innocence and experience

by

When This Is Over

UntitledThe week before we left our home in Livermore to move to the North West, a raven began hopping around in our front yard. That was seven years ago next month.

It was a sign, I thought. Raven is the wolf bird. Raven follows wolf. Wolf is my spirit animal. She really is. I even had a dog that was part wolf.

Now, ravens have taken up residence in the back part of our property here in Sequim, nesting in the majestic evergreen trees that occupy the back 40, as I like to call it.

I think they are ravens. Though they might be crows. When I Google to find out how to tell the difference, I get results like one has tail feathers that create a diamond shape. I have yet to have any stand still enough for me to discern the shape of their tail.

The main difference the results reveal is that ravens are bigger than crows. Which of course begs the question, how big is a crow?

May 9th will be the 11th anniversary of the Writing Shed. I have not been constant in writing blog posts. I go long periods without writing one, then dip into my well of words and out comes a blog post.

So why now? Why today?

I actually started this blog about a year ago to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Writingshed. It’s been hovering ever since.

When this is over, people say. But no one really knows what “this” is or when it will be over or how we will know it will be over. This pandemic, this microscopic organism that has us perplexed. You can’t reason with it. You can’t negotiate with it. It has no language, or at least not one we can speak or hear or translate.

It is just going about the business of being itself with no regard to who it is doing its business to as I wait . . .

A couple of days ago, I picked up a book I’ve had in my Writing Shed for a number of years, “The Celtic Book of Living and Dying,” and began reading, feasting on the beautiful illustrations of Celtic art, drinking in the information. The art affects me much like the art I see up here on the North Olympic Peninsula. Art that has a sense of being, rather than completion.

So, maybe that’s the answer to why today—this sense of waiting is a sense of being, not knowing, not having enough information to know, not knowing when the knowledge will come, or even knowing what I am waiting for.

When this is over . . .

Life’s journey, the book says the Celts believed, is one of moving from innocence to knowledge, from vengeance to forgiveness.

It is humbling to know the power of a microscopic organism. It certainly shakes one out of innocence. For years I wanted to reclaim the innocence I lost when I was molested by my grandfather and uncle. I longed to be the girl who climbed on her uncle’s lap thinking he asked me to do that because he loved me. This was a family who ate long, slow lunches together after church on Sunday. Who was relieved when the polio vaccine saved us from the terror they felt when Spring arrived and the images of rows and rows of children in iron lungs began appearing on television—in their living rooms.

They wanted to protect me. Perhaps they knew the virus that was a part of my family, perhaps they didn’t.

It came over me like a revelation, I don’t know when or how, that innocence is never something that can be restored. And that the opposite of innocence is not cynicsm, but rather experience. And with experience comes knowledge.

There are people in the world who just go about the business of being themselves without regard to who they are doing business with, or its effect on them. Much like a virus.

That’s good information, good knowledge, to have. It’s actually good wisdom for the heart. It helps you protect it when those around you don’t or can’t see the danger.

I’m not even sure where I’m going with this today, except that I feel like we are experiencing a cultural loss of innocence. We are not the center of the universe, we are learning. We are not omnipotent. There are microrganisms, as well as other humans, out there who are just going about their business of being themselves without regard to, or concern for, their effect on others.

Up here where I live in Sequim, there is a force that has arisen—people who are sewing and sewing and sewing masks. These masks are the ultimate acknowledgement that we have an effect on each other—I wear a mask to protect you from me—as we journey through this pandemic.

I can’t sew my way out of a paper bag. I confessed that on a Facebook group, and within a day, a woman I have come to know through Facebook had delivered two homemade masks to my front door. Another wrote me to let me know she could make some for me.

As I wrote this, it swept over me like a revelation that these gracious gifts of kindness were the medicine I didn’t even know I needed.

As much work as I have done to understand, cope with, rise above that early betrayal, there still lingered in my soul a memory that seemed to say, you don’t matter.

Linda Klinefelter and Robi Andison, your offers of homemade masks made me feel like I mattered. It was the medicine my soul didn’t even know it needed. I can’t begin to tell you how much my heart has been opened up by feeling that I matter.

The simplicity of knowledge.

I’m sure there is more knowledge to be revealed as I wait through this pandemic. One never knows when something like this is over, until long past it has been over.

Because I started this with ravens, I read about their role in lore across cultures. One of their roles is to dive into the darkness to find light and bring it out.

I think many of us are feeling a bit lost and wandering (and wondering) in the darkness that comes with this waiting without knowing what we are waiting for.

I don’t think being compelled to use this time to learn a new language, clean out that garage, learn a new skill or whatever is called for.

Instead I think we can be the raven willing to dive into the darkness to find the light. We will need this on the other side of this bout with a microscopic organism when we need to rebuild a society that has become sick with greed —that considers empathy a weakness.

Shakespeare allegedly wrote King Lear during his time of quarantine during the plague. He could not have done that if he hadn’t been willing to dive into the darkness of the story. The light is revealed in the final verse:

The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young. Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

by

November 22, 1963

Football season was done. I think it might have been the first Friday without a football game. But it was Friday, so we had to do something. We planned on going to the Vine to see West Side Story. Back then, it took a few years for “big” movies to get to Livermore.

The bell hadn’t rung yet to mark the start of fourth period. Kids were still straggling in to Mr. Fraser’s fourth period Freshman English class. I had just taken my seat when Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Weiss rushed in, pulled a radio from the closet in the back of the room, then just as quickly left the room. I remember thinking it seemed strange. They looked so grim.

By the time the bell rang, we knew. We heard. President Kennedy had been shot. Mr. Fraser led us in a discussion. We talked about politics, who was Democrat and who was Republican. He managed our bewilderment, kept it light, told us he was a Republican, then said we should use the remaining time to read our assigned book—Great Expectations.

Pete Prassinos, he of the beautiful deep dark brown eyes framed with long dark eyelashes, asked if he could go to his locker to get his book. Across the hall, Mr. Satterthwaite had the radio on, the scratchy sounds of the newsfeed barely audible. Pete returned with his book.

“He was shot in the head,” he said pointing to his temple.

Moments later, we heard the news bulletin clearly. The president was dead.

“Well, that’s it,” Mr. Fraser said and turned away from us.

“President Kennedy has been killed,” the voice over the public address system announced. “School is dismissed.”

The boys in the back row jumped up and cheered. Not because Kennedy was dead, but because school was dismissed. They were teenage boys who didn’t know how else to react.

“Hey!” Mr. Fraser boomed. He was barely five foot two, but his glorious voice drove the hulking members of the football team in the back row into their seats. “A man is dead! The president is dead. We need to respect that.”

And with that, he dismissed our class.

There were other things that remain vivid in my mind from that weekend:

My mother cleaning house wearing the skirt and blouse and heels she had been wearing when she was at the store and heard the news. My mother hated housecleaning and never—never—before or after that Friday wore heals and a dress to clean the house.

My father, the next day, threatening to break the Vaughn Meader record that lightly satirized Kennedy. My dad was an Irish Catholic. That was a big thing to him: an Irish Catholic as president.

Seeing Oswald shot on Sunday morning.

Going to see West Side Story on Sunday afternoon with Mary Ann Kriletich, Kathy Smith, and Kathy Keene. Weeping as we walked home, comparing Jackie to Maria, remembering that Jackie had lost a child just months before.

On Monday, the riderless horse, boots placed backwards into the stirrups, preceding the coffin as it made its way to Arlington. I had seen the same image in the previous week’s Life magazine, an illustration that accompanied an article about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand—perhaps because Barbara Tuchman’s book, The Guns of August, had influenced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We returned to school on Tuesday. It was a two-day week. Thanksgiving was on Thursday.

The Beatle’s arrival in February of 1964 took the focus off of Kennedy’s death. Or at least, that’s my memory. The trauma of the assassination of a president receded, seemed a mistake, something that still couldn’t happen here.

Over next five years, civil rights workers were murdered, fire hoses and dogs let loose on peaceful marchers, cities rioted. The war in Vietnam escalated, driving a wedge between generations—those who fought the “Good War” and those who questioned why we were at war.

By the time Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed five years later, we came to believe that assassinations were part of the American landscape.

I had Mr. Fraser again in my senior year for English Honors. That was his last year teaching high school. He had been accepted into the Master’s program at San Francisco State College (later University); I was heading there, too. I saw him once in the Humanities Literature and Language building, drinking from the water fountain.

I later learned that he did not make it through even the first semester. Academia, he quickly learned was not the place for him. He left for New York where for years he made a living doing voiceovers and acting bit parts in soap operas.

In 1996, on a trip to New York, Tom and I reconnected with Mr. Fraser. He had been Tom’s teacher as well. By that time we called him Bert. I thanked him for how he took care of us, my fourth period English class, the day Kennedy was killed. “You gave us a safety net in a very confusing moment,” I said. “And you showed us how important and sad that moment was.”

We agreed to keep in touch. We invited him to our wedding that September, but he was unable to attend. Sometime soon after that, a heart attack took him.

Mr. Fraser introduced me to William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech in English Honors. I had to write a paper showing how the convict in “The Old Man” exemplified the sentiments of his speech. I don’t remember my paper. It’s been too long since I read the short story to be able to tell you how it exemplified his sentiment.

But Faulkner’s speech has stayed with me over the years. I go back and read it from time to time. With each reading, it resonates more deeply with me.

Innocence and experience. Experience does not necessarily lead to cynicism. It can, if we are willing to go deep enough, lead us to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, how to wend our way through sad times. I was fortunate, that on that awful day, November 22, 1963, I had Mr. Fraser as my guide.

From Faulkner’s speech:

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

by

Weaving Our Fate

DSCN0251By acting on our creative opportunities, we take our fate back into our own hands. Such is the meaning of the Spider (High Priestess) card in the Animal Wise Tarot deck.

Fate. I usually resist that concept. One is fated for something. Has no choice in the matter.

Acting on creative opportunities to take fate back into my own hands puts a different slant on it.

Michelangelo said that he saw the statue when he picked out marble from the quarry. Then he would get to work releasing it from the marble.

My journey for a good many years was to find the innocence lost in my childhood—to restore it. I entered innocently into friendships, partnerships, jobs, with the assumption that my best interest was central to any agreements that formed the basis of the relationships. That is, I thought that my best interest was at the heart of the other party’s motivations.

I was stuck in the helplessness of childhood. That brand of innocence is actually a bit on the narcissistic side.

I don’t know when the light bulb lit up over my head. It has been there for a while, that light bulb, waiting for the switch to be flipped. I’m not even sure what made me flip the switch. But it was a revelation:

I didn’t need to restore my innocence. I needed to embrace experience.

Experience, not guilt, is the flip side of innocence.

Each one of us is living a story. It might be truly ours, or it might be one we think we are supposed to be living—one given us with such dogma that we think we have no choice but to live it. I think our job is to chip away at the dogma, much as Michelangelo chipped away at the marble slab, so we can release the story we are, not the one we think we are supposed to be. And our story comprises our experience.

My early experience showed me that there is darkness as well as light in the human heart. Maturity has allowed me to see that the darkness of another’s heart wasn’t and isn’t about me, but rather experience stuck in the darkness of shame, humiliation, and refusal to let go of innocence.

Maybe that’s the villain in us—refusing experience, holding onto innocence. The hero in us embraces experience as life, our life, and weaves it into our story.

My fate is my story. The story that is my life, comprising innocence and experience, light and dark, joy and sorrow.

We each have our own life story.