With some time to kill before rehearsal and a desire to buy a magnifying glass as a gag in an upcoming birthday present, I darted into a CVS pharmacy, where I promptly became disoriented. Everything in this one was backwards: the main checkout counters were at the back of the store, by the municipal parking lot, while the druggists were in a corner at the front, away from the doors along the main street. I had no idea where to begin looking.
No doubt in reaction to my perplexed state, a young clerk approached me and asked if she could help. It wasn’t her fault I was now thoroughly bewildered. Standing before me was my First Love, from nearly 50 years earlier and hundreds of miles to the west. Right height and shape, right hair, right voice, same quirkiness, even the same intensely blue eyes. Somehow she hadn’t aged, while I, well, time tells. In some ways, this was time travel of the worst sort.
How could I say anything that would make sense? She’d never be able to answer the questions I would have posed her.
Just about every time we take I-95 south to Boston, a particular experience comes to my mind while crossing the Merrimack River. I look out from the bridge, hoping to see whether the tide’s in or out.
But that’s not how it was when I first moved to New England.
On one warm evening, while driving with a girlfriend along the river just beyond the bend we can see from the bridge, I found a place to pull over. The water was low, with many steppingstones exposed. We couldn’t resist walking way out from shore and back again, but when we turned around, all of the stones where we’d been were now submerged.
As humans, each of us assumes a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Mason, Protestant, middle class, married. I don’t think “grandfather” was high up in his awareness. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.
The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.
Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.
Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.
When I turned to this is a series of poems, I found myself identifying many of the subjects by occupation, even though their confessions or interior monolog typically reflected the more intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. The resulting poems are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.
What began as an exercise in self-definition breaks out nonetheless into an entire spectrum of personalities. Do we know any of these people? Or are they somehow eluding us, masked by the bits that are revealed? Those we recognize, moreover, happen by accident – none of the portraits are of known individuals, but rather the inventions of the poet’s craft and imagination.
Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. My collection builds on such moments, constructing a cross-section of community like a web of each one of its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, then, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may be more like the part we deny, as well. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.
In the end, I’d say I have a Village of Gargoyles.
My fondness for mountain laurel goes back to my days of living in the ashram in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. There, the undergrowth of the forest was filled with these blossoms in season.
Over the years, my own spiritual practices have undergone many changes. Even in a tradition like the one I’ve embraced, seemingly free from the annual routines of a liturgical calendar or outward emblems, there appear cyclical changes mirroring those of the seasons. Cycles, too, like those of progressing from childhood and parenthood into retirement or release. In Salem Quarterly Meeting in Ohio, the session each Fifth Month meant rhubarb in the applesauce. See it as sacrificial and special.
There are times of struggle, doubt, and distrust. Times of whirlwind passion and excitement. Times of discovery. Times of drought or deep winter, relying on what’s brought out of storage. Times of renewal and recharge.
This has manifested as periods where I’ve been able to dedicate significant time to meditation, solitude, travel in ministry, prayer, Bible study, research into history and theology, organizational service, teaching, correspondence, or writing, as well as to regular disciplines such as fasting or physical spiritual exercise (the hatha yoga sessions or even wilderness hiking). Emphatically, however, one would predominate while others would likely be absent or greatly diminished. In addition, they would be strongly impacted by the events of my daily life itself – whether I was single, married, divorced, or “in relationship,” my hours and nature of employment, my friendships and faith community, my driving patterns through the week.
The result of all of this would be a crazy-quilt tapestry or a ricochet trajectory if it weren’t for a spiraling within it. That is, over the years, various periods and interests begin to overlap one another, creating a kind of harmony or accumulated depth. My asparagus bed in New Hampshire has roots in my experience of asparagus along irrigation canal banks in Far West desert three decades earlier. A dog sitting through Quaker meeting here is a reminder of dogs sitting through predawn meditation sessions in the Pocono Mountains, or of the cats aligned on the scaffolding outside the windows, as if they, too, were deep in concentrated worship. I read a particular Psalm and see the passage taking twists I hadn’t perceived earlier.
In my own life, my childhood was filled with natural science, hiking, and camping, each with its mystical visions and moments. Adolescence led into politics, classical music, opera, and writing complicated by unrequited sexual yearning. Without romantic companionship, a Lone Ranger journey. Rejection of existing creed while ensconced in church office was followed by flight into atheism and hippie excess landing, inexplicably, in a yoga ashram with its Hatha exercises and sustained meditation. From there, into Quaker practice, though of the ABC – or “anything but Christ” variety. The ashram lessons were applied here, in circles of deepening prayer life. By steps, I moved toward Christocentric and Plain speech, and an especially faith fervent language. Among the Wilburite Friends as well as Mennonites, especially, I came to wrestle within Scripture while similtaneously undergoing repeated Dark Night journeys and questioning. Turning to therapy, I wondered if anyone could come along with me through all of this. By now I was no longer meditating to get high, or transcend, but rather to center down to the Seed. Here, with all of its committee work, I was engaged in a religion that combines mystical experience with social witness and activism. In a nutshell, then.
Each swirl also stirs up something from before. What failed in earlier marriage or relationships reappears. What has been left unfinished is not left entirely behind. What has been shredded remains to be woven. I heard this opera in its entirety a hundred times. Have I ever heard this note before?
I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast and back before heading on to the Pacific Northwest in what seemed an epiphany but instead shattered amid volcanic eruption and devastation. I left the wilderness for another kind of wilderness, back across the Midwest to the East Coast. The pendulum, as they say. Here, I now see life as both linear and circular – that is, spiraling. The spirit requires flesh, or is it that flesh requires spirit? Seasons include times that are full or overflowing, and times that are barren or dry. I now welcome the questioning that is not hostile is both essential and healthy.
My first spring in the orchard, I expected all of the trees to blossom simultaneously. They don’t. The apricots and cherry petals give way to plums, pears, and peaches. The apple blooms arrive last, when others are already gone.
Experiencing a new place through a full year or repeated years provides a much different understanding than a tourist gets – even one who spends several months there. Relocating requires a year-and-a-half to gain familiarity with the new surroundings – to get beyond the obvious, to establish friendships, to be oriented with the elements one finds essential or special. A favorite restaurant, a woodland pathway or place to swim, a boutique or gallery.
There are seasons for a person of faith, from winter to spring elation and then into fullness, dryness, struggle, or disillusionment. To harvest, perchance. Marriage? Family? Children? Extended into joy, compassion, humility, appreciation – one begins observing and naming.
The turning point in my own journey came when I accepted a new name.
In any relationship, it is difficult enough to know one’s own actions and thoughts completely or accurately, much less the other’s. Misunderstandings are inevitable – “You promised,” “I never said that,” “Why didn’t you phone?” “I did what?”
The gaps become especially obvious during a breakup. Like a mirror that smashes to the floor, the image comes apart. Spider webs span gaps. The reflection distorts. Here, silences – the interstices of what is unseen or left unsaid – become as important as what is harshly trumped or cruelly enacted. Sometimes, it appears that figures previously hidden by the mirror itself now become visible; even motions that had been observed but dismissed return with ominous significance. Excuses no longer suffice.
Moreover, if one partner has been cheating, the mask itself now drops away. Some misunderstandings, it turns out, were intentional. “I know I said that, but I never meant it.” Stones, then, are finally thrown directly at the looking glass, and through it. A hammer is held in the fist.
“Do you love me?” becomes a meaningless question. Petals fall from long-stem roses given as an expression of passion. In the fractured mirror, even blossoms shatter.
And then there’s the personal complication. As Diane Wakoski of the Motorcycle Betrayal has observed: “I suppose part of my adult fascination with American adolescence is that I didn’t live one, except in very scattered ways. I was, all my life, trying to escape my … background. … Thus my lifelong snobbery about highbrow things.”
Everyone where she was from said simply, “Oh, that Anna! She’s a character!” But they’d never say why.
I met her long after she’d moved east, and sensed in her a deep spiritual presence.
Still, when it came to opening her memorial service, I couldn’t refrain from mentioning her identity as a character. What emerged in the next hour was quite a lesson.
Afterward, as I drove home from New Jersey, I embraced this mandate: we have the first 40 years of our lives to get our act together – and the next 40 to become a character. If we can. If we’re worthy.
To perceive a spiritual journey as Seasons of the Spirit acknowledges how much of it is out of our own hands, like the weather. We yield to the Spirit and are guided by it, to the extent we are faithful. “Which Spirit is thee speaking of?” I hear echoing, a memory of elder Mary Hawkins of rural Ohio before she counseled me of other spirits, such as anger and jealousy and so on. For the record, then, this is what I now call the Spirit of Christ – specifically, the Light and Life addressed in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. You may define your encounters as you may. My interest here is with an experienced connection with the Divine and a heightened awareness of its manifestations among us.
While everyone talks about the weather, few openly discuss religion. Too often, those who do raise the subject seem unwilling to listen, at least openly, and their arguments are cast along the lines of dogma or creed. Again, my focus is not on what we have been taught about faith, but what we can say about its workings in our own lives. When we can get past the formulaic responses, a discussion of religious experience allows us to search some of the deepest desires and fears of human existence. It can also unleash extraordinary social reform, as we might see looking through history, or be constrained to do the precise opposite.
* * *
To speak of Spirit in this manner requires us to search for the ways it becomes embodied in our lives and our world. That is, how it takes flesh. What is abstract reveals itself in concrete decisions and actions, as well as thoughts and emotions.
Seems I’ve always been a coffee lover, as far back as those “coffee milks” our Gran used to serve my sister and me on Sunday afternoons. Maybe that’s why I still prefer mine café au lait – half milk heated with a liberal dose of sugar or sweetener.
For decades now, my days have begun with a round of hot coffee, often abed – yes, how blessed I was after remarrying, when my wife would appear with the perfect mug when I needed to awaken. And how much I lament how that ceased, in part because the office rejuggled my schedule, meaning she never knew quite when I would be rousing.
For someone in a faith tradition that eschews rituals, I have to admit where they really appear – and be willing to acknowledge anything that’s an addiction, as well. (Remind me to take a coffee fast in the next year, OK?) Yes, maybe the editors of one poetry journal had it right when they admitted they were devotees of the Goddess Caffeina. (Oh, she has temples everywhere.)
More recently I’ve begun to question whether it’s really the coffee itself I like. That is, I can drink it black. And, yes, I also demand dark coffee – the darker, the better. I even like Starbucks, though that has nothing to do with my years in the Nevergreen State. (Remember, I lived in the desert side of Washington state.) No, I realize when the mug’s turned cold, my beverage tastes a lot like the cartons of chocolate milk we used to purchase in the elementary school vending machine – the ones that cost us a nickel. So maybe it’s that chocolate underpinning that grabs me.
Is it possible that even at six-foot-two, the chocolate stunted my growth? We can’t blame the coffee, now, can we?
As I said at the time, carrying a picket sign, after all those years as a professional journalist, crossed a barrier. We don’t take sides, in public, so what does one do in a labor impasse? I realized this is what my younger stepdaughter, the political activist, called a “viz,” for visibility event, and that we could add more posters to our sticks, to create a “totem pole.” I also recalled a Friend, speaking of driving along and seeing a vigil and then stopping and opening his car trunk for the sign he always carries, just so he’d always be ready to join in anywhere. There was something liberating in this, even if it was an “informational picket” rather than a straight-out strike line.
Now, having retired from the profession, I sense another opening. A return to an earlier calling. My entering journalism, as a public witness and service, is restored to its original prompting of advocacy and reform, before it was confined by corporate media – the very bottom-line organizations right-wing critics overlook when they accuse “liberal media” of, well, reporting both sides. Maybe I’ll become a Quaker agitator, after all. (As the retiree activist, I might say: Thank you, Megan. And Iris. Especially.)
The milestone demands some acknowledgement, or at least a hard assessment of my life to date. To be honest, when I graduated from college, I hardly expected to survive past my mid-thirties, and the way things were going, maybe I wasn’t far off the mark. On the other hand, I never anticipated the turns this journey has taken.
For one thing, I rarely thought of journalism as my lifetime career, but rather as a steppingstone to something else. While the field could be exciting at times, getting caught up in the management side of the business took a toll, and the more recent downward spiral of the professional publishing industry in general is downright frightening.
I had envisioned myself either returning to my hometown and writing for a newspaper that no longer exists, or else working in the heart of a large metropolis with its range of concerts, galleries, lectures, and theater, possibly after going back for a law degree. Of course, neither way opened, but the ashram route did. And I, who started adulthood somewhere between agnostic and logical positivist, was now on a spiritual pathway that would lead me to Quaker practice.
As I look back on my adult life, the only thing that has made sense has been this spiritual evolution. Each of the geographic moves, ostensibly in pursuit of a career, actually introduced the next step in an expanding faith and practice. Now my generation is having to move into places once filled by the “mighty old oaks” who came before us – the most troubling aspect being that we are, all these years later, still the younger members of Meeting or, for that matter, much of literature and the fine arts.
The craft of writing has itself has taken its own curious twists within this; while the poetry and fiction have often arisen in the discipline of keeping my skills sharp in the face of the daily grind, and thus have often veered toward the “experimental” side of literature, they’ve also served as a tool for investigating the unfolding experience – something quite different from trying to “create” a poem or story. Examining a situation honestly and directly, rather than trying to be ironic, cute, entertaining, or ideologically correct, is one of the consequences; on the other hand, you’re constantly measured against some standard of innovation. It ain’t easy, balancing the two.
Nevertheless, I’ll confess to a lot of remaining frustration. All of the unfinished work before me, for instance, or the difficulty in achieving successful book-length publication, despite having more than a thousand poems and short stories published in literary journals, at this point, on five continents. On a more personal level, I could look at all of the social skills to be fostered, to say nothing of a round of grandparenting, should that happen.
Even so, as I told my wife a few months back, I have nearly everything I’ve wanted, though it resembles none of what I imagined. The crux here is in being receptive and grateful, which proves surprisingly elusive when we’re in the middle of the usual swirl.
* * *
This is something I wrote for myself at sixty. And here it is, with a few tweaks, five years later. Just as applicable.
Jnana's Red Barn 