and the amazing connectivity this can bring you.
Let’s begin with my adventure: When I hit 60 I started looking for a new direction. A South African living and working in Paris for 30 years, classic retirement looming up and knowing that I would need to keep on a “lifelong learning, lifelong earning” path, I surfed the net and soon found myself in telephone conversation with Howard Stone, founder with his wife, Marika, of 2Young2Retire, pioneers in the field of relooking at retirement and rebuilding it with a cement of purpose, meaning, and contribution.
He invited me to follow a very affordable 6-week facilitators’ course by telephone. I joined and made 12 new virtual friends, including my own special buddy, Jean Gilhead, who was phoning in from Spain. Toward the end, Howard announced he had arranged to piggy-back the first ever positive aging conference to be held at Eckerd College, Saint Petersburg, Florida, in December 2007. My hair was just growing back after a bout of chemo and I decided to go. It was the best decision I have ever made.
That trip to the Florida crystallized the growing excitement I was feeling about positive aging and changed the course of my life. I met the 2Young2Retire founders Howard and Marika Stone and my “virtual buddies” and felt as though I had come home, the bonding was so strong. I was introduced to the Life Planning Network, AARP, Civic Ventures and the people from OLLI; I met Meg Newhouse, Marc Freedman, the late Dr. Gene Cohen, Judy Goggin, Jan Fulwiler, Rick Moody, Helen Dennis, Karen Greer, Judy Lipp, Pat Samples, and Jan Hively. There was an incredible sense of purpose, generosity, sharing, and community. My “Aha” moment came listening to Jan Hively’s presentation on “The Role of Meaningful Work in Third Age Planning.” I went up to her and left her my card as director of GIMAC Santé an Travail, member of a professional federation representing 250+ occupational health doctors who are responsible for 3+ million workers within the Paris metropolitan area. I invited Jan to look me up when she was in Europe, and she did.
I walked out of that meeting room and into the beautiful Eckerd campus gardens with two key ideas mulling in my mind: “meaningful work paid or unpaid through to the last breath” and “we are the ones.”
We’ve moved a long way since then. Jan’s been to Paris three times, and I’ve had the opportunity of visiting Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, England, and Italy within the framework of the EVAA project that Jan talks about, as well as traveling to South Africa several times. Each trip yields a harvest of new contacts, new ideas, and synergies. When there’s a common interest, the bonding is very strong and enables you to penetrate other communities in a way that straightforward tourism could never allow.
I started my career as a journalist. I love spreading stories and, with Jan, my association “Le Cercle des Seniors Actifs” in Paris, and our 2Young 2Retire European network, that is exactly what I am doing now, in this my fifth career: discovering and passing on stories of sustainable, workable, replicable projects in positive aging and multiplying their impact wherever they may be found, whether it be in the Unites States through Jan Hively, or in Europe, with our many partners including World Café Europe and Old-Up in France; or in my home country South Africa with Lynda Smith, founder of the Refirement Network; or in Russia, where, through Jan, we have a special relationship with Dr. Gulnara Minnigaleeva, founder of “Wisdom Ripening,” an organization of retired people in Bashkortostan, Russian Federation, and a research fellow at the Centre for Studies of Civil Society and the Nonprofit Sector at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
Longevity is a totally unprecedented worldwide phenomenon; there is an urgency to find out what’s working and pass it on. The other aspect is that every single adult, whether we are older or younger adults, has a total responsibility, both to self and to community, to be involved and to make a contribution.
It is all about the magic of connectivity and moving from “me” to “we.” When we are in community, meeting people and interacting, something greater than me by myself and others by themselves is generated, and when two or three people are gathered the exponential factor comes into play and draws potential into a positive spiral.
You’re Invited
Please step forward and become one of the “we.” We are asking you and other readers of this story to get involved and contribute your ideas about next steps to pursue the mission of the We Are the Ones Network that is described below. If you’d like to join us on this adventure, please contact Jan Hively or Moira Allan.
We also invite you to check out the following Web sites:
We are the ones we have been waiting for, all of us, working together!
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We Are the Ones NetworkMission: We are an international network of people in midlife and beyond who are willing to step forward as life-affirming leaders to work on team projects that strengthen local communities and raise expectations for generativity in later life. |
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Who Are “We”? |
What Are Our Values? |
What do we expect? |
A global network of older adults, in midlife and beyond, who enjoy working together to create a life-affirming future for all.We are the ones who:
..Shift expectations from work & retirement to positive & productive aging ..Become catalysts for community change ..Engage in meaningful work, whether paid or unpaid ..Understand the power and magic of working together and sharing strengths ..Create a culture of positive expectations about the role of older adults in society ..Feel excited about the opportunities and challenges of the longevity evolution ..Seize opportunities for entrepreneurship ..Tune into international developments and build bridges across frontiers ..Seek out, analyze, and adapt successful projects for local environments ..Strengthen communities by working with wisdom and other existing assets ..Demonstrate the truth that small acts when multiplied can transform the world ..Accept and practice the premise that everyone is a teacher and a learner ..Walk the talk |
Promoting self-determination and active aging for and with older adultsAssuring both consistency and flexibility
Paying attention to the small things Expressing gratitude and appreciation Focusing on what we have and can do Appreciating the dynamics of change and concentrating on the positive Using the power of story Understanding the power of the catalyst Believing in small life-affirming acts Honoring our oneness with one another, with animals, with plants and all aspects of nature Affirming the flow of energy throughout life Understanding that diversity is essential for progress Seeing the groundswell of support for moving from “me” to “we” Welcoming anyone who wants to become one of the “we” Listening with respect for others Believing a leader is anyone wanting to help & willing to step forward to create change |
The flow of energy that comes from stretching to achieve challenging goalsA sense of purpose expressed through productive individual & team effort
Creative use of our senses through imaginative and flexible work and play Personal growth and productivity as we share what we know and learn by doing Uplifting joy and affirmation based on the opportunity for generativity in later life Meaningful work, paid or unpaid, through the last breath |
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Jan Hively lives up to her personal credo of maximizing productivity and assuring “meaningful work, paid or unpaid, through the last breath.” After playing leadership roles in government and education for more than two decades, Hively received her PhD in Education for Work and Community from the University of Minnesota in 2001 at age 69. During the last decade, she has co-founded three organizations dedicated to empowering older adults: the Vital Aging Network that promotes self-determination, community participation, and personal enrichment through education and advocacy; the Minnesota Creative Arts and Aging Network, now called Artsage, dedicated to expanding opportunities for creative expression by older adults; and the SHiFT network empowering midlife transitions in life and work. Now living on Cape Cod, Jan has recently focused on engaging older adult leadership through global networking, as described in her story.
Moira Allan, the founder of 2Young2Retire Europe (Cercle des Seniors Actifs), is currently winding up a 10-year spell as director of an occupational health organization located in Paris. Previously she worked as a journalist and public relations consultant with a client base in France and in South Africa. She holds a degree in professional coaching from the Paris 8 University, is a member of the Association European de Coaching and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council.
How Far Must We Go? by Frances Wood
National Geographic had recently declared the 150-mile road from La Paz in Bolivia, up and over the Andes to Rurrenabaque, as the world’s most dangerous, a fact that my husband Bill and I took seriously. On average, 220 people are killed yearly in vehicle accidents along that winding mountain road with its blind curves and gaping drop-offs. To avoid that deathtrap, we booked seats on an hour-long flight to Rurrenabaque, the first leg of a bird-watching adventure to Madidi National Park in the lowlands of the Amazon River in eastern Bolivia. The park bragged that it hosted 20 percent of all the bird species in the world. I couldn’t wait.
Years earlier during a college ornithology course, I became utterly and hopelessly enamored with wild birds. When I met Bill in 1990, he embraced bird watching enthusiastically. As we became empty nesters, we also became avid birders. We scampered around several continents watching with pride as our life list of identified bird species grew. Some might have called us obsessed with, or even addicted to, our birding, but at the time I was carried away with the adventure, not thinking of the repercussions and unaware of the potential dangers of our actions.
On the morning of our departure from La Paz, the cobalt blue sky sparked with energy as thunderheads hovered over the glacier-clad monolith of the Andes. Forty-five minutes into our flight, the pilot of the small, ten-passenger plane turned in his seat and shouted in Spanish that the Rurrenabaque airport was closed due to heavy rain. We would instead land at a town farther south called San Borja. Bill and I sensed no alarm in the statement, nor did the other five passengers, although the loud drone of the engines prevented conversation. We banked to the right, sliced through valleys between towering clouds, and then dropped toward the foothills.
Half an hour later we approached a grassy airfield and landed without incident. As I climbed out of the plane a blanket of hotter-than-hot humid air engulfed me. A smoky scent from a pile of burning rubbish mingled with the heavy, sweetly rich fragrance of lowland jungle. Inside the one-room airport, Bill and I gathered with our fellow waylaid passengers to figure out how we would continue to Rurrenabaque. Besides Bill and me, the group included an Irish backpacker, two Brits on their honeymoon, another young British adventure seeker, and one Argentinean businessman. We shed jackets, rolled up sleeves, and wiped sweat from our foreheads. The pilot, now acting as a representative of the airlines, joined us, and Bill translated our two options. Either wait for the Rurrenabaque airport to open, which no one expected would happen for at least a day or two (the town had been deluged with rain and a plane was stuck in the mud, closing down the runway). Or accept the airline’s offer to hire a bus for the five-hour drive.
The moment Bill translated the word “bus,” the rest of us winced. We all had heard horror stories about the dangerous Andean roads. Bill continued to translate that we would be traveling on a completely different road between San Borja and Rurrenabaque. This road, the pilot insisted, was level. “No es peligroso.” It isn’t dangerous.
At five that afternoon, we boarded a worn-out, Japanese-made mini bus and headed north. As promised, the dirt road extended ahead, flat and straight as a railroad bed. Out the window to the right, the vast, thickly vegetated Amazon basin stretched east to a low horizon. On the left, gentle foothills, the final toeholds of the Andes, appeared benign. Huge dark and pregnant clouds obscured the Andes’ peaks, a reminder of the power the weather holds over our best-laid plans. We bumped, jerked, and lunged along into the darkness. The engine lugged as we lumbered up a low hill, then the road leveled.
Suddenly, the bus jerked to the right, as if to avoid an unexpected obstacle. I gasped. Then I froze as the bus plunged off the road. It hung in mid air. Then banged, side over side down a cliff. I grabbed for Bill in the blackness, but felt only empty space. Bodies and luggage flew into the air and thudded against the bus frame. Windows smashed. A sharp smell of broken vegetation pierced my senses. I pleaded, “Dear God, save us!” My shoulder banged against something hard — probably the bus ceiling — and I instinctively raised my hand to protect my face. For a split second I thought of Phoebe Snetzinger, the first bird watcher ever to see over 8,000 different species. Phoebe survived cancer only to die 15 years later in a Madagascar bus accident.
With no tremendous impact, the bus eased to a halt on its side. Time stopped. An eerie silence flooded the darkness as countless years of dust which had accumulated in the bus’s nooks and crannies infiltrated my nostrils.
I was alive. I tried moving. Nothing seemed broken. I pushed my torso upright, still nothing hurt. I shouted, “Bill, are you all right?”
After an interminably long pause, I heard a muffled response from somewhere under the seats. “I’m okay, but I can’t move.” I remembered my headlamp and switched it on. The beacon of light revealed Bill’s long legs inverted in front of me, running shoes in the air, the rest of him head down between two seats. The British woman who had been sitting in the seat behind had landed on top of him. I grabbed the woman’s hands and pulled her up. Somehow we turned Bill’s tall, lanky frame upright.
The bus teetered with activity. “Get out quick!” mixed into a barrage of Spanish. The younger, stronger passengers rapidly hoisted themselves up and out the broken windows directly above us. Would the scrambling dislodge the bus and send it back into a tumble? Bill climbed out a window while the British woman and I, too short to follow his lead, scrambled over seats to escape through the driver’s open door.
The last to leave the bus, I jumped out into thick brush. A line of fellow passengers offered their hands to assist me up the steep incline to the road. The last hands were Bill’s. We hugged tightly. When we eased apart, I gasped. The light from my headlamp spotlighted streams of blood dripping down his face from one cut above his right eye and two more on his balding scalp. The British honeymooner pulled some sanitized towelettes from her fanny pack and we mopped up the blood. In the dark we found and accounted for our group of seven, the driver, and his young son. Everyone was alive and Bill’s injury the worst.
Relieved that there were no fatalities or serious injuries, I sank to a rock on the side of the road. I looked down at my trembling hands and found that my whole body was shaking uncontrollably. I really needed to pee, but didn’t think I could stand. Bill knelt down and engulfed me in his long arms. “We’re alive. We’re alive,” he repeated over and over. He sensed my shaking body and offered me a sip from his rum flask. “Baby, this will calm you.”
“First I have to pee!”
He pulled me up. I staggered down the road a few yards into the deep shadows and squatted. I returned to Bill, relieved but still shaking. The Argentinean businessman, whom I’d not even spoken to, gave me a big bear hug.
“No funciona, no funciona,” the bus driver motioned that the steering wheel had stopped working, insisting it was mechanical failure, not his error, that caused the accident.
Everyone spoke at once: “A miracle!” Flashlights were pulled from backpacks, and the men returned to the bus to retrieve the group’s gear. We held our cameras high and used the flashes to illuminate the view down the ravine to the bus. It rested on one side, a gray, windowless, dead hulk, stopped by a lone, skinny tree. The light from the flashes couldn’t penetrate any farther into the dark void.
About an hour later, a flotaappeared from the direction we had come. We flagged down the large first-class bus, staggered aboard, and found empty seats at the back. Our band of seven survivors huddled together.
When we arrived in Rurrenabaque, Bill and I settled into our simple but comfortable 1950s-era Hotel Safari and I tended to Bill’s cuts, carefully cleaning, then closing, the gashes with butterfly Band Aids. Before crawling into bed, I downed two pain pills and a sleeping dram to dull the pain in my hand and shoulder and help me sleep. Still, my dreams churned and tumbled.
The next morning, chattering black and white swallows outside our screened window awakened us to a still, calm day, a welcome contrast to the prior evening. A message taped to our door the night before indicated that Alejandro, the birding guide from Chalalan Lodge, would meet us at breakfast to escort us on the five-hour boat ride, plus one-mile walk to the lodge.
Bill and I dressed, assembled our gear, and found our breakfast waiting outside under a palm-frond-covered palapa. We silently sipped strong local coffee. I picked at my black beans and scrambled eggs; Bill wolfed his down. I looked beyond Bill to the simple hotel gardens where lavender and orange flowers had taken on a surreal brilliance; even the green foliage shone unnaturally. It appeared to be some optical trick, reminding me of times when I’d done watercolor painting. After several hours focused on the nuances of color and shading, my vision would play that same trick. Everything my eyes beheld became supersaturated like a TV screen with the color setting out of whack. Not only was my vision keenly ramped up but also the birds sang louder, and the perfume of summer flowers wafted through my senses like the smell of vanilla sugar cookies straight from the oven.
I felt so keenly aware of life. I’d been spared and I dearly wanted to continue living. More than any other time in my life, I felt there was an undiscovered purpose awaiting me. Although my journal indicated November, today felt like Easter morning and I’d been resurrected.
“You’d better eat something.” Bill’s voice at first seemed miles away, but immediately pulled me back to our breakfast table. Our close call with death had crystallized what was important in my life. I yearned to call my sons to tell them I loved them. I reached for Bill’s hand, held it tightly.
“I want to cancel the rest of this trip. I want to go home,” I said soberly, thinking of Phoebe Snetzinger again. “I don’t want to die looking for birds. It doesn’t matter how many birds are at Madidi National Park — it isn’t worth the risk.”
Just then Alejandro, a black-haired, dark-skinned indigenous man in his midtwenties, arrived at our table and greeted us with a warm smile. Bill stood up to shake hands and I sat still, not wanting anything to do with this foreign angel of death.
Bill chatted with Alejandro, telling him about our horrendous accident. I barely heard Alejandro admit that the previous day’s rainstorm was the worst he could remember. Then he added, “The boat is waiting — are you ready?”
I madly searched my mind for a way to escape. I wished that I could beam myself back to my safe, familiar country. Soon their eyes rested on me, and Bill explained that I was fearful of continuing our trip.
“But now you are here,” encouraged Alejandro. “And Chalalan Lodge is very nice and very safe.” I looked up into Bill’s hopeful eyes and I knew he wanted to continue. A long pause hovered in the morning air while I gazed off toward the river, considering my options. Did I want to hole up at the Hotel Safari until the airport opened and allowed me a chance to escape back to La Paz, or continue to Chalalan Lodge? I hated to ask Bill to give up this long-planned and well-earned birding adventure.
As if on cue, bird song flooded the silence. The innocent melody sank deep into my consciousness and I began to relax, diluting the fear and flooding me with fresh energy. I looked again at Bill, forced a smile, then heaved my pack onto my back, wincing from my bruised shoulder. I reluctantly marched down the dirt road trailing ten steps behind like a traditional wife.
I’ll always remember that 20-minute walk down the dusty Rurrenabaque road. Like reaching the crest of a mountain range and looking out over a completely new watershed, I began to think differently about bird watching. I craved an answer to my questions: What was I really chasing? Where was my life headed? That short walk framed the beginning of my journey to discover a new way of relating to wild birds.
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From the outside, the second half of our South American birding adventure didn’t look very different. Bill and I continued birding in Bolivia and traveled through Ecuador. I awoke to birdsong in remote lodges and tallied up new species with glee. But inside, my life had taken a 180-degree turn. I had no idea what could substitute for the adventure and exhilaration of seeking new bird species, but I knew I could never chase birds in the same compulsive way again.
Shortly after returning from our South American trip, I discovered that the island where we lived in Puget Sound was prime breeding territory for a playful, endlessly entertaining species of seabird called the Pigeon Guillemot. Over 1,000 of these chunky, black-and-white birds with fire-engine-red legs gather into colonies to nest in burrows in the steep bluffs along our shores. They consume small fish and are considered an indicator species. Like a canary in the mineshaft, their success signals the health of the waters around Whidbey Island. Scientific studies of these birds had been conducted in California, British Columbia, and Alaska, but the Puget Sound populations had never been researched.
One day while finishing up a yearlong study of the breeding birds of Island County, I took my lunch to a beach to watch a group of 60 guillemots frolic in the waves, circle over the water, and disappear into high burrows. What was going on inside those burrows? What food was delivered to the newly hatched young? How did they manage to fledge from so high up on the cliff? Did the babies survive? Was the population viable? No one had any answers.
A month later I stood up at the local Audubon meeting and asked if anyone wanted to help me survey the guillemots. I gathered a team, trained volunteers, and we began an ongoing study of these seabirds. Each summer for two and one-half months, 50 dedicated volunteers create a community of citizen scientists who not only study the birds but also help educate the Whidbey community about “our birds.” Before this project began, few people on our island could identify this species. Now the guillemot is identified in community brochures and highlighted on outdoor signage. The Whidbey Audubon Society has changed their logo to include a pair of guillemots. A local winery features the bird on the label of one of their red blends. We’ve presented findings at international seabird conferences and contributed substantial data on this bird population. We now have answers to many of my questions about the birds.
And my personal questions? I’ve learned that researching the birds in my local community fulfills my search for finding meaning within my birding passion. Watching the guillemots return each spring brings a fresh vigor to the year. Anticipating the fledging of young keeps me walking the beaches and scanning the bluffs, and when we crunch the data at the end of the season I jump with joy when I learn that the population is still strong. Not all of Island County’s 75,000 residents know the significance and the importance of the guillemots, but making sure that happens will be a big part of the second stage of my birding journey.
Bill and I still go birding and we still travel. When we see a new species we high five and later toast the species at happy hour. But we’ve stopped what I call “self-indulgent birding.” We’ve even stopped keeping our life lists. Counting the guillemots and monitoring their lives offer up the kinds of adventure I now relish.
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Writer, painter, and naturalist Frances Wood has published four books including Brushed by Feathers: A Year of Birdwatching in the West. Her most recent book, Langley, was published by Arcadia Publishing in December 2012. Frances helped originate the radio series called BirdNote, which airs daily throughout the United States, and she has written over 100 on-air scripts. She recently began a series of watercolor paintings of the 150 common birds in the western United States. An avid naturalist, Frances coordinates a seabird research project of the 1,000 guillemots that breed on Whidbey Island, where she lives and enjoys nature.
Writing Exercises to Engage the Spirit of Travel by Ellen B. Ryan
May you travel in an awakened way,
gathered wisely into your inner ground;
that you may not waste the invitations
which wait along the way to transform you.
— John O’Donohue(1)
Journaling about a trip — before, during, and after — can contribute to the impact of travel upon your growing self. Setting intentions beforehand can expand possibilities. Then, jotting down brief images and impressions during travel can sharpen attention and enhance perception. Despite our best intentions, recall for travel events and personal responses fades quickly without memory aids. Afterwards, savoring the meanings of diverse experiences and observations through reflective or creative writing can foster imagination, generate insights into your way of being in the world, uncover lessons learned, and raise questions for further exploration.
Journaling can include different styles of writing — lists, questions, memory-based reflections, imagination, poems, and creative writing. Many people also sketch images or incorporate quotes and reactions to ongoing reading. Fast writing, keeping your pen on the page, fosters depth and creativity. Journaling has become part of my experience of the world and of my daily spiritual practice — even when I travel!
People often use different formats to match varying circumstances. As a writer myself, and as a leader of writing groups, I have divided my regular journal into three sections — diary of day-by-day activities, solitary reflections, and exercises completed during writing group sessions. I also keep a separate “to-do” list nearby while journaling — an action page to take away. As well, I carry paper and pen wherever I go, including frequent walks. From time to time, I harvest my journals — first with colored markers, then typing key sections into computer files for use in personal, work-related, or creative writing.
Below I set out ten writing exercises that can support journaling during the three stages of travel. Drawing examples from a recent journey, I also illustrate how I used some of the exercises for our intergenerational trip to Stockholm this past summer. In August my husband and I traveled to Sweden with our daughter and her baby to visit my son, Swedish daughter-in-law, and grandchildren aged 3 and 5 years. The trip was busy and demanding, yet my practice of journaling supported my intentions — and my sanity!
Set Out Curious
Journaling can help you sort out the usual details of planning and packing for your trip. More importantly, you can free yourself for a deeper travel experience by writing about your hopes and uncertainties. Seeing these in black and white can help you set intentions.
Exercise 1 — Sometimes travel can be disorienting or overwhelming. In the week before you are to leave, set intentions for how you want to be during the journey (e.g., be open to surprise, treat the inevitable disruptions as opportunities, move lightly through new lands).
MY INTENTIONS for our Family Trip to Stockholm
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Travel Mindfully
Carry a small notebook. Write out your intentions on the first page. Frequent reminding can help you stay grounded as you move from place to place, experience to experience.
Exercise 2 — Use in-between moments to record impressions of sights and people in brief phrases, or try to write a haiku poem. Focus on the small (e.g., preschooler reaching out to pat baby cousin’s cheek) and on the big (e.g., Stockholm’s city hall gleaming at sunset with Nobel pride).
Exercise 3 — Collect postcards for describing your experiences. Write on the back of a postcard in the evening after you saw whatever is on it, or when you know you will not see it.
Exercise 4 — Look at a scene as though you are a camera and record the details. Embellish with the other senses. The scents of travel — how seductively the cinnamon assails you as you trundle sweaty and frayed from the wrong terminal in the airport to the right one. Or the sensual: the wild massage of the sea breeze in your hair on the ferry.
Exercise 5 — What surprised you today? For example, conversation with the café waiter, silvery stream found by following its trickling sound, other side of the story you learned in history class, or even what the baby did.
You might write the facts of your trip on the left-side pages of your notebook, with the surprises, moments of wonder, disappointments on the right-side pages. The right sides will be especially useful for sharing your trip with others.
Weekend Cruise from Stockholm to Estonia
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Return Inspired!
These exercises can be used to focus on your most recent trip, or a significant trip from long ago.
Exercise 6 — Draw on metaphors of similarity (or difference). You can try describing your travel experiences in terms of colors — not only the many hues of green in a particular forest, but how the range of colors is so different from home; the pearl grey of skyscrapers, but also the shades of your feelings. For example: the fall-in-the-ocean blue of your grandbaby’s eyes, flaming flag in your mind’s eye when you realize the tourist agent made a big mistake about which terminal, the burst of primary colors when you finally spot your family waiting at the gate, and shades of sepia for the ache of saying goodbye.
Exercise 7 — The impact of a story or poem often depends on the power of the verbs. List 20 action or feeling verbs to describe your trip. Then include as many as possible in a story about the trip.
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Exercise 8 — Select 10 photographs from your trip, then work into your story the names, places, and activities displayed in the photos.
Exercise 9 — Juxtapose imaginatively! Describe how your trip was like a day in a new school, reading the newspaper, visiting a toy store, walking in the woods, or some other part of your real or fantasy life.
Exercise 10 — Share your journey! For example, write a letter to grandchildren after joint travels or traveling to visit them. These can be wonderful keepsakes for both young and old (and the middle generation). Put a copy into the scrapbook you keep for that child.
I recently created a ten-page booklet for our grandson’s fourth birthday based on the sports experiences we enjoyed with him during our summer visit — making use of photos and a repetitive refrain to help him learn to read English. |
Finally, you can journal about the spirit of travel using quotations such as these, selected from The Tao of Travel(2):
Being invisible — the usual condition of the older traveler —
is much more useful than being obvious.
— Paul Theroux
All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself
and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
— Pico Iyer
Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.
— Claude Levi-Strauss
There is a meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler. — Dietrich BonhoefferAn unexpected boon from our family reunion delights us all. Our Swedish granddaughter is keen to master English so she will be able to talk with her Canadian cousin. As always, young spirits look ahead. As for grandparents — we are rewarded with close ties among the next generations. How can we burnish ties and cultivate shared values in a cross-national family even when oft-imagined travel to be together is not feasible? |
The more attentive we are as we travel and the more reflective afterwards, the more likely our travel experiences enhance our sense of self and purpose. We contribute to the upward spiral of living and growing, returning home inspired each time.
We shall not cease from exploring,
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time . . .
— T. S. Eliot(3)
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Notes
1 O’Donohue, John (2008). “For the Traveler” in To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. New York: Doubleday.
2 Theroux, Paul (2011). The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
3 Eliot, T. S. (1972). “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets. London: Faber.
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Ellen B. Ryan is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her psychological research demonstrates how empowering communication fosters personhood and successful aging. She has created the Writing Down Our Years Series of publications to highlight the many ways in which writing life stories can benefit older adults and those with whom they share their stories and poems. She is co-editor of the anthology Celebrating Poets Over 70, a frequent writing workshop leader, and Web host of www.writingdownouryears.ca.
The Circumference of Home by Kurt Hoelting
Excerpted from book, The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Quest for a Radically Local Life by Kurt Hoelting, by arrangement with Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2010
When I looked more closely at the details of my energy consumption, I discovered that three-quarters of my carbon footprint is a result of frequent jet travel, more than swamping all my other efforts at energy conservation combined. I’d been turning a blind eye to my biggest source of personal carbon emissions, while obsessing on small efforts to rein in energy use in other parts of my life. Yet with family and friends spread to the four winds and a livelihood dependent on frequent travel, I could see no way out of my personal enmeshment in this global crisis. It was a moment of truth that offered no easy solutions.
I’d almost given up finding any answers at all, when the genesis of a creative response ambushed me one morning while I was having breakfast with a friend. I’d watched the dramatic changes happening in my own local climate — the rapidly receding Cascade glaciers and diminishing summer snowpack, the increased rainfall and flooding in the rivers, the obviously warming temperatures. It was written in plain sight, yet still I felt stuck. Tired of feeling powerless, and weary of this treadmill of travel, I overheard myself musing to my friend. “What would it be like if l didn’t get into a car for a year? What would it be like to spend an entire year within walking distance of home?’’
Just the thought alone brought a wave of relief. The very audacity of this prospect echoed all the way down to my bones. Rarely has a passing notion taken such complete hold of my imagination. In the days and weeks that followed, I could not let it go. I spent hours poring over local maps with a growing excitement about the places I’ve always wanted to explore close to home. The prospect of doing so under my own power added an aura of adventure that fired my spirit. Using my home as a center point, I drew circles of varying sizes on the map, to see what each contained. The image of “circling home” inscribed itself on my mind as a scope for the adventure. I chose the duration of one year for the project to include a full cycle of seasons, and one full circle around the sun. And I chose the winter solstice as a time to begin because of its symbolism of darkness turning back toward the light.
What really closed the deal, though, was the discovery I made when I drew a circle one hundred kilometers (or sixty-two miles) in radius from my home. The arc of this circle passed directly over the summit of Mount Olympus to the west, the highest point in the Olympic Mountains. It swung north to just include the San Juan Islands, before passing directly over the summit of Mount Baker, the highest point in the North Cascades. From there it passed directly over the summit of Glacier Peak in the east, the highest point in the Central Cascades, crossed Stevens Pass and Snoqualmie Pass on the Cascade crest, then swung around to just touch the southern tip of Puget Sound. To my astonishment, I discovered that my home on Whidbey Island lies at a perfect symbolic epicenter of the Puget Sound basin. With a home circle like this, there was no turning back.
For the coming year, I will travel exclusively by foot, bicycle, kayak, and public transportation inside this circle, with a portion of each month devoted to explorations under my own power. I still have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into or how I’m going to make this work. What I know for sure is that I’ve already set off on one of the grandest adventures of my life.
My goal is straightforward. I want to turn the necessity for change into an opportunity for adventure.
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Six weeks into my year of local living, I can begin to feel the pace of my body slowing down. The inner residue of hurry and restlessness is gradually seeping out of my nervous system. It is a subtle shift, and it has taken this long to begin registering in my conscious mind. I am able to sit still for longer periods, not because I am more determined to do so, but because I just want to. My mind is more available to what I am seeing. With less wanting of things to be different, less pursuit of external stimulation, I simply see more of what is right in front of me.
One of the most obvious manifestations of this shift is the way I can literally feel the geography around me growing in scale and stature. A circle I drew on the map that felt small to begin with, and potentially confining, seems huge now, since it takes an entire day on foot to cover a small portion of it. Fifteen miles of walking is about what I am good for, yet such a day is filled with far more sensory input than a comparable day of driving that could take me halfway to San Francisco. I end my days physically tired, but emotionally full, with a sense of having transited a whole world of hard terrain. Curiously enough, I can end an equally long day of driving or flying almost as tired physically, but emotionally exhausted at the same time, not sure that I have connected with anything real beyond my desire to cover as much ground as fast as possible.
The landscape around me falls upon my senses differently now, working its way down through my perceptions and into my bones at a rate that my whole being can participate in, every step of the way. Already, I look out on a very different Puget Sound and a very different map of the region hanging on the wall of my office. I see nuances of landscape, identifiable landmarks, cultural niches, and relationships between them that were invisible to me before, and I am only just getting under way. Where there are blank spots remaining on the map, I have a new urge to explore them. My prevailing experience of a shrinking and flattening world has reversed course, and the geography around me has begun to expand again, right before my very eyes.
Gary Snyder touches on this dynamic in his story of riding in a pickup truck through the Australian outback west of Alice Springs with a Pintubi elder named Jimmy Tjungurrayi. As they speed along the road through his ancestral territory, Jimmy begins telling stories at a very rapid pace about what had happened in the dream time in each of the places that are flying by. Puzzled by this staccato accounting, Snyder later recalls, “I realized after about half an hour of this that these were tales to be told while walking, and that I was experiencing a speeded-up version of what might be leisurely told over several days of foot travel.” The writer David Abram, in reflecting later on this same story, points to the inseparable bond between landscape and language within oral cultures: “We might say that the land, for indigenous, oral cultures, is the very matrix of linguistic meaning. So, to force a traditionally oral people off of their ancestral lands . . . is, effectively, to shove them out of their mind.” It is worth wondering what kind of mind we can hope to sustain — what level of sanity — when the landscape upon which we dwell has been separated from its stories, when we must piece together our meaning from generic sprawl, usually transiting the landscape at a pace far faster than our stories can get a purchase on.
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Kurt Hoelting is an Alaskan wilderness guide, meditation teacher, and climate activist with a passion for adventure and a lifelong commitment to the restoration of our planet home. He lives on an island in Puget Sound and is the author of The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life.
This article is excerpted from book, The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Quest for a Radically Local Life by Kurt Hoelting, by arrangement with Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2010
from The Captain’s Table by Colin Stuart
Contemporaries
His Story
The Drawing Room
The wind in the curtains —
How can I tell the story of
the wind — the end is
the beginning — the
wind of the mind unwinds
the scent of the
North Star —
Send me
a sentence.
They tell me you learned
your knots.
Yea — I was tiller boy
in Heishker — I could bind
her cord to a pinnace
to windward and learned to
find her a memling of old
cast — and anchor her deep
down drawn deeper.
So when the tide drew her
outward the cords would shriek
and catch at the Amist by
the volcano barnacles on
the downward draft of a
gromlech or a pinnacle —
the draw of the ebb
could not uncurl the golden
serpent from her kill —
ever.
Could the wind talk you out
of it?
So say what is the oldenest knot we know?
May it be the granny, sir?
The way she lies loose
Ties the noose?
Maybe at sea — but say you
were me — Captain —
and we were knotted nowhere
in slumber — Where the fish
fly and seabirds think to
scuttle us?
They say — god sleight
— give me then
my sword — say the warning — then unsheathe
the lily of light from
dawn’s jeweled scabbard.
Young Kit, you will pray
like a virgin as I play the
perfect hand and ply this
ancient trade of mine to steal
the heart of the heartless
Gordian knot — – …
plunge into the diamond
cascade of the sea-foam —
the eldest knot of olde is the not of yesterday —
but older I bet
the knot of the not-yet
you must know the plan
and pray you keep the reef knot to your self!
The sea has its plenitude, its
dark nights of the soul, its
backwaters, its emerald
mountains and the frolic
of a festival, dolphin
flights to distract almost
all of us. Time is
sand in the hand of a stranger —
‘round capes and curves,
have a hand in midnight
alchemy — “Wind — now you see
it now you don’t” —
So there! In a spell —
may dawn’s fingers
uncover for this hidden hand whatever
depths, disasters
and plunders, — slip like
dust through my fingers —
we reach to take back
with us the pearl
o’ great prices.
Think simple! What’s to you
anyway if I lie beside
you — beside, say it — a
lily-paven lake in
azure mist, as we take in
our nostrils quintessential
essences of medieval
fortresses, castles of
drunkenness and then —
sentences of flowers come
like pressing tastes
to our famished lips — .
What can shape invisible
kisses — why a wet wind —
silk furls and furloughs —
brush like light spray
on the eyelids —
to loosen necklaced
intersections of convergent
mind-beams of sapphire
from sleep?
In the hollow of the hold in the
hold of the hollow take
two for one or one for
two mixed matched
doubled or paired, —
spells and
parallels,
Now you know what happens
when you take to the mysteries —
now you know the what-if-
I-try-to-touch —
fall off the apple cart
you did well as you did
yourself in — to tease
the tongue back into
the mouth of the serpent —
nothing left to find
in the landscape of your
hands
tempted me
to this fear over here —
you think they guide you
to words — on a page —
something to say for your
curses — now
how can you pay for
your way — so long —
at seaside —
What notes when you took
to your mouth the magic
horn of the unicorn?
Have you heard the universe
escape from your lips —
the rush of a thousand visions
the power of the night
the veins of light …
July 24, 2012
Selected Poems by Linda L. Beeman
Accumulation of Days
We age, we bemoan
slippery memory
broken sleep
chronic pain
We reach for grace
iced forsythia on a February morning
the shape of an owl’s wing in slow flight
wood smoke smells in old textiles
acceptance that what’s undone will wait
Accumulated insights layer one upon another
knowledge sifted through humility
justice measured with compassion
beauty sculpted by imperfection
love honed with patience
hope balancing wisdom
Our voyages out
eventually bring us home
where we acknowledge
the unknowns we sought
were coded
deep within us
all along
//
Give and Take
you know how
you pray to rain
to its downward fall
asking that it take you
soak the earth
grow green shards
exhale oxygen
send it up again
one long ongoing chant
for redemption
//
Lurching Toward Wholeness
turning the hundredth corner
of that coastline road
pelicans balanced in mid-air
stationary on their current
took my breath
when we are fleeing pain
trying to reconcile mean loss
these are the moments that
etch themselves glass sharp
yet comfort like wind over grass
when anguish tugs us
like a sweat-soaked sheet
despair floods us again
in the minute after waking
these jolts of beauty
as I hold divinity’s glance
without blinking
feel strength’s first surge
bring me back to myself
lurching toward wholeness
//
Travel Tip
Wherever you go
there you’re not
Travel is all about
seeing through other eyes
making yourself unobtrusive
gaping at small wonders
finding courage to ask
Wherever you go
pack humbly
//
Linda Beeman is an award-winning non-fiction writer and poet living on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. She is the author of Wallace, Idaho — a chapbook of poems celebrating the history of her gritty silver-mining hometown. Her poems have been published in Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Colorado Mesa University’s Pinyon, and online at Adanna and the University of Chicago’s Euphony Journal.
Her exploratory travel articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Foreign Service Journal.
She researches and writes extensively about antique textiles from South and Southeast Asia and believes that curiosity extends the cat’s life.