ROCKPORT MORNING

Doves call

Summer breeze

Rustling leaves

Distant bell over sleepy town

Lobster boat chugs the harbor round

Beyond grassy meadows

Immense sea glistens early light

Birds take flight

For Suzanne

Friend, Suzanne Miller, passed away suddenly - March 2015
When we first moved to Cape Ann, she and her husband came to visit and she brought gifts, then invited me to an evening beach picnic over labor day.

There you were with gifts

Basket filled 

loaf of bread, candle and wine

a feast for friends

The real treasures?

the sustenance of your smile, your warmth, your joy

I see you on the beach that night

moon rising over the incoming tide

lighting the tin lanterns against the wind

when all the while

it was you who were

light and warmth in the dark and cold

Worry Doll

Finn took the one-inch square, rainbow-striped bag from his shelf, pulled open the drawstring and turned it over. Six painted wooden matchstick figures fell into his small hand. I watched him delicately pick up one at a time to look at. 

 “What are those?” I asked, reaching for the little scroll that fell out with them. 

“They’re worry dolls, Nonna!” Finn said in a tone suggesting that I should have known exactly what they were. I read out loud from the paper scroll. "According to legend, Guatemalan children tell their worries to the dolls, place them under their pillows at night, and all worries are gone by morning."

Give me a few dozen, I thought, but said only, “I didn’t know that. Shall we put some under our pillows tonight?

“Of course we should!”

When it was time for bed, Finn picked out three of the tiny figures for himself and gave me the other three. Grandmother and grandchild each whispered our worries to the dolls and placed them under our pillows. Then I opened the evening story book and read until Finn’s eyes began to close.

I should have been tired enough to sleep too. But, as was my habit before sleep (if sleep comes at all) all the things there were to worry about crowded my mind: my husband’s progressing disease; my dear friend’s terminal illness; my regrets about all the things I might have done, or done differently, or not done at all! I started to think about the random violence, pain and suffering that was happening right then all over the world--in war zones, in cities and towns-- while I lay in a warm, safe and comfortable bed. As if that weren’t enough to keep me awake I began to think about aging and inevitability of my own death.

Why do I do this? What were the three worries I had whispered to the dolls? I didn’t remember, but I wondered if more people than I might imagine were also worrying at that moment, or did I alone have such a negative state of mind by nature?

The senses of the body and sharpness of mind beginning to dull, and with more life behind me than in front, I tried to come to terms with the loss. Where was my youthful motivation for looking ahead and welcoming each challenge with the kind of strength and enthusiasm I once had. With all that, and the progression of my husband’s Parkinson’s quickly diminishing his health and former self, there was the sadness at everything slowing down, except time. I now take more time to do things that had once been done with facility and not a thought. Also, my forgetting a word here, a name there, left me hoping these are not the first symptoms of the dreaded “A” word disease.

I recalled how my father used to go out with his shirt inside out (I did that the other day), and how he once got into his car to drive to the donut shop and found himself sitting instead in the back seat. About that same time I noticed how slowly my mother was walking, with an obvious sense of caution and uncertainty, and her admirable attempts to “keep up.” Now they both are gone, and oh! the many regrets and things left unsaid and undone.

Although I myself continue to do all the things I have always done, it is with increasing effort, not only to accomplish them, but also to appear as though nothing is different. I, for instance, try now, as my mother once did when walking, to keep up with younger people. Is it better if my family notices and asks if I need help with things, or if no one notices?

In a recurring dream I am standing at the top of a long stairway I must descend. It is open on both sides, no rails and each individual stair impossibly steep, like an Alice in Wonderland scene--no way down or back.

When I get to the point where my thoughts twist themselves into self-perpetuating loops, I prompt myself to initiate another evening ritual: counting my blessings. It is a noble effort to displace the worries with all the things to be grateful for, which are very many. After 45 years of marriage, ("shear madness" we sometimes call it), my husband and I remain together, support and love one other. We laugh a lot (about eating and drinking ourselves to death in retirement), and live comfortably within our modest means. Both of our sons have found creative work (without our having had to pay for college educations--their choice). They love their work, and make a living at it. I still have my dear friend whose enthusiasm for life, even as she prepares for death, is a shining inspiration. I am grateful that I write, and still at least interested in planning and projects which keep me from from boredom and despair. 

And there are our joy-filled grandchildren, Finn and Sula, beautiful, bright, happy, healthy--the most cherished blessings.

I look forward to and love being with my family. When I visit, I am welcomed, feel useful and valued for the love and warmth, both given and received. Worries are pushed, at those times, to the periphery. Finn’s joy and interest in everything lifts life above the ordinary into another realm, and he is pleased to have me near him. “I love you, Nonna,” he says, sometimes with his eyes closed, ready to drift off into that angelic state of sleep so visible on a child’s face.

At bedtime the night after we placed our worry dolls under our pillows, Fiinn called to me, “Oh, Nonna, look! The worry dolls--we forgot." He reached under the pillows to gather them. Then, with wide eyes, “Hey, but I still have my worries; they didn’t go away." He told me of his fears--having bad dreams and of his house burning down. I felt that twinge of compassion one feels for children when they begin to realize that there is no magic to escape the possible real dangers we fear. 

Then, remarkably, he observed, “Well, the scroll did say it was a legend, didn’t it Nonna?”

“Yes, yes it did,” I agreed, with the sense that I was more child and he more adult, “so we may not be able to wish a worry away, but we also have to remember that what we worry about may never ever happen." 

Finn and I, nevertheless, decided that we would again tell the dolls our worries and try again. “Nonna, I am afraid to go to sleep and have those bad dreams. "Dreams, dreams go away.” Finn said earnestly with his eyes tightly closed.

“Well, we know what to do for that?”

“Go to the other side of day, right Nonna?”

After stories and songs, if Finn still feels uneasy, we sit up on the bed and I start an incantation. Finn and I get into the cross-legged position, our hands, open and turned upward on our knees. “Close your eyes and let your body melt, like a stick of butter in a pan. Now, let’s go to the other side of day. Take three deep breaths--slowly, in and out, in and out, in and out." Then I chant a Latin prayer learned in childhood, “Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,” * to lend an air of mystery and magic. The words are accompanied by hand gestures that Finn imitates, pushing day away in the seven directions, ending with our hands crossed over our hearts.

“I feel better, Nonna.”

I looked at him, and felt tears welling, “Nonna has to leave tomorrow, and I’m very sad. I won’t see you for a while, and I’ll miss you so terribly.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow, Nonna?”

“Yes, sweetie.”

With his innocent, wide and wise blue eyes, he looked straight into mine, “Well, Nonna, it’s not tomorrow now!

I felt my heart would stop.

Then we lay down holding hands and listened to the quiet. After a few minutes, Finn was asleep. It’s not tomorrow now, indeed. Why did I place my worry and sadness on him, as though he were my own little worry doll? Yet, instead of his taking on my worry, he nullified it with the wisdom, clarity and truth of innocence.

No, it’s not tomorrow now, and it's not yesterday. There is only "the present where time touches eternity," and that is heaven on earth. I fell asleep whispering the rest of the Latin prayer: dona nobis pacem.**

* Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world
** Grant us peace.

JAPA

“If there had been only one Buddhist in the woodpile” 
That cynical idealist, realist poet of the people once pondered.

Substitute Waco, Texas with any and all absurdity of violence
Before then, until now and beyond tomorrow

If Isis, the Egyptian mother goddess protector of all
had been in the woodpile in Iraq

could the children have been saved?

the Christians, Yazidi, Sunni,

the young men killed

by black masked executioners

their faces well hidden

                             

Isis: they have taken your name in vain

perverted your purpose.

Could any power prevent mass murder, carnage, brutality? 

Only consciousness can
Not Bodhisattva or saint-like consciousness

But the tiniest bit of wonder before the infinite universe

A modest intimation of human spirit

One clear glimpse of beauty, goodness, love

In an instant might engender compassion

for the pain, suffering and sorrow of "the other"

That glimmer of consciousness might have asked: 

"With my life, here and now, what will I do? 

What do I wish to bring into being, to experience? 

Men of war have ever said thus:

“I will assert and secure my power over the weak and helpless"

through terror, torture, rape and death

Shedding blood of innocents with the arrogance of zeal

Such is the history of the world

a "nightmare from which we are trying to awaken,"

And what will the warriors rule over

these modern hoards at the gates of civilization?

Chaos and devastation?

Keeping watch, lest the same thing befall them

Born of the pain and malice they engendered in others?

No deus ex machina descends upon us.

While the Buddhists wait and meditate

Clapping one hand

MISSING

Parts of me are missing

I don’t know what they are

 or where to look for them

I only sense sometimes--the gaps

spaces that keep me from wholeness

standing under the stars last night

the tide coming in

wind blowing restless

preferring the familiarity of my small room

where I am not reminded of the what I could not name 

in the dark mystery of the infinite. 

Why?

I fold the laundry

wash out the green glass

sweep the leaves from my doorway

 put everything in its place

except the fragments of myself--out there somewhere

or within, so near but

deeper than I can go

FOR BOO

For Mary "Boo" Budash - Crossed the Threshold  May 2014

You, poised at the bank of the Seine

alone, like a country girl

innocent in blue
Madone de la rivière you seemed
full of grace.

We did not know you then
but sensed in the friend and poet you became
what radiates in that image.

Your inward gaze
the water's serenity
flowing from and to
that moment you left us
all that transpired
all that transformed
along the way 

visible to us now
we will remember.

ON THIS GROUND

Nora was comforted to know Indians had once danced on on the ground where her son had taken his last breath. She did not discover that until today, after wondering all through summer and fall if she had somehow imagined his death. Since that rainy evening she had slept on the sofa in the front room with the shades up, waiting to see him coming up the walkway or to hear him open the door.

When she arrived at the accident scene that night, she saw the chalked outline of his body. Only an hour before, at the hospital, his young face was at peace. She was given a blue plastic bag containing his sweatshirt, keys, cigarette lighter, wallet, phone, some change, and an arrowhead he always carried with him.

She reached for the sweatshirt, held it to her face, inhaled, and pulled it over her head. She walked the few steps to the chalked outline and lay down within it on the wet, leaf-strewn sidewalk.

In his last moments, did he suffer, think of me, call out, pray? Did he know he would die, hope he would live? Was he already unconscious when he was thrown from the car? 

These were questions Nora lived with and sometimes spoke out loud or wrote down over and over again on sleepless nights. She thought of all the times she had held him, comforted him when he was a boy. In the end he was alone.

This morning in late December, she awakens to the crisp stillness before a snow.  This is the day of winter solstice with lengthening days ahead. With that promise of light, it comes to her so clearly, she must to go to where the chalk outline has long faded, where no trace of shattered glass remains.

Only burning grief remains. Each day upon wakening it assails her, but on this morning she feels moved to give over to time and reason. He is not going to call; He is not going to walk past the window. He is not coming home.

Feeling an urgency, she dresses, pulls the shades down on the front windows and locks the door. It irritates her when the phone rings.

“Hi, Addie, what’s up?”

“Hey, Mom. Nothing much. How are you?”

“Good. I’m good, how about you?”

“I’m fine just checking in. They’re calling for snow today.”

  “Oh?” Nora looks out the window. “I see it’s flurrying already. You’ll be happy to know I’m going for a walk.”

It’s a revelation to Addie. Partly elated that her mother plans to do anything at all, other than wait, and partly concerned at the sudden change. “What, where? I mean that’s great, Mom, but the snow. How about if I come over and we walk together like we used to, or maybe we could just have coffee and walk tomorrow?”

“No, no, I’ll be fine. I have to go today. I’m leaving now for Three Island Cove," already sorry she has told Addie where she is headed. "See you tonight though, right?”

“No, I mean yes, you will see me tonight, but…Mom, wait. I’ll be right over. Don’t go without me. You shouldn't go by yourself.”

“Now, don’t worry. You’ve been telling me to get out and do something, and now I am. See you tonight.”

“I…I wanna go with…”

Nora hangs up, hoping Addie won’t show up at the cove. She knows it’s been hard for Addie too, and that maybe she has made it harder on her, but grief is a private matter, to be protected not shared—not even with her own daughter—her “favorite,” as Andrew used to say.

She enters Andrew’s darkened room, which remains as it was on the night he left and never returned: curtains drawn; an unmade bed; video games; on the floor; empty cigarette pack, and batteries on the bedside table. A job application and resume on his desk remind her that, in his slow, deliberate way, Andrew was ready to make changes in his life.

Each morning since his death, she calls into the room, “good morning,” and in the evening a “good night,” but not today. She goes for the blue bag at the foot of the bed, takes out the sweatshirt, holds it close to her once again, lifts it to her lips, then slips it on. She hurries to the hall closet for coat, hat and gloves and steps out into the cold air, emerging into what seems like a new world.

It’s just the old world I hardly recognize, where people have been going places and doing things, living their lives as usual. For her, there has been no usual, no place to go, nothing to do and no life to live—only her world of grief—vast and deep.

It’s so quiet, so white, so pure.

Her senses open on the deserted street, where holiday lights glimmer from houses and trees. Head down against the wind, she sees snowflakes sparkle, then fade on the sidewalk. She hears the sounds of icy branches stirring in the wind and her quickening breath, as it turns to frosty mist in front of her.  The pace of her lengthening stride uphill sets her heart pounding; a burning cold fills her lungs. 

  Disoriented by the opening of the forgotten world outside herself, she also begins to sense something inside —unwanted and unwelcome. Out of her inner landscape, there seem to be thought threads being cast backward in time, attaching to images, people, places and events—connecting her with her son. Her impulse is to turn around and head back to the familiar stasis of home, but her intuition and the intensity of the experience compels her: Keep going.

What is this feeling of contracting and expanding at the same time? These intimations of truths, both light and dark? Were those days and nights of ritual sorrow preparing the ground for all that flows from her now? Maybe, yes. Something is shifting. Why? To where? Threads of questions, regrets, love and loss stream out, weave together; emotion gushes in waves, leaving her  breathless— a deluge to drown in.

The widening circumference of memory touches many truths, exposes illusions, illuminates things forgotten, brings the yet unknown to the surface. Nora had not wanted a second child.

Was that really twenty years ago? I don’t know why, but when Addie was born, I felt normal, whole again. She brought me down to earth. A beautiful gift, taking away the darkness. Life was bearable again, redemption for past transgressions. With Andrew, I had to reach into myself…find strengths I didn’t know I have. Matt said I saw everything too dark or too light… deluded myself. I knew he was right, but couldn’t let him know that he knew me that well.

    She remembers that, as a baby Andrew had been content but less responsive to affection than was Addie. He didn't like to be held and was often ill. A dreamy, independent, willful and irritable child, he tried her patience. More than that, as he grew, she felt he was asking her to change in order to see who he was, to discover what he needed, which was hard—maybe impossible.

Matt said Andrew was my “project.” He wanted no part in it, wasn’t interested in my one-woman show. I shut him out—and everybody and everything else too.

Early on there had been signs that, while Andrew may not have been as “awake” as Addie, he had extraordinary insight about the essence and purpose of things. Nora felt he was a puzzle, a paradox and, in many ways, knew more about life than she did. His intuition and sensitive nature engendered a deep love in her, but an uneasy one. Something was asked in exchange. She tried to figure out what it was, but never had. She became convinced Andrew's inherent wisdom was meant to guide his parents to discover parts of themselves that were missing, to the self-knowledge they lacked. His father did not agree, insisting that nothing had to be done—except to live their lives.

I didn’t have to push Matt away like that….I shouldn't have. I miss him terribly. There, I’ve said it. He was right. I created my own Greek tragedy, got in my own way, and in Andrew's too. It wasn’t a good place to be, above all things like that. I felt Addie had lifted a burden, but I guess I just placed it on Andrew instead. He had to tolerate my mothering and smothering; suffer for Matt's leaving us; for my trying to be father and mother; for our move away from the only home he had ever known and loved. Did he carry that resentment to his death? And I never got the chance to….I failed him in every way.

“Oh, Andrew, can you forgive me?” she asks out loud.

By the time she reaches the place she had dreaded, but at which she longed to be, a perfect, almost visible imagination had formed. Perfect in that it is whole, woven in reverse from moments in time, expanding outward, encompassing the lives of a mother, a son, and a family—then, now and forever.

Looking up, she notices a sign post rising from the pavement—one of those placards noting some bit of history.

Why haven’t I seen this before? Was it always here?

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN. Due east from here on

July 16, 1605, the Sieur de Monts sent Samuel de

Champlain ashore to parley with some Indians.

They danced for him and traced an outline map of

Massachusetts Bay.

Nora remains for some time gazing at the sign   with the new-found realization that long ago something extraordinary took place here. An exchange, a sharing, a trust, an encounter between the strangers who had arrived on a foreign shore and the Native Americans who danced to welcome them, and shared their knowledge of the land—a living knowledge inside of them.

She reaches down to touch the ground.

And it was here, too, where another soul had departed—Andrew, whom she had both striven to know and to become more like.

Has he united with the others from another time?

In an instant, she became the bare trees, the grey sky and the falling snow, a small but integral part within creation, which holds all that was, is and will be.

“Time,” Nora smiles, “another illusion. We are all here—then and now and tomorrow.”

       How long she remained in this reverie of her own creation, in the light of the knowledge the placard had shed, who can say?

A few snowflakes float down like feathers. Feeling the cold more than before, even though the wind has subsided, she turns, glances back, then begins walking quickly downhill.

There is Addie coming toward her, smiling and waving as she makes her way amid the lights twinkling from trees and houses along the still, quiet street.

*“SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN. Due east from here…” from the inscription on the historic marker at Whale Cove on South Street in Rockport, Massachusetts.

The Measure of the Universe

In Genesis, God spoke the world into being. In the New Testament, we have, “In the beginning was the Word.” We are given these imaginative truths that speech or sound has formative power,  bringing form/substance into being and that, “The Word,” or “Logos” has always been. We also find in Shelley's epic play, Prometheus Unbound, that Prometheus, a demigod who stole fire from the gods, a “gave man speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe” (II.iv.72-73). What these two sources suggest is that language is a mediator between humanity and divinity.

Language is what separates humans from other sentient beings in our ability to communicate not just informtion or feelings through sound, but also intentions, plans, logic in precisce, as well as subtle, nuanced layers of thought and meaning. Language creates meaning and, thus, thought. In this way, language builds and expands consciousness and conscience.

Although I am not a member of an organized religion, I was brought up in Catholicism. I am grateful for those early experiences, not the dogma, indoctriation, judgment I and others may have experienced, but all  which helped create a foundation for my inner life—experiences of seeing, hearing and feeling beauty. The interior of the church inspired awe and reverence: the reverence for the sacred experienced in the services, the gleaming red votives; the artwork and statues, and frangrance of flowers and incense; the images on and color and light streaming through the stained-glass windows.

I loved Saturday confessions, not for the act of confession itself, but before and after it, sitting quietly in an empty church. Each sound echoed through the space. In the presence of the figure on the cross, the somber saints on the side alters and silent angels in paintings on walls and ceiling, there was mystery. I felt at home in wonder, which the Greeks tell us is the beginning of wisdom.

I listened on Sundays, Holy Days and at funerals to the liturgies, prayers and hymns, first in Latin, which was beautiful and the meaning obscured also imparted ony the beauty and mystery of its sound. I recall my first apprehension of the spiritual—being lifted above the ordinary, although I couldn't have put that feeling into words back then. It came through words in one of the Latin prayers that was about the power of the word. Once heard, it reverberated through and in me (and still does): Dómine, non sum dignus, ut inters sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo et sanábitur anima mea. We also recited it in English:

Oh, Lord I am not worthy that thou should come under my roof. Only say the word and my soul will be healed. 

“Only say the word and my soul will be healed" was a revelation to me as a child, as it is now: that words can and do heal, that they both express and shape wisdom-filled thoughts and have a life which I cann breathe in! Such word-thoughts offer a sense of hope and renewal, are felt as light, and can be called upon again and again as a source of comfort, strength, and even of actions I might not otherwise take, had I not been inspired by them.

As an adult, I found a life inseparable from layers of language as an English teacher and writer, grounded in the “trinity” of language: power, beauty and meaning, which long ago planted a seed within me. 

I imagine that, if such a thing could be observed, the palest shade of green would have been seen through the thin shell of my young soul—ever so pale, but green, green and growing.

GOD IS LOVE

Driving for hours, he starts to wonder if the road stretching ahead is endless. His anxiety building—like when he first tried to grasp the idea of “forever,” or envision the universe expanding outward—into what, into where? Colors and shapes blur together and fade: tree branches into sky; gravel edging the road into fields of dried cornstalks. Wispy clouds line the glowing horizon at sunset as he travels west. This is how he remembers it in the cold season.

He is going back after so many years. He doesn’t know what he will see, or what he will say, but he needs to close the circle of his life, “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

By early morning, he sees the farmhouse rising darkly against a brightening sky. His eyes fix it as he turns on to the long, narrow earthen drive. The fence on the perimeter is broken in some places, missing in others; some of the once-sheltering oaks are gone. They have been living only in his memory, but the old poplars still stand on either side of the front porch, with its wooden steps sagging into the damp earth. Twisting bramble and weeds crowd the flower gardens that once grew in sunny spots.

Ahead, loom rusted parts of yellow and green farm equipment, abandoned near the barn with part of the roof down on one side. He sees the fading painted image covering the top half of the barn facing the house, the first thing he saw each morning from his bedroom window: a red cross against shafts of light, over which the words are printed: GOD IS LOVE.

He remains in the car, his eyes closed, until he shivers from the cold. Emerging, he walks toward the house, observing broken windows, warped siding, and fallen shingles on the path to the back door. Entering the low doorway, he bends in a gesture of forced humility.

There is the wide stone hearth, charred ends of logs still across a blackened grate. Here is where the oak table stood, he and his sister set for Sunday dinners. He stops, moves his hand over the place where it had been. Entering  the front room, he scans the whole of it camera-wise. Tall windows line the west wall where, on summer afternoons, he would read stretched out on the window seat below, imagining he was drifting to a sun-soaked Greek isle.

The windows, coated with a fine yellow film,  diffuse the light through the vacant room. He sees, not the empty space, but everything as it had been on the day he left—with no warning, no word. A rocking chair next to the fireplace; an old-style standing radio the family would gather round to listening to hymns on Sunday evenings; a sofa opposite the fireplace; his father’s straight-backed chair with its black, crackled leather seat; a marble-topped table with frosted globe lamp painted with peonies, matching the ones on the wall paper—now worn in places down to the plaster. How elated and proud his mother had been when she papered the walls herself, saying, “There, now we have a proper sitting room.”

All the while, his memory projects a tableau of intimate vignettes and voices from the past into the room that smells of earth and cold, and feels like pain. He has arrived—returned from another world to speak to his God-fearing family, who had raised him to work on the land, making sure he was educated enough to run the farm. All gone now, they had waited years for his return. He has to believe they will gather here again, in spirit to listen to what he has come to say.

Outside, the wind kicks up, whining through the house, rattling the remaining shutters. His fingers, though gloved, are numb. He heads outside to gather kindling. Tiny vortices of golden dust rise up here and there as he picks up broken branches and twigs to build a fire to warm the frigid room. When the fire blazes, in the glowing warmth of its flames, he conjures his imaginary family, summoning them to hear the truth of his life. 

He wonders, Is reconciliation more possible with spirits than with living beings?

There is his mother, seated at the front windows, gazing out; his father stands at her side. His sister, Anna curls on the rocker next to the fire. His abandoned lover on the threshold, her back to the room. He can’t recall her face—only her despair.

He wants to say, “Call me Ishmael, Gilgamesh, Oedipus. I have seen the white whale, entered the cedar forest, solved the famous riddle.” But, those are his inspirations; they never would understand. He will speak in plain language, though those epic figures and their stories still live within him, the foundation for his thinking about  the world, life, and himself.

To the conjured visions now assembled for his homecoming, he states his case:

“When I was a boy, I read about heroes’ journeys, and I knew I had to set out on my own. I don’t think of myself as a hero, but I do think that simply living life is heroic, contending with all the forces coming against it. Here I am…battle-weary from forging my own path. I have survived, as I must believe you also have. There is no end to our journeys, here or beyond. There is always still a far way to go.”

He had set out long ago, leaving everything behind, toward what he had hoped would foster consciousness and conscience. He freed himself to leave the known for what was out there yet to be discovered, and to acquire an understanding of what it is to be human, which his youthful readings and musings had begun to suggest.

“I strove toward a vision, but…I am flawed, still so flawed.” His tale unravels, partly in sorrow without remorse, partly in victory without joy. “Maybe it is I who need to hear my own story to grasp it, but I put it before you,” he, hoping in whatever feeble way, he might atone for the pain he had caused.

“I wasn’t ungrateful or, at least, I never connected what I did or didn’t do with ingratitude.” Early on, he knew he would not replay the worn record of his father’s life and his father’s before him.

He intends to acknowledge to his sister the he abandoned her, after the confidences they had shared. He wants to kneel before his mother to ask forgiveness for his “mysterious disappearance,” for her never to have looked upon his face again, for his not having fulfilled her reasonable expectation that her family remain near, and that life go on in the same way ever after.

He thought to apologize to his young lover, whose beauty and innocence must have long ago faded. Her words, screamed to him still resounding, "If you leave me, I’ll hang myself from the barn rafters.”

“No, no you won’t! Don’t say that,”he had shouted back, feeling held hostage to others’ expectations and needs, but also bound to them by love.“I can’t stay to save everyone else and lose my self.” The next day, with guilt and grief, but with the vision of the life before him, he did the thing he had to do.

“I veered off the trajectory created for me…set sail on my own voyage, uncharted and blown off course many times,” as he remembered his wish to see wide rivers, not content with irrigation ditches and small streams trickling through the countryside: “I wanted to see the Nile, the Amazon, cities rising against the sky: Athens, Paris. I wanted to meet people who didn’t live as we did in what I had come to think of as this God-forsaken place.”

His mother had said it was not God-forsaken, ”God is everywhere the eye can see and the heart can feel—horizon to horizon.” If that is so, he tried to reason with her, couldn’t He then be found in other lands and landscapes—ones that would better serve to shape and grow something still small inside himself? He wanted to see the open ocean, stand before and climb mountains, meet and get to know people not like him, people who might be God and angels in disguise—strangers who would become his guests.

“When I finally settled after years of wandering, it was on that island on the wide Hudson. I felt I had found my place…my home.” There he saw those driven in black limos stopping at hotels, theaters and restaurants. “I made my way among them, but mingled with those who had lost their way, but not their souls.” To those he had dedicated himself—those who carried the sum of their lives in carts or plastic bags, maybe disguising sainthood beneath blank and somber eyes.

“How can I tell you what it would have meant for me to have stayed here? What it has meant for me to have done what I did, see what I have seen? I did what I had to do…trade the predictable for… for the possible. Here, yes, I was secure and comfortable, but… I didn't want that. I…I didn’t know what I would wanted, or what I would find, only that I needed the unpredictable…and some sense of fulfillment.”

He turns toward the windows, “Mother, you said I was a dreamer, a doubter, selfish. Father, you said I was lazy, a sinner, a bad influence on Anna with my wild talk of journeys and trials…that I was wasting my time reading what you called ‘those foolish books.’”

Then to Anna, “I have prayed you found your way and lived a life you chose,” as they had often encouraged each other to do, but wondering through the years if she had instead submitted to the life laid out before them. Had she been left utterly alone?

He glanced at the figure in the shadowy doorway, but could say nothing, the snare of her last words to him having left a crusted over wound on his heart.

He paused until he could recall the urgency that had propelled him beyond all considerations to leave, and how the ideas in those books became ideals to be acted upon—light-filled thoughts that opened up all the color of dreams, inspiring  his plan to free himself, body, and soul.

“When I was a boy, I loved this house…the picnics, the Sunday prayers, the hymns, and I always loved you…all. I knew what you wanted for me, and…I wanted to be good, to be grateful.” How he had struggled to be obedient, to honor father and mother—the commandment they repeated almost daily, noting the fires of hell awaited those who transgressed it, or any of the other nine “shall” and “shall nots,” until he could obey only one commandment: to experience life by following the fire within him.

“Please, Mother, I know you thought I should be content to be here, where I was born, but I…I had to walk into the world…on the narrow path of my own making…my own…limitations. I guess I…I had to learn things the hard way, and not just believe or follow all the things you tried to teach me. I couldn’t live up to what everyone else expected. I had my own expectations, and have come to believe as certainly as you had in your beliefs.” 

He speaks what he could not articulate before he had lived it. “We have not come to earth to blindly fulfill the dictates of God or man, ignoring our own experience, avoiding our own thoughts and questions, denying our doubts. Wouldn’t an omniscient God have foreseen, even intended rebellion? The disobedience of Adam and Eve was not sin, but a picture of destiny, human destiny—to be cast out of a perfect garden, to lose our innocence and to learn through suffering. To be fully human is to…to choose the good—in freedom, not out of command or fear. 

    If I hadn’t left, how else would I have come to know that evil is a mystery woven into the very fabric of the universe? Evil is not so much to be resisted but endured. Good and evil are all mixed up, one can be mistaken for the other, and what we think is good may turn to bad, while our good intentions can affect others in ways we couldn’t have imagined, no matter what we intended.”

He knows his own rebellion, by default or design, has moved toward his becoming “one with the Father” and was meant to achieve that fulfillment alone.

“I wanted to find my own fulfillment. And I did once…for a while. At least the kind I had imagined could be mine, with a red-haired woman I loved too much. She painted my portrait in blue with a gold halo. That was before our son was born with his spine outside of his body,” he swallowed hard. “On the first anniversary of his death, I came home to find…she was gone.” For the first time, the realization comes to him with excruciating clarity that she had vanished, just as he had from the sad farmhouse in which he now stands. He had never spoken the words out loud before—until now.

“I burned the portrait, along with the letters I had written each day for a year, with nowhere to send them. What would I do with all the love remaining?

“I had wanted to find life—as if it were something to find rather than to live…too proud in my belief…or my illusion that I was destined somehow to find fulfillment. Instead I lived alone with yet another mystery, until I took in a young man in rags with violet eyes who danced in night in St. Mark’s Place—asking nothing in return for his performances of grace and beauty—but a witness.”

He had meant to speak many more things into the quiet room to those he imagines are listening now. He is spent, empty to speak of the years roaming the city streets, to which he will return after this pilgrimage to the past—maybe stronger, maybe more broken.

All at once his life appears before him—as a sacrifice, forfeiting simplicity for the sublime, facts for hard-won knowledge. With the vision, comes a warmth, a calm, the frosted breath of his words visible, his voice hollow and weak.

“I am sorry for the pain I caused and…wish only…that peace be with you—now and forever.” And he feels it is so.

The wind has died down, the fire gone to embers. Across the fields, the sun is low in the late afternoon sky.  The circle is closed, he on the outside, the imaginary figures fading into the darkening room.

*“whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” paraphrased from “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” attributed to multiple sources, including Dante and St. Augustine, with the earliest being Empedocles (490 - 430 BC).