End of A Road

On the hall wall by the bathroom hangs an original oil painting by a neighborhood friend of my mother’s family. Dr. Carl Quosig picked up the skill of a paint brush after he put down his skill with a scalpel.

I remember meeting him once in his attic room turned into a studio. His house was as weathered as his face and the welcoming warmth of its interior matched the cheerful gleam in his eyes. Fascinated by his many canvases, my mom and I were treated to a range of subjects from landscaping, flowers, city streets, and several depictions of monks in various stages of inebriation. My mom chose the one of the monk passed out in the wine cellar with the monastery’s cleric looking disapprovingly down a very pointed nose. Dr. Quosig gifted us with the one that is now hanging in my home.

The 8 X 11 canvas shows a once muddy road, now drying under a late summer sun and disappearing through a stand of trees whose leaves are gloriously orange and yellow and red. In the distance, gray mountains stand beneath mounds of white clouds looking as if recently whipped into stiffness and waiting to top a fruit cobbler.

This carefully crafted scene housed in a frame my mother refinished in cherry maple stain appears to me as if I’m looking out a window. For all the years it hung in my parents’ home and then in mine, I have studied every detail. As a youngster, I wondered what it would be like to live at the end of this road. On every trip I took with parents, mostly when we were ordered by the Marine Corps to a different military base or one of our rare vacations, I would look for the earthy driveway into the trees, thinking I would recognize the scene and perhaps talk my parents into turning around and investigating the end of that road. My dream continued as an adult, traveling with either husband or by myself. I wanted to know who lived there, what kind of house, and were there horses and cows?

About the same time I began imagining the end of the road, my parents and I visited the family farm in the southwest corner of Colorado. Uncle Lee and Aunt Lois, with their two sons and their families, farmed the land. Uncle Lee had the brightest blue eyes and admitted he could count cows on a hillside, miles away, but could no longer read newspaper print. His sun-dried skin was etched with spidery wrinkles, his wispy white hair held in place under his lop-sided straw hat which had seen rain and sun and sleet and snow. Aunt Lois’s face crackled with every emotion, worry lines from tending children and animals, angry lines when I let the pigs out by carelessness, laugh lines that came out like sunshine after a storm. Even mad, her eyes were merry.

In my memory, today, I learned so much in the week we were there because once you set foot on the land, you were part of the activities. Yours were another pair of hands to stir the gravy or soup, dig and wash the potatoes, peel the fruit, iron the sheets, feed the pigs, or find the eggs.

Whereas, I was left to my own devices and homework when I lived as an only child with my parents, at the farm, I was part of something. A team of some kind with a common goal of survival is the only way I can describe it. With my mom and dad so involved with each other, I was more the observer of life, like an appendage.

At the farm, we cooked constantly with foods picked from the garden, fruits canned in blue and clear jars from the previous fall, meat brought up from the freezer that had been one of those pigs or a cow or a steer or a chicken who’d stopped laying. I learned about the cycle of life, the dying and the living, and about outhouses.

So now I had a picture of what life could be like at the end of my well-traveled country road through the multi colored trees.

I’d like to say I found my dream. In a way, I did. The unpaved road to our home in Laytonville didn’t lead to a farm house, but my late husband and I did build the eight-sided hogan ourselves. We didn’t have farm animals but we did have a dog for a time and watched the ravens and wild turkeys pick at whatever food we left out, heard the pileated woodpeckers and sassy squirrels, relocated rattlesnakes, and tried to keep the garbage cans safe from the bears.

In my mind, I believe I tried to sustain what I remembered of that team work effort so all who lived or visited there could feel part of something bigger than themselves.

I suppose I did find my ‘end of the country road’. Interesting though, the memories of the farm in Colorado are more distinct now than those of the 27 years on our land. What clings most from the early childhood experience is the idea of the togetherness, the purposefulness of our lives, the relationships initiated and forged. It’s that commonality I miss and am continually looking to create in my current one bedroom bungalow which stands past a two-car long driveway, behind a garage, and at the end of a cement walk which travels under the shadow of a fruit-filled plum tree; my own version of a country road. 

AFTER THE HIGH

Monday morning! And after a wonderful weekend of visiting, driving my new little car on an adventure, experiencing the enthralling creation of a singing community in less than two hours of being together, I am strangely ‘down.’ I have had to ask myself every hour on the hour, “What is going on? Why am I feeling out of sorts?”

Everything seems to fall out of my hands onto the floor or collapse in front of me. The only successful thing I did this morning, in an unexpectedly short amount of time, was water the newly-planted vegetables in the raised beds and new felt containers. Sitting in the sun was the most I could do for one solid hour.

Going through my emails and scrolling Facebook entries took up another hour.

Of the many projects on my kitchen table, I did tackle a tax receipt problem for my mom which has entailed finding the paperwork I sent out last week to attempt, yet again, to get my Power of Attorney in place so I can do her business. This is an ongoing challenge because the POA is 20 years old. If I was to try to get another one signed, I would have to contact Ombudsmen to have them approach her with new papers. This is because she’s in a nursing home with dementia, thus making the accomplishment of her signing anything more than a simple task.

The point to all of this is not to whine about details and challenges. No, the point is, I am trying to answer the question: “What has gotten me into this place of no energy, no continuity with thoughts or trails of paperwork I started last week or last month, and why am I grumpy??

It’s a good thing I’m not in any kind of relationship or I’d be biting their head off. Then I think, maybe that is precisely why I’m in a poor mood. I don’t have anyone to share the wondrous experience of yesterday: the singing, the harmonies, the new meaningful songs based on extraordinary poetry. Maybe, I am missing what happens with companionship: making memories together so that each can help the other keep the magic in place behind the drudge of everyday routine. Sigh! I am beginning to believe that my excuse of not being in relationship with a significant other is a cop out, is irresponsible, and not really the truth. I AM in relationship! With myself! With the Earth! With friends!

So that makes way for another possibility. After a high, I am asking myself, is there a resultant low because the high was so high? The acoustics of the large room bounced sound and harmonies among the fifty or so people who were sharing two hours of their time to open their hearts and mouths for beauty. We gave each other healing by standing together and memorizing words and tunes of songs presented by two masters of direction. We sang of heartbreak and mending chaos. We reminded each other of the importance of open hearts, open minds, compassion, determination. We sang counterpoint and left the doubts and fears of our daily world outside that room for a short time.

Would that I could hold on to those words and tunes forever, but just as they flowed into my brain, because we sang one song after another, those thoughts and rhymes flowed out again. I can’t think of one of them today. I want to hold on to at least one little ditty to repeat and repeat so I can attach myself to a small piece of the joy of yesterday. But, damn, I can’t reconstruct a one of them.

And I want more. Is this what it feels to those who go to one expansive experience after another? The lack and the need of lightness, so much so that they push themselves into the next experience and then the next one? Never knowing how to create the linchpin to ground themselves to the feelings they had during the expansive experience? Is this my trouble today? Wanting more? And not knowing today just how to open to the world the way I did yesterday?

If that’s the real cause of my dumps, then I owe it to the experience and to myself to get up and find what will bring back one small portion of the same level of joy from yesterday. Maybe if I experiment enough with every tiny opportunity I can make, I will eventually fill my day with just as much love and light. Maybe that’s what yesterday’s experience requires of me. I’m supposed to be learning how to regroup, reframe, and rekindle in myself that sense of wonder I forgot I had before yesterday. Worth a try!!!

Are You Feeling It?

In the scheme of things, I believe we each get ‘nudges’ from our muse, angel, our higher consciousness, or you even might call them our guides or our ancestors. I don’t judge how you call the source of that little push that directs you to do something beyond what you usually do or believe you are unable to do. The fact is, we all get them. Some of us don’t sense these nudges. Others of us rely on them for life management.

For instance, Emandal’s choir director, Don Willits, felt a nudge when he decided to attend a fund raiser for the legal fund for those arrested at Standing Rock. He invited each of us to consider donating our time for this event. Many of us joined him. Many of the choir then were also educated regarding what this movement represented: the unity of tribes and indigenous peoples all over the world for their treaty rights, clean water, the health of Mother Earth, and the commitment to make this stand a prayerful one.

One of our group was nudged after the November election results to become more active in government affairs. Her first step was to begin educating herself on the issues. She subscribed to the New York Times Newsletter and then found an article about the inception of the Standing Rock movement.

The article is titled, “The Youth Group that Launched a Movement at Standing Rock” by Saul Elbein, January 31, 2017. It details the work of a 19-year-old who for reasons of her own (and that infamous nudge) decided to help her tribe and especially the suicidal teens on the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. The article gives voice to the many people who responded to their own nudges and stood in prayer for clean water and to block the contamination of the Missouri River by DAPL.

Bear with me now as I tell you a little bit about the only true story (as I was told it) recounted in my new book, The Spirit Bundle. The abbreviated version of this story is of Martin Charger, a Lakota, who in 1862 gave everything he owned to ransom 2 white women and 6 children from the Santee tribe and return them to the army. He was labeled a fool by his own tribe but stood his ground saying he would do anything he could to preserve peace.

I removed this story after the first draft, but, three months before publication of The Spirit Bundle, I was nudged to place it again in the book. I had been concerned I was breaking confidentiality because I had heard it first as a family story. Then I realized the story was on the internet by both the Charger family and by a descendant of one of the women who had been captured and ransomed. The renditions of the details are different, but the basic story is there.

Can you imagine my surprise when I learned that the young woman who followed her own ‘nudge’ to stand for lost youth and Mother Earth was Jasilyn Charger, a direct descendant of Martin Charger, the man whose warrior society of the Dependables was renamed to the Fool Soldiers? Without the actions of either of these people, in the first place, women and children may never have been returned to their families. In the second place, a group of teenagers might not have had the foresight to stand peacefully for the goals of treaty rights, clean water, and Mother Earth.

All the individuals in this round-about telling of mine moved forward because of a calling or a push. I’m proud to have returned the story to its place in The Spirit Bundle and am humbled by the synchronicity. Each of us has the opportunity to follow a ‘nudge’ that might build a web of compassion and community and possibly carry us through these difficult times.