When We No Longer Know Which Way To Go

Morning has surprised me. I looked up from my coffee cup and there it was, waiting patiently outside, a soft gray light beyond a translucent curtain of coastal fog. My list is long today; there are so many things I intend to do, none of which is significant taken by itself, but this is the very first. Write.

And so I am writing, not at all sure that I have something to say, but certain that if I don’t, I will lose even those flimsy thoughts that might be passing through. Already, weeks have gone by wordlessly with nothing documented or adequately pondered. Writing doesn’t always yield answers, but it helps me to see, and sometimes with seeing there comes a kind of truce. Writing is also giving, even if there is no one to receive it, and a declaration of existence, perhaps rendered more crucial by virtue of the ephemeral nature of that existence. And I can't explain it, but when I am not writing at all, I don't feel healthy. So let's get back to blogging, at least

I went to the Sierras last week for a few days with three friends, four women in a mountain cabin in a very odd moment in time, and it was good. The days were bright blue and gold, with snow on the peaks, and the temperatures just cool enough for jackets. We walked. And we talked a lot, as women friends do. We even watched the so-called Final Debate, although part of our plan had been to get away from all that, and I must say that it was fun to experience it together. We set up two iPads in front of the fireplace for multi-screen viewing, and kept a stack of therapeutic chocolate bars at hand, sharing the outrage and satisfactions and celebrating our Nasty Women camaraderie.

I will forever be grateful for women friends. And mountains. We’re all four retired, gratefully so, but still in search of meaning and purpose, wanting to help and create and relate. It brings to mind this poem by Wendell Barry: It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Now we stood before actual streams that sparkled and purled, and a pool of water bubbling from below, and we wandered and reflected. Oh, we were aware that many people in far-flung elsewheres were enduring incomprehensible misery occurring simultaneously with our mountain walks. The here-peaceful present and indeed all moments are composed of infinite and dissonant nows. We cannot contain them all. One of the women has been knitting hats for refugee children, and there was a little pile of color on the table. It’s a tangible thing, a pattern of kindness, healing for her and hopefully helpful to others. My own contributions to the world are vague these days. I try, but I’ve gotten snagged.

Meanwhile, I’m still a bit obsessed with mortality, as if it were a new discovery. I guess it has been stirred up by the surprisingly substantial number that is my age, but it's also an after-effect of my mother’s death, which forced me to see a long life in its entirety, with all its pain and disappointments, and opened the wounds of old losses too.

One day while walking, these words about my mother came into my head: All her wants went wanting/in their wake, an ache/unsung her songs/un-righted her wrongs…

At that point I had to stop for a moment. My heart hurt too much.

When I came back home from the mountains, I had a dream that I was standing on a grassy hilltop with my mother and one of my girlfriends, our silhouettes framed against a wide white sky. My mother looked more as she did in her seventies, long gray hair, upright yet surprisingly tiny and tentative, pleased to see me. I took her hand, introduced her to my friend, and the three of us held hands, forming a circle. My mother had never been to or seen such a place as this wild, windy hilltop, and she was surprised and proud, maybe even delighted, to be there with me. I was vaguely aware of some worry pressing on me, that old familiar instruction to hurry, but we stood for a moment holding hands in that circle, and she said to me, "I love you" and I said "I love you" and I felt at peace, at least with her. And I was so happy to see her in the great outdoors, the kind of experience she never knew. I wish her life had been bigger, and happier. I guess I wish that for all my lost loved ones.

I’m still working on The Living Stories Collective, and last Saturday I gave a presentation at a community gathering, and it seemed to resonate. We all need stories, and we need to ask questions and listen to one another. There’s a pool of wisdom available to us if we tap into it, and it’s possible to feel a little less alone.I’m now in the process of transcribing my latest interview, with John Hollister Wheelwright, who is the last living person who actually resided for a time in the old ranch house here, and he and I walked through the rooms together. He is now in his eighties, and he lived there with his grandparents when he was a boy. He remembered it as a quiet time, but he still recalls hearing the murmur of his grandparents’ late night conversations, and his grandfather’s cathedral-shaped radio issuing forth FDR’s announcement after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Grandmother playing Bach’s Prelude Number 1 on the piano, still his favorite melody.At the age of twelve or thirteen, he took to climbing down from his bedroom window after his grandparents went to bed. The ranch was wildness then, with virtually no one around.

“But what was there to do?” I asked. “Where did you go?”

“Oh, I was off to the races, having a fine time for myself," he said. "I’d go down to the orchard and eat some fruit. I’d walk down to the beach, or wander around the canyon.”

It seemed poignant to me; I wanted there to be more than that. "Did you have a sense of wonder about the night?” I asked, in my wide-eyed way.“

Children don’t specifically have a sense of wonder,” he replied. “They accept as normal what they see, and they hope that what they see as normal remains.”

I suppose it’s true. And then we grow up and begin to see that normality is change.

But once in a while, wonder takes hold of us.