Yesterday I hiked among the majestic coastal redwoods of Muir Woods. Following Redwood Creek to its source on Mt. Tamalpais I met trees that are 350 feet tall, 14 feet wide and some as much as 1,000 years old. Half of those trees water needs come from that creek. (The other half comes from the famous fog so ubiquitous to this area.) I needed to be around trees - big trees, wild trees, ancient trees… They are the memory keepers of this land.
I set out from Vermont to drive across this continent because… well to get to the other side I guess! Two weeks and 4,000 miles later, I find myself in the lands surrounding San Francisco Bay. I am doing a little work for Free Speech Radio News in exchange for training, but that is another story. The one I want to tell at this moment is about how a story in ones life, comes to an end. When you think about it, most stories’ endings are arbitrary. They end when the storyteller chooses to stop. It is an irony not lost to me that in February, in this blog I wondered about how a story begins.
As anyone who has been reading these missives knows, Zpora is doing well and has begun another chapter, or is it another story? Who is to say?
How do I offer gratitude for Zpora's healing? I had set that as a goal for the cross-country journey and it was a steady companion as I traveled. I have felt an unfathomable sense of relief/gratitude/joy/ but also sadness and vulnerability that I can only attribute to a loss of innocence. Maybe after 55 years I might have known better (and I thought I did) but, alas no. Up until Zpora was diagnosed with T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, I thought I had control in my life. Don’t you?
It was time to find an end to this story of my daughter's pas de deux with cancer. I was ready to let this reality go, and for another to begin, but how? It is time for me to reclaim my life, but how? Somehow this problem of stories ending, stories beginning, seems important, and has to do with the essence of being human.
I think it’s spelled C-H-A-N-G-E.
Along the way I lit candles, offered small bites of my meals. (To whom? Certainly not to any clear image of God or gods, but it felt enough to offer to those who had gone before me... and to offer some of what sustains me to the raccoons, the wind, the unseen spirit of life…) In lakes, rivers and streams I dipped my body and tried to shed the expectations and questions that were a constant presence in the hope that I could draw the answer closer.
It was a struggle for my mind’s eye and my dogged reflections to keep pace with the car as it sped across the unfolding landscape - the rolling farms and industrial cities of New York and Pennsylvania, through the ragged grazing pastures of Missouri, across the vast corporate growing fields of Kansas and climbing into the violated mountain peaks and drowned valleys in Colorado. So much goes un-noticed, un-felt, un-held. What if I miss something important, something that will never come again? Winding through Utah’s canyons I did begin to feel a sense of the rhythm of the land as it undulated under the wheels of Crow (the VW diesel car that carried me, and that gets 50mpg).
Either the landscape slowed or I quickened somewhere beside the Escalante river and my consciousness shifted. Surrounded by the many, many million year old red rock walls towering above me, a different sense of time began to ripple my consciousness. Perhaps I was entrapped by this primal power of Time, like the way, in a household, all the women start to bleed when one does - I don’t know, but something let go, or gave in, or perhaps I simply embraced what I had been resisting. (You may have noticed that feelings – especially the ones that seem to reside somewhere in the DNA, do not lend themselves to concise description. Maybe it is another human challenge to know what one DOES with these things that we FEEL, and which have such a profound impact on us even when – maybe more so - when we don’t have words for them…)
I had heard for years of a Temple dedicated to the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet in the Mojave Desert 45 minutes north of Las Vegas, and I had decided that this would be where I would make my offering. This is Western Shoshone land, part of the Ruby Valley. It is the site of an oasis - Cactus Springs - where precious water bubbles up from the ground, a sacred place anywhere, especially in a desert. The same vast landscape is also “home” to the Nevada Nuclear Test site, an Air Force base, and a federal prison. Sad irony or divine intervention, these juxtapositions of opposites that we are called to hold seem also to be part of being human.
For two days in the dark of the moon, in that conflicted landscape, I wandered the dryland among creosote bushes, mesquite trees, salt cedars and the 100-year-old cottonwood trees that circulate the precious water. I sat in the womb-like temple dedicated to Sekhmet (there are pictures attached) and slept under the vast braid of the Milky Way. I waited, listened, watched, meditated, dreamed, and hoped. I needed to find a way to make an offer of this immense feeling of gratitude to have my daughter so whole and alive.
It was a simple ritual in a familiar pattern. I invited Candace the resident priestess to join me in the sweet and welcoming temple. I said that I didn't know Sekhmet, and though I didn't feel the need for an intervening presence, I welcomed Candace as one who had dedicated her life to serving this goddess that had somehow called to me. I say “called” because there is no geographical or social reason that I drove to California from Vermont via Nevada.
I made my preparations. I washed my body (in a desert, water invokes a deep awareness that I name Sacred) and dressed myself in a soft red dress. I walked the labyrinth in my bare feet. The layers of wind and water-shaped pebbles had been raked off the paths to form the walls of the ancient pattern, exposing the soft underlying sand. It gave me a tender pleasure to have this intimate connection with the drylands.
We cast ourselves within a sacred circle there in the belly temple, that welcoming womb. Standing on the smooth sandstone still warm from the sun, we named the directions - East, South, West, and North. (It is a mystery to me, why, when you name something, it invokes a certain power that might have to do with a thing’s inherent wholeness. I don’t know. Like knowing the name of a bird that you see or a fern or a mountain brings it closer in a way that isn’t there in a generic world. Candace acknowledged the presence of Sekhmet and I of Madre del Mundo - two beautiful sculptures which embody the spirit of that place, and in doing so their power also danced there with us there in the center.
The Story that I had thought to tell of Zpora's illness, treatment and recovery, a story I find still too alive to hold all at once, shimmered in the flickering candlelight. I waited for it to settle and take form in my mind's eye, so that I might speak it out loud. But it remained formless, like a whisper or an echo or movement or light. I struggled even to remember the name of the disease! I felt that if I named it, then that would BE the offering that would allow me to leave it here in this place. But I could not draw it away it from my memory's unwilling soup. The story, the names, the myriad feelings swirled and churned but refused to be en-worded. So be it.
And so I offered, not a story, but a feather, 3 stones and 2 apricots, with gratitude.
