Life has a way of providing hints as you bushwhack your trail through it. They're steadfast, and punitive if the path you clear is forced. They're a line of breadcrumbs if you're on your way home. After nine months, I may have found a few.
Nine months. That's a pregnancy. or a second gestation.
My first breadcrumb slipped out of a book I've never read when I knocked it off the shelf. It belonged to my mother. I don't know why I kept it. What fell out was a postcard she sent me three months before she died. This is what it said:
Anyhow, it seems appropriate it found me now. I won't question how she knew I needed it.
The next crumb came as sustenance. Unexpected resources appeared. Not much, but enough to get me to think I'll be OK. That thought hasn't entered my airspace since forever. That's a long time without optimism.
And there are those job listing breadcrumbs appearing that I'm qualified for. Jobs in line with the purpose I want to fulfill. I don't have any expectations of being asked to do them, but they woke me. Just as I was thinking I'd tried every shoe in the shoe store without a fit the clerk says, "Well, we do have this one pair....", and I'm Cinderella.
The crumbs combined to provide just enough to narrow my focus, pin my ears back, and set me to hunt again. Maybe I'm still useful around here, after all. Maybe I'm still a Hunter. I wasn't sure anymore.
The crumbs combined to provide just enough to narrow my focus, pin my ears back, and set me to hunt again. Maybe I'm still useful around here, after all. Maybe I'm still a Hunter. I wasn't sure anymore.
The work required by writing is the work that defines objective. It inspires passion, and creates a need. If I can't get paid to teach, I'll find a student who's ripe to learn a lesson, but can't pay. I'll prepare that student to prepare the one behind him, and I'll do it for free. I'll crimp the first two links in the chain.
I'll leave a legacy of ordinary before I agree to go away.
A Pulse
When I picked up the book to return it to its shelf, I noticed three pages had their corners turned down. My mother did that. Two pages marked poems by May Sarton. They are written below. The third page led to this, also by Sarton:
"I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seeds every spring, and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind."
The dead do speak to us, but they need to ask others to borrow a voice. If we're lucky, we'll be listening for their message. My mother got four to me in a day.
"For ten years I have been rooted in these hills,
For 10 years have called a mountain, friend,
Have been nourished by plants, still waters,
Trees in their seasons.
Have fought in this quiet place
For my self.
I can tell you that first winter
I heard the trees groan.
I heard the fierce lament,
as if they were on the rack under the wind.
I too have groaned here,
Wept the wild winter tears.
I can tell you that solitude is not all exultation,
Inner space,
Where the soul breathes,
And work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.
Who wakes in a house alone,
Wakes to moments of panic.
Will the roof fall in?
Shall I die today?
Who wakes in a house alone,
Wakes to inertia sometimes,
To fits of weeping for no reason.
Solitude swells the inner space,
Like a balloon.
We are wafted hither and thither,
On the air currents.
How to land it?
I worked out anguish in a garden
Without the flowers,
The shadow of trees on snow, their punctuation.
I might not have survived.
I came here to create a world
As strong, renewable, fertile,
As the world of nature all around me-
Learned to clear myself as I have cleared the pasture.
Learned to wait.
The impact huge,
The reverberations slow to die down.
Yet what I have done here,
I have not done alone.
Inhabited by rich past lives,
Inhabited, also, by the great dead.
By music, poetry..."
I'm no less amazed now, than I was as a boy, when the world actually speaks to you, picks you out of a crowd, and makes eye contact. Like you matter. Like you're supposed to be here. I'm in awe of the world's dexterity to provide just enough of what you're not hearing, from the ones you should be hearing it from, to keep you believing.
"Dream"
Inside my mother's death
I lay, and could not breathe.
Under the masked face,
As if I'm locked under stone,
In that terrible place.
I knew before I woke
That i would have to break
Myself out off that tomb.
Be born-again, or die.
Once more, wrench from the womb
The prisoner's harsh cry.
And that the only way
Was to bring death with me
From under the lost face,
For I would never comeFrom that empty place
Without her, alone:
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Like the roots of a tree,
Her life with in mine-
Twice born mystery
Where the roots intertwine,
When i woke, I was free.
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