Days of Smoke and Boxes

Sometimes it all comes apart. I should understand this by now, but I’m in mid-tumble, and it took me by surprise. When I consider the cruelties, sorrows, and destruction unfolding in the wider word, my personal concerns feel minor, and yet, this is the sea in which I sail, and my little vessel is leaky. Meanwhile, the sky is hazy from the Gifford Fire to the north and east of us; it’s fairly distant, but it’s huge and ominous, and it adds to the sense of worry and fragility.

I am sitting among boxes, and we are neither here nor there. We have begun the process of moving, but nothing is certain, and we are dismantling our lives with no destination and possibly not even able to leave. Without going into details, I’ll just say we are dealing with betrayal and disillusionment, conflicting ideas about ethics and integrity, and self-righteous hypocrisy. I’m getting an unsettling hunch that much of what I believed to be true may have been my own idealistic creation. I know better than to slide into that kind of doubt, but I never imagined I would experience such bitterness and heartache at the conclusion of this chapter. There’s a Yiddish word for it: tsuris.

But I’ll put all that on hold for the duration of this little writing session. A few days ago, we had dinner with two brilliant and well-known musician friends, and, among other things, they talked about practicing and how crucial it is, even well into their careers, and the surprising gifts it yields. It got me to thinking about “practice” in the sense of a noun-concept, as in the practice of writing, or the practice of prayer. One’s practice, I thought, is the action, craft, work, or expression that is your essence, the doing of the fundamental thing that develops your being. For me, it is writing. It took me a long time to realize that.

And so, I am writing to help me process this very strange time, to steady myself, and perhaps discover what is within and without that I can now only sense in useless and amorphous ways. I am writing with no plan, writing as a pilgrim, just meandering.

We are culling objects, organizing and streamlining things in order to travel lighter. Isn’t it amazing how much extraneous stuff accumulates? And I’m spending lots of time contemplating artifacts and personal possessions, totems and remnants of my own and other lives. They do contain stories, but I am beginning to see the wisdom and potential peace in letting most of it go. My friend calls this “Swedish Death Cleaning.” It makes a lot of sense.

And speaking of writing, I’ve been throwing away my old journals, one by one, after quick perusals, occasionally tearing out interesting or significant passages. I don’t know why I saved all these pages. No one cares, not even me. Sometimes old sorrows are awakened, surprisingly raw and viscerally painful. But I remember these anyway. I don’t need to see it written out.

What has pleased and surprised me most are morsels of my little girl’s verbal journal, a daily narration that I used to transcribe in my Mommy days. She talked of playing dress-up and bouncing along in the trailer which I pulled on our bike rides, having breakfast with Daddy before he went to work, eating a popsicle, losing a sock. “Sometimes I’m a flower girl, and sometimes I’m a heart girl!” she famously announced one day, and that gives you a sense of her delightful personality. I can still picture her running and dancing in the living room, acting out The Nutcracker, surprising me with her comments and observations––a “streak of color and joy”, as I put it then.

One day, she said, “Mommy, you know what you are? You’re the rock I hold onto when I feel afraid.”

Yes, she really did say that, and I wrote it down, and when you think about it, that’s all I need to keep. The Mommy journals went into the dumpster. I won’t forget what matters.

My journals from the dismal 1970s were easier to discard, and in the 1990s, there was a great deal of anguish about the deaths of my loved ones and troubles related to my family of origin. As I said, I don’t need written reminders of all that. It’s inscribed indelibly on my heart with painful clarity.

Then there was the era of teaching. I unearthed and enjoyed many vignettes from those days, and felt the fullness of having been fed. I threw those journals away too, after copying out a few random passages, such as these words from a day when the middle school kids and I watched an old Marx Brothers movie during our Cultural Literacy afternoon elective:

Harpo strums his gilded harp, enchanting us across the chasm of six decades,
twenty kids on a rainy day in an old house converted to a classroom,
our pencils scratch the pages of our journals,
sometimes stumbling with nothing to say,
not like Groucho, who always had a line,
or Harpo’s silent eloquence,
but aren’t we lucky to be here,
sitting on used furniture in a roomful of friends,
including the dead ones who still make us laugh?

Sometimes we time-traveled.

And sometimes we write to live twice.

I jotted down the following thought during my teaching days, and it seems especially fitting now:

There is the possibility of finding what you have to be enough, of staying here and tending to things, frugal with everything but love, traveling far and wide through the hearts of those whose lives you touched, who will sail through time like a thousand little boats carrying lanterns, sometimes leaving laughter in their wake.

And I copied a few random responses to the prompt of “Who Am I?” I don’t recall if these were by kids or my own amateur poetic stabs, but they charmed me:

I am a restless pony tied up in the barn.
I am a book that starts out slowly.
I am a shadow in the moonlight.
I am a felt hat and a woolen scarf trying to ward off the icy wind.
I am a song without music.

Of course, I have since learned that there are endless answers to that question, for we are always changing. One of my favorite poems comes to mind, “The Layers” by Stanley Kunitz. It begins with these lines:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

Many lives. I see this now, surrounded by boxes and history and sadness. And I am indeed struggling not to stray from that principle of being, my abiding essence, the true core of myself. I think it is the earnest ten-year-old Cynthia who is most at home within my rickety exterior.

Meanwhile, trying to maintain perspective, I am aware of being as ephemeral as my discarded journals, and relatively insignificant, but somehow also capable of making meaning and shining light and mattering in this small arena where I stand.

And I also know that the disillusionment I am experiencing in my personal realm is exponentially mirrored in “the news”. A few days ago, in response to a comment from a reader expressing the panic and dismay so many of us are feeling, Robert Hubbell wrote this:

“It may be our task to ‘be the resistance’ for a generation. If so, that is a sacred and important task. Others before us performed similar work, knowing that they might not see the fruits of their labor. The important point is that we do not give up.”

I’m still in there. No matter what.

Just now, I stood at the sink eating an orange freshly picked from the tree, and as the juice and sweetness dribbled down my chin, I looked out through the kitchen window and watched evening shadows fall upon the golden hills, and all that wonder came to me, singing like a hymn of affirmation. There are piles of boxes at my feet and heaps of things that suddenly don’t matter very much, and there’s so much work to do, but that was a heck of an orange.

My earnest inner essence may be disappointed and bruised, but she hasn’t gone away.

Here’s an unattributed quote I heard somewhere and wrote in one of those journals about thirty years ago: