Fragments of Eternity

When I was traveling from Massachusetts to Montana I passed through South Dakota. I remembered from my cross country travels in 1985 how much I loved the Black Hills, but before I got that far, I passed through the grasslands and they were beautiful to me. I pulled over at one point, got out of my car, and began walking through the grasses into the north. My logical mind told me that I would eventually reach something human-made … but I felt another truth alongside that one … I had entered into a fragment of eternity. I seriously thought about stopping right then and there and finding a place to settle somewhere in that ocean of grass.

This weekend I am staying at a cabin of some rancher friends. It’s south of Butte and north of Dillon. I can hear ‘my’ river just to the east of this lovely little home. I’m writing this on Friday night and will post it when I return to Butte sometime on Sunday … though I must admit – if there was a chance that I might stay here … for a very very long time … I would jump at it.

Just before sunset I decided that I would  head out back of the cabin and walk up the dirt road into the eastern hills. (Even though I was warned about the rattlesnakes warming their bellies before the dark set in!) I walked past rusted pickups and antique haying equipment … I passed up the road watching the almost-full moon rise above a new set of mountains. I opened … and politely re-locked the gate … and continued as far as I could, passing off the main road onto a little path that led up a small rise.

I stood there in the twilight that rushed down from the Pioneer Mountains just across the valley and I was again placed into another fragment of eternity … similar and different from they way I felt in the grasslands of South Dakota. Here there are no grasses waving in the strong breeze … just sage and cactus, stones and rocky hills. I turned to the south and to my left the moon was rising higher into the night sky and to my right Venus fell toward the western mountain peaks. This felt like home.

I’m writing this in the loft bedroom of the cabin … it’s 10:30 pm, but there is still enough light so that I can see the sillhouettes of the bare peaks against the darkening sky as I glance out the windows. The ceiling fans above in this loft and below in the main room create a gentle breeze and hum and outside… ah, outside I hear crickets, the river, an occasional car as it  passes by on the distant highway. It is a blessing to be here.

I’ve always said that when I move (and I’ve moved many times from home to home to home) I want to move someplace I find to be  “this or something better” than wherever I am at the moment. And as I mature and gain perspective and discover what it is I love out in the world and in myself “better” changes its definition. Or I change.

My move from Egremont in Massachusetts to Dillon in Montana was better for me for so many reasons. And my move from Dillon to Butte – even better than before. I know that this particular little cabin is not my home … and … I feel that I’m being given a taste of possibility for my next ‘better’. Maybe here … maybe someplace very much like here – with the faint scent of eternity waiting behind the leaves of the cottonwoods in the breeze and the broad splash of stars across the night sky.

Letting Go

Sometimes you just have to let go of that thread you've been clinging to ... desperately ... and ... let go. I think of trapeze artists...

... and the deep trust in yourself, in your skills, in the other artists that you must muster up ... time and again ... so that you are willing to let go because you trust that something ... a rope, a slender wooden bar, a firm hand ... will be there to help you along the way.

I've done this before--many times--and I'm sure that I will continue the cycle of wanting things to be a particular way, clinging to that desire, and then finally letting go of it. It's the particularity of how that seems to get in the way--not the desire itself. The desire is clean, sharp, clear.

So, I let go of my thesis. No! Don't misunderstand - I am entirely dedicated to the goal of completing a well-written, interesting, and useful thesis. I've let go of the how ... of the rigid schedule ... of the expectations of how this is going to happen.

I've let go of how I'm going to re-emerge into health. I've let go of how I'm going to figure out what comes next - after grad school - after Butte. I've let go.

I'm out there, soaring and falling at the same time. I fill my days with the tasks associated with the responsibilities that I've chosen. I fill my evenings with gentle walks ... with song, dance, and drums ... with the words of others that inspire me ... with writing that fulfills me. I fill my heart with friends ... I empty my mind of expectations and leave the door open for ...

Bends in the Road

The morning of July 10, 1983 I woke up to bright sunshine and the Sunday comics on the side of the bed. My new husband, Stephen, had left them as a sweet gift before he headed out to Gloucester to meet friends for a day of scuba diving. A few hours later, I received a phone call from friends that a former co-worker had been in a roll-over the night before on her way from Boston back to Yale. I called the wife of Stephen's diving partner asking her to let him know that I would be with Susan and Peter waiting on more news about our friend, Mia. An hour or so later, the phone rang and Peter went to answer it. He walked back into the living room, pale. We thought that Mia had died. But no. It was Stephen. Drowned in the waters of Gloucester Harbor. Two days later I was back at the synagogue for the funeral. It was four months, to the day, of our wedding.

A few years later I received a letter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with the court date for the divorce from my second husband. The date: July 11th. I called him to laugh about it, "I guess the timing means this is really over". We drove to our divorce together, used the same lawyer. It was as amicable as could be.

July 10, 11, and 12 are significant anniversaries in my life. Each year they also mark an opportunity for me to pause and reflect on how I have changed ... through imposition from the 'outside' as with Stephen's death or as a result of choice from the 'inside' as with the divorce. Change comes from the same root as barter (exchange) and also bend.

I like those two ways of seeing change in our life. We exchange on set of experiences for another, we exchange one set of beliefs for another, we give away something of the past in return for something new into the future. Change is a bend in the road, sometimes a gentle turn on a slow country road where whatever is around the bend may be unknown, but can be anticipated:

Other changes can be more dramatic, like these sharp turns in a trail at Carlsbad Canyon that lead into the darkness:

In the early and mid-90s, I studied with a tarot master. She was a remarkable woman, an intelligent, intense, scholar with a deeply dramatic flair. On the surface she and I could not be more different. She expanded my understanding of the world and I am so grateful for the years that we spent together - we studied history, symbolism, feminism, herbalism, esoterica, communication, theater, religion and spirituality, and our selves. She challenged my beliefs and limitations and gave me an opportunity to learn how to be both immersed in an experience and at the same time able to stand outside the experience and observe.

The tarot is a picture book with images that are like doorways into rooms where you can contemplate the commonalities of human experience. It is tempting to many to use it as a tool of prediction ... there are so many people who would like to believe in the words of others rather than in their own self-knowledge. People who would like to believe that we can know the future rather than accept that each moment, each choice, each experience changes our possible future.

I prefer to use the tarot as a means for insight into the present moment. And I know that there are many, many tools for that kind of insight.The tarot offers four cards to indicate the various kinds of change that we experience.

The Wheel of Fortune symbolizes those changes that feel out of your control - Fate turns the wheel and your fortunes rise and fall without any rhyme or reason - you are at the mercy of other powers: parents, mate, children, boss, the economy. Whatever it may be, you are powerless.

Then there are those moments where change comes sudden and out of the blue. This is The Tower. There are no storm clouds on the horizon and yet the lightening strikes and you and your world tumbles down. There are choices here - live amid the ruins, live in the past, never move on; rebuild the same structure and hope that it was a fluke (usually, its not); take what's useful and re-build something new; or walk away.

Some changes are like the 6 of Swords: a long, slow and weary change. You know why you're leaving the situation, you know where you're headed and its just a matter of taking it one step at a time until the change is complete.

The jongleur in the 2 of Disks is the last of the symbol for change in the Tarot deck. These are the cyclic changes that we can expect in life - the gentle rise and fall of good days and bad ones, the highs and lows of moving from birth to death, the ones we consider natural and normal.

Of course, each day of the year has some kind of resonance of joy or loss - especially as we travel along the years of life. The changes that I contemplate each year were made possible because of those losses and those joys.

The Wheel is from a Swiss tarot deck from the 1800s

The Tower is from an Italian deck from the 1800s

The 6 of Swords and 2 of Disks are variations of the Rider-Waite deck

An amazing variety of tarot images can be found at www.trionfi.com.

No One Told Us

There have been many phases of life that I might not have been truly prepared for ... but at least I anticipated that they would arrive. This phase has come as a surprise - and not entirely welcome. I wish more older people would mentor the rest of us as we move through life. I surely try to do that with my younger friends.

In conversations with friends who are of a similar age ... a few years younger or older ... we find ourselves faced with life experiences both personal and social that force us to re-evaluate who we believed we are ... and what it is we truly value. I'm not sure if this is what 'mid-life crisis' is ... I had always assumed that was a phenomenon associated with men and most seemed to fail the test by turning away from self-knowledge and toward red sports cars and younger women who would never be their true peers or partners.

We stand in the face of children growing up and leaving to create their own lives or children refusing to grow up and unable to leave ... in the face of life partners turning cold--turning away and leaving to create different lives apart ... in the face of losing lifelong careers because of financial problems or health problems ... we are at a loss. And the loss is our understanding of self.

When the house empties at the end of the day and we are left in silence and darkness that can't be filled with the faces and voices of the familiar ... who are we? What is our value? Where is the meaning that our days seemed to be filled with? These are questions that my friends struggle with.

It's easy enough to fill what seems to be a void. Our culture offers many choices: there is busy-ness. There are plenty of chores and responsibilities that we can use to fill the time, the dark, the quiet. As friends have said, when moving numbly through their nights: it's important to stay on task. There is the bottle of wine, beer, whiskey ... choose your poison, they say. There is the bowl, the joint, the needle, the pill. There is TV ... the new "opiate of the people". There are a million different ways to avoid the void until our last breath.

Facing that void is no bowl of cherries ... it is a privilege, can seem like a curse, and in the end is no promise of future happiness. Our small segment of the world --middle and upper middle class, mostly white people--have the time, luxury, and space to face this void. We're not starving, we're not faced with war and intercultural violence, we're not tied to the cycle of agriculture with the seasons of farming or raising animals that don't ever go on vacation or get sick days. We're free to explore this dark place.

And maybe ... facing the void isn't necessary. Maybe the various "opiates of the people" that allow for pleasure in the moment are the best choice of all. "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die" says Ecclesiastes. I'm sure I'd be a lot more fun to be around if I took that advice instead of always seriously creasing my brow in thought and contemplation ... looking to scratch out meaning from every darn experience I face.

My friends and I, we look at our selves, our friends, our families, our children - we cast our gazes out further and we see the same problems, the same struggles, the same suffering as far as our sight will take us. We are good people--we work in various ways to create space for a 'better world' for our children and our children's children. We know that it feels that our work--professional and personal--is just a drop in the bucket.

And so we're left to create meaning. We're left to shape our lives into some form of value. I have friends who are artists, they pick up the brush and dab it into color and spread it across the canvas and they create meaning and value and, more often than not, they create beauty. The beauty is there for all to see. I look around my home. I have artwork from many friends that grace these walls and space. The beauty gives me pleasure, and it is also a source of strength. Their art reminds me of the more ephemeral art of my own life that I shape and create each and every day.

I dreamed last night that I was lost and stopped to ask directions. The problem was ... I couldn't remember where I had been or where I was going .. and I sure didn't know where I was. I don't have any answers here. And I know that my answers are only my own, shaped by who I've been and who I want to be. Most days I am able to find enough meaning in the way that light shifts over the East Ridge, or the sound of a child's laughter as she passes by, or the soft fur of a friendly dog, or a rich red glass of wine that mixes perfectly with a great conversation with a dear friend. These things have always sustained me. I didn't expect this particular struggle at this time of life ... I'm just grateful that I can offer storm warning and suggestions for safe passage to others.