Far and Away

Once upon a time, my brother told me that China is on the other side of the world.  I was digging in a sandpile with the cat, who was doing other things in the sandpile.  My brother said if we dug too deep, we'd fall through and go to China and never get back.  Then he moved on, presumably to drop thought bombs elsewhere.  At the tender age of 4, I was learning not to believe most of what he said.  Yet, the idea of an "other side of the world" was new and something to chew on.  For a few minutes.

Forty-five years later, in a small backyard at a small house in a suburb of Kobe, Japan, I watched an eclipse of the moon.  My hostess, a Japanese woman, was better at English than I was at Japanese.  Because being on the other side of the world confused me sometimes I asked, "Is this eclipse visible at my home in the U.S.?"  She thought a minute, translating my question and her answer internally, and said, "No." I was, after all, on the other side of the world.

Cats and eclipses and Dorothy, oh my. 

You can go far away from where you were to see where you've been.

The all-time top universal theme of human Story is: I want to go Home.  All the great heroes do it: Dorothy, E.T., Frodo, Ulysses.  They all had to leave home for some reason, and all wanted to go back.  All of them had adventures which changed them, and benefited others.  Mythologist Joseph Campbell calls this The Hero's Journey.  In myth, someone like Greek hero Ulysses goes far away, has wild and crazy experiences, and fights his way back home, where he is a wise ruler for the rest of his life.  Carl Jung describes it as a personal journey, specifically individuation: finding the self, becoming a mature and whole person. Someone who refuses the journey falls under what Jung calls the shadow. A tidy example of individuation and shadow is the small hero Frodo, in Lord of the Rings.  Frodo both physically carries and personally embodies the Light that Shines Where-There-Is-No-Light.  He never gives up his mission: to save the world, specifically his shire.

So where is Home to go to?  Frodo's journey leaves him so changed that he can't stay in the shire.  He goes off into the West with the Elves.  I had a home where cats and brothers roamed wild and free.  I had a home with children and financial responsibilities.  And a home living alone. With cats. As my personal journey through time and space winds down,  I think home is a place I've always left, to find the place that I was always creating.  It's the place to stop and share everything I picked up.

This quote hangs on my fridge:

Don't ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.  --Howard Thurman

Pretty much the same thing Campbell and Jung said.  In that spirit, I play with grandchildren, paint pictures, write stories, garden, and otherwise come alive.  After years of looking for something, it may have found me.  My cat and my brother sent me off.  I'm back in the sandbox.

• Carl Jung . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_His_Symbols  10/14/14
• Joseph Campbell.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell.  10/11/14
•  Howard Thurman (November 18, 1899 – April 10, 1981) was an influential African American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He was Dean of Chapel at Howard University and Boston University for more than two decades, wrote 21 books, and in 1944 helped found a multicultural church. Thurman, along with Mordecai Johnson and Vernon Johns, was considered one of the three greatest African-American preachers in the early 20th-century.-  Wikipedia, 10/14/14
• Rufus Jones --He distinguished between . . . negative mysticism (making contact with an impersonal force) and . . . affirmative mysticism (making contact with a personal being). He upheld that God is a personal being with whom human beings could interact. He wrote in The Trail of Life in the Middle Years, "The essential characteristic of [mysticism] is the attainment of a personal conviction by an individual that the human spirit and the divine Spirit have met, have found each other, and are in mutual and reciprocal correspondence as spirit with Spirit." . . . He exerted a major influence on the life and work of theologian Howard Thurman, who studied with him in 1929-30.

Tree Zen Me

In the middle of nowhere, where I was born, trees were ubiquitous and at-hand.  They were frames of reference for weather, locations and daily events.  They had personalities. They suffered damage and died and were mourned. They had branches for climbing, for harboring snakes, and for providing shade on steamy days.  They were black and grey in winter.  They categorized, in our Universe, an order of How Things were. 

The maple trees in the Front Yard formed double columns.  My parents planted some young ones as replacements, when needed.  These comradely trees were quiet and well-behaved. They had each other.  They were front-parlor trees. They were tolerant of children who mowed and raked and crossed between them on their way to other places.  Their limbs were high above climbing-and- swinging reach. The Front Yard was a buffer between the house and the passing road. It kept to itself.  

Some trees, on the other hand, grew in solitude.  An old maple stood a little east and south of the cistern, in front of the kitchen windows.  It  held a series of rope-and-plank swings. It shaded a sandpile.  It held a bird feeder.  It is close to 100 years old.  Its the tree I love most.  Another tree which grew in solitude at the edges of the yard is a hackberry tree.  It grew along the fence between the truck garden and the field.  An elderly neighbor woman, who lived down the road when I was a child, told my Dad that she loved to listen to the blackbirds singing in that hackberry tree at night, in the moonlight.  I don't recall the blackbirds or the singing, at all.  The hackberry tree was split almost in half during a storm, but it still grows.

And there were cedar trees. Two giant cedars, as old as Methusaleh, bordered our driveway when I was a child.  But when our old, teensy bungalow was replaced with a newly-constructed, modern (plumbing) ranch house, a neighbor bought the bungalow.  He moved it, on a flatbed wagon pulled by a tractor, down the road a few miles to his property and lived in it for many years.  However, in the process of moving it out of the narrow driveway, we had to cut down one of the guardian cedars to allow the house to pass through.  We remember and mourn the lost cedar to this day.  Its surviving fellow seems to be immortal.  It compelled Mom to compensate for its lost companion. In the following decades, she tirelessly dug up cedar saplings in the woods, and re-planted them around the edges of the farm yard.  Now, the saplings are huge and fragrant, guarding pens and fields in ascending lines of growth stages.  The surviving Methuselah cedar still stamds, aloof, at the end of the driveway.

There was another division of trees / time / space: an orchard.  Pears and apples and cherries grew on the north side of the rock driveway.  They always bore fruit, which was sometimes wormy and thrown to the cows and pigs.  But careful salvaging allowed occasional batches of pies, or of apple butter,  cooked up in a copper-lined pot in the back yard and preserved in Mom's home canning. The apple trees were kind. They were small enough and large enough to climb.  I sat in them and watched down the road where my brothers were at school.  I watched the field behind the orchard.   I watched apple leaves and sunlight and heard the wind and nothing at all. 

Places we live in never leave us.  My house today is surrounded by trees and bushes who came to live with me, sometimes planted, sometimes left by passing birds or winds. I don't take for granted the shade, the sounds, the associated wildlife, the beauty of trees.  Its nice to see organizations like the Ancient Tree Archive out of Northern Michigan, which preserve genetic material from the world's oldest beings:  ancient trees.  Its wonderful that so many people all over the world are planting trees and reforming ties.  Lord of the Rings, with the walking, talking tree warriors, remembers ancient relations with trees.  The plot of the cult movie  Avatar features great trees which are the center of spiritual connection on a planet. 




 

Hummingbirds

Beautiful late summer day, under the pergola.  Life is good.  A lone hummingbird swoops past, startling me. Hummingbirds are rare in my backyard.  A friend says, "Were you thinking of your mom?"

Mom was our family hummingbird fanatic.  She kept legions of them fed and admired for decades.  She made their preferred food--sugar water--herself, adhering to strict rituals of preparation.  She kept their feeders hygienic and full.  She picked up the occasional unfortunate who slammed into a window or another hummingbird, and stroked them with wonder and confidence until they recovered (usually recovered).  She cared for them as physically as she did for everything she loved.  When her kids left home, and after many many years when Dad left her, the hummingbirds were an outlet for some of her passionate energy.  We gave Mom hummingbird trinkets, jewelry, magnets, note cards.  Hummingbirds were part of her symbology, like Jesus and a lamb.

When Mom died, we took down the hummingbird feeders.  Nobody was there to care for them.  Maybe the neighbors who inherited the feeders will put them up in their yard, and fill in the slack.  Probably, the hummingbirds are on their own.  The livin' won't be as easy, but I hope they find enough.

I'm a displaced hummingbird this autumn.  Suddenly my job is not the place I want to be.  Whatever has been filling my feeder has moved on, so to speak.   Instead of the urge to serve and save humankind, I am having a survival kind of epiphany.  Happy is Important.  Mom's death has spotlighted my own mortality in a way I didn't expect. 

When did the choices get so hard, with so much more at stake?
Life gets pretty precious when there's less of it to waste (1).

There are other avenues of finding enough.  Hummingbirds can attest: all good things come to an end, look for the next good thing. 

When I see a hummingbird, I think of Mom.   The hummingbirds will not lay down and die of grief. Their life is their own.  They'll think of something.

 
1.  Raitt, Bonnie.  "Love in the Nick of Time;" song.