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Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Outside Sleepy Holly Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts
We’ve just returned to the van from our drizzly
climb up to Authors Ridge. Alcotts, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne –
what a time and what a place that must have been.
Who calls to me the most? Where would my writer’s
garret be?
I think I would be most like Louisa
May, not just because she was a woman, but also because she was
more temperate, more balanced, more taking of the amazing influences
and then synthesizing them. Not the sage, aloof Waldo. Not the cranky
misanthrope Henry. Not the dark and brooding Nate. Not even the
apple-eating, head-in-the-clouds Bronson.
Louisa May brought it back down to earth, made
their Concord spirit life-sized, voices singing and laughing in the lanes
and houses here.
Monday, January 23, 2006
After our first “Transcendentalist” walk of the semester
The contrast between four
years ago, when I taught this course with Patricia, and this winter,
teaching it on my own, is profound. I walked to my old house –
remembered sitting there in one of the wood chairs Jennifer gave me,
looking up at the sky, feeling my feet rooted to the damp, dank
earth, marveling that I had just bought that property. And I imagined
being there, on that piece of land for years and years to come.
But now, tonight, in 2006,
the last year has occurred – in all its joyous changes – and I don’t
“own” that house and that piece of land anymore (whatever that means:
to “own” the land). Jim has come into my life, and everything –
everything – is in flux, everything is up for grabs, everything is
possible. The world is new again, and I am beginning to feel I am
having an original relation to the universe – at least, it’s an
original relation for me!
After looking at my old
yard – empty now without Jennifer’s table and chairs, unkempt with
the shrubs scraggly and overgrown – I decided to walk on to
Patricia’s house. I told her that I’d be thinking of her tonight –
can’t help it. Four years ago, we were settling into our homes,
claiming our lives – we thought we’d be here for years and years and
years. But now come new love and new life
and new work – and these houses no longer ours, our lives moved
forward elsewhere.
Are we still here in any
way? I’m always disconcerted when current students don’t know past
students (how can it be that no one knows Sarah Alouf or Anna Deeny
or Julie Banks?). And that makes me wonder: will there come a day
when Patricia’s vision is no longer felt here, when my energy is no
longer part of the fabric of this town, this school?
As I walked back, coming
down Back Alley, approaching my old house, I looked at the dark
façade – never any sign of life there anymore. No lights, one
car, nothing in the yard to indicate that people love and care for
this place. And I begin to think that maybe home is not the place
but the love, the people. So much love spilled out of that house all
the time I was there.
My new home very much
carries all of the love with me – the spirited Miss Abbie and the
impromptu visits from Catie (when she’s here) and Kathy and Chris,
sometimes others. And now of course, the new home is graced with the
presence of Jim.
As I think about making a
home with Jim, I realize that the house itself – the physical
structure – is not the “home” we are making. We are already making
home together even though we live in two places. Yes, we dream of a
fireplace and a big living room for his music and a screened-in porch
for my writing and reading and a fenced-in yard for Miss Abbie and
hidie-holes for Tillie Tat – but the physical space is so much more insignificant than the home we
make together with our beloved critters. We’ve both been dreaming
about houses lately, about moving, about packing up old belongings.
So in some ways, with the
turn of the spiral (spoken about in such depth with the Postcolonial
class in this very room), I’m right back at many of the same
questions I was posing four years ago. What is home? What does it
mean to be settled, to be part of a loving community, to experience
right livelihood as part of that home and community? I know I’ll be
asking these very same questions again and again and again, just from
another ring of the spiral.
February 13, 2006
“I left the woods for as
good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had
several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for
that one.” ~Henry David Thoreau
We just returned from a
truly wintry walk – Shepherdstown the day after a snowstorm! Ah . . .
I have walked this town so many times in the snow.
The quote from the
“Conclusion” of Walden was a good one for me tonight and one I’ve
been thinking about a lot the last few weeks. I walked the very
familiar streets of Shepherdstown – started with a walk through
Sonya’s garden behind Knutti, the place where the tennis courts used
to be, where Kathy and Tina played. I could say there are lots of
ghosts in Shepherdstown – but they aren’t bad ghosts at all.
They’re memories, fond memories, of happy faces and good friends and
close times, a life coming into full bloom. Shepherdstown is where I
began to experience living deliberately – where I really started to
become myself.
I walked past the Blue Moon
(I started to say the Town Run!), past Patrinka’s house and the mill,
past Scooter’s house as far as Rachael and John’s house (the Bardi
party!), then turned around and came back up Mill Street to German
Street, saw the train station in the distance, walked past Jenn’s
first apartment and Anna’s old building and the Yellow Brick Bank,
past the Lost Dog and the Meck and Sky’s the Limit, marveled at the
snowy branches of the tree in front of the library (where earlier
today I went in and told Hali my news), but amazingly enough I did
not think much about my old home tucked there around the corner.
As I came back inside the
warmth of Knutti, I was thinking about the young woman of 31
who moved here 15 years ago. How little I knew of myself! Despite my
degrees and my adventures, my travels to Alaska and my journeys
across the U.S., despite my far-flung friendships and my close ties
to home, I didn’t yet know myself.
I came to Shepherdstown to
make my way in the world – to set off on my own without the structure
of school or the security of family. Partly, I suppose, I found what
I sought: I got close to making my goal of owning my own house by age
40 (I was 41), and I’ve gathered friends, a doggie, a community, made
a lovely life teaching. But there was so much more to my life in
Shepherdstown than I ever could have anticipated. I let myself become
a writer (a real writer!). I plunged into a voyage of self-discovery
I never imagined possible (in its deep sorrow and its thriving
growth). I struggled with depression on a scale I didn’t know existed
and wrestled with a sometimes debilitating chronic illness. I was
hurt more deeply than I realized it was possible to hurt. I grew to
love my students and my work with them, and they brought me joy
beyond measure, again and again, always when I most needed it. I have
managed, as Thoreau said, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow
of life” and, I say it with Jim, “to cut a broad swath and shave
close.”
I have done this – lived
deep, sucked out the marrow of life, shaved close – but now life
calls me forth again – to more. I did not know there was all this
more to want. I have spared enough time for this life in
Shepherdstown – 15 wonderful years here – and now it is time
to live another life. I imagine what the next life will bring –
building a new program at DU, making a home with Jim, finding ways to
live and thrive despite our health struggles, loving and growing and
deepening, sucking out more marrow and shaving ever closer. But I’m
certain there will be so much more in this new life than I can
anticipate now.
Will there come a time when
I walk the streets of a new neighborhood in Colorado, see the yellow
lights in the winter windows as I did tonight (ah, Scooter and
Kelly’s cozily lit home!)? Will there come a time when that place is
truly home, when I’ll walk into our home on a cold wintry evening,
anticipating as my daily reality the love that will be our home?
March 14, 2006
Last full day of our trip
I love the image of Louisa
May writing in her garret – eating apples? I told Jim last night
about being in her room, and he asked me if I spied any apples J. He listens so attentively
to me in all ways and makes connections so rapidly that he’s often
ahead of me in my own life, for I hadn’t even thought to look for
apples in that room. J
I might have been able to
do what Henry [Thoreau] did – at least part of the time – but
Louisa’s room/garret is the one that calls to me. Perhaps it is
because there is love and community nearby – right in the house and
then in the houses surrounding. Henry wasn’t a hermit, but he could
live off there with all that quiet. He was definitely an introvert
who liked a fair amount of conversation and company. I’m an extrovert
who likes a fair amount of solitude – and I suspect Louisa was the
same. But when I am in the thick of a writing project, I – like
Louisa – get into the “vortex,” as she called it, the “zone,” as I
call it.
I found a beautiful card of
Orchard House yesterday that says a lot of what I feel about Jim –
and I might put it in a little frame for somewhere in our house. It
was written by Anna Bronson Alcott on her wedding day, May 23, 1860:
I’ve felt for the first time in my life the joyful
consciousness that I am truly loved by a truly good man, one that
with all my heart I can love and honor – one who loves me for myself
alone, and with an unselfish, patient, gentle affection such as I
never thought to waken in a human heart.
I often think,
when it is time to “write in my journal” for Transcendentalism course
purposes, that I’m not being thoughtful enough, get too quickly drawn
back to my own life. But of course, the Transcendentalists – from
Emerson on down – wanted us to look at our own lives, to claim our
own lives more fully. As Whitman said, “Not I, not anyone else can
travel that road for you – you must travel it for yourself.” Levi
read from “Self-Reliance” yesterday – and it was so good to be
reminded of that essay: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not
what the people think.” Yes!
I was also thinking that
Bronson and Abba May Alcott were thinking a lot about love –
about the importance of nurturing each other and letting each other
grow and blossom as intended. He was a bit nutty (bless his little
heart), and he did put his family at risk at times – but he did have
a good heart and did value each person’s development. Alan and I
talked a lot Sunday about life and love, what life is for, what love
is for, and the further I go with Jim, the more I am validated and
strengthened in my belief that our purpose here is to “love one
another.” We are to nurture, nourish, support, care for, love one
another – not just our mates, though if we are lucky this is the
highest, most sustained expression of that love – but everyone: our
family, our closest friends, our acquaintances and community members,
our students and colleagues, the people we encounter everyday, even,
as Tom Fox showed, our enemies. “Love was the first motion,” wrote
the Quaker journaler John Woolman, and from that first motion one
lives a life of meaning and vibrancy and honor and integrity. I don’t
always accomplish this – but I try, at least a lot of the time. Love,
for me, is the way I connect to the oversoul, the way I experience
and express the spark of the divine within.
March 14, 2006
Library, Thoreau Institute, Walden Woods
I’m sitting here writing
while listening to Jeff Kramer talk with the students. This isn’t how
we should live – this is how we should think about living. We
should live and think deliberately.
Yes! We went this morning
to the site of the original cabin: “I went to the woods because I
wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of
life, and not discover when I came to die that I had not lived. I
wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live
Spartan-like and put to rout all that was not life, I wanted to cut a
broad swath and shave close. . . .”
Such a beautiful room. Such
a beautiful place. Such an inspiration. And so great to see all of
the students writing and reading and listening to Jeff, everyone
engaged – people having hiked and explored. What a great day! How
great to be part of passing the torch.
What a day we have had! What
a day! It was drizzly, wet, rainy, damp, gray, misty this morning –
fog on the water – the walk to the original site was invigorating,
brisk, great. By the time we got back to the bus, the sun was
starting to peek out, and by the time we got back from lunch in
Concord, the sun was shining brilliantly. It is blue, blue, blue
skies now – and we heard birds on the walk and saw pussy willows
budding out and a chipmunk scurrying out and the ice went out
Saturday, Steve said. So we are right here as the seasons are
changing. Last night, a booming thunderstorm came through the area.
Ah . . . heralding the new spring.
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