It’s a fair question to ask in looking back at this period. What were the possibilities and consequences if something had turned differently? For instance, what if?
I had found a girlfriend? Someone more supportive of me and my direction than I was finding in my tenuous marriage?
Agreed to a divorce? At the time, it was out of the question on my end, at least in my strict upbringing, but she clearly wasn’t committed to us. Or, as I’m sensing, even what she saw as her calling of fine art.
Where would Kitty have turned/gone if we split? Not my problem, apart from the ways she was relying on me for financial and emotional support – something I could now argue was draining me.
We had children? It would have meant less time to write for me for certainly demanded growing maturity. Would I have resented their intrusion and limits? I was yearning for something more than sex in our connection.
Moved to Ellensburg and commuted? I would have been physically and mentally exhausted. There would have been less time for writing or anything else, actually. I saw that in an esteemed coworker.
American Olympus been published by Copper Canyon? It would have been a breakthrough possibly out of my journalism career route. But poetry, as I’ve since seen, is a precarious life route.
There had been no circle of Quakers? Trying to bridge the distances between my “worldly” endeavors in the newsroom and my spiritual support in my private life was difficult enough. Unitarians might have inspired intellectual and even social progress visions but missed the essential intuitive grounding. Zen, as I’m seeing now, had its own limits. Living in isolation in the secular world, I would have been crushed.
A local poetry circle actually existed other than the rhyme tasters? I was truly in a wilderness here, chiseling away on a number of fronts, clueless about what was actually working apart from the reactions of a few editors off on the fringe.
I had not gotten the newsroom promotions? They did give me four weeks of vacation each year, which I’m seeing as the high points of my Yakima experience. But they came at a steep price during the rest of the year and gave a false promise of professional glory off somewhere later.
Had I followed Gil to New Jersey? He would have created me a step up the career ladder, though in the end, the route crumbled under him, too. There would have been no wilderness at hand for me, though a promise of reconnecting with the ashram. On the other hand, there were major Quakers and cultural activities. As for Kitty in this leap? It would have been one more upheaval before completing her degree, though maybe not all that different from the route that ultimately opened.
~*~
Once again, in reviewing these volumes: How much my sense or memory of the timeline of these has been off and now stands corrected.
In Zen Buddhism, so I’ve been told, engaging in “what if” speculation is considered a waste of time and attention. What do you think?
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
