The Garnet and the Snail, or The Spirit of Place
I opened Messenger to see a screenshot of what appeared to be remnants of a barn, although it was hard to tell. A great mass of ivy and underbrush threatened to topple the silo and one remaining gable-end wall, while the roof sagged in a great slope to the ground behind and beside it. It stood on a flat stretch of grass with no landmarks around it that I could identify. It was about a year after Dad had died, and my niece, Stacey, who is the same age as I and my childhood best friend, had attached a note to the picture, which she had snagged from Google Earth: “Because sometimes I torture myself and find places I lived as a child on Google Maps only to find this… Mary’s barn isn’t what it used to be and for some reason that hits me hard.”
Mary was Mary Cinitti, a curly-haired dynamo and horse enthusiast who boarded horses at a barn that actually belonged to a local farmer named Mr. Bean. Mary made it her own, though, in everyone else’s estimation - boarding horses, offering riding lessons, putting on shows, and hosting fox hunts.
Mr. Bean and Dad were friends because, among other things, they both liked to fly Piper Cub airplanes and sometimes did so together, cruising in bluebird skies over the pastoral patchwork of the hay, alfalfa, corn, and wheat fields of upstate New York.
It is only natural that Dad and Mary would eventually meet and hit it off. As it turned out he loved horses, too - going way back - and both had charisma for miles.
“Mary’s barn” was where Dad introduced Stacey and me to one of his old passions and one of our first – horse riding. He drove us there once a week, on Saturday mornings, and stood gladly by – leaning on the fence, or with hands in pockets – making conversation with Mary.
“Hey Bob!” she cried, walking up to him, brushing her hands off on her thighs and picking a piece of straw out of the poof of hair over her eyes
“Mary!” said Dad, placing a hand on each of her shoulders and holding her out to look at her. He looked her up and down, and moved her side to side, peering behind her in feigned puzzlement. “Hey, where’s the rest of ya?” he joked.
Mary cackled in response and punched Dad in the arm.
It wasn’t just riding lessons we were there for. We learned to feed and groom the horses, hauled hay bales, brushed the coats to a gloss, and sometimes braided the manes or tails. We learned that, in order to pick mud and stones from the tender hoof, you have to stand next to the horse and run your hands gently down the front of the leg to lift it. Never stand behind a horse.
We learned to offer treats of carrots, apples, and the occasional sugar cube – with open palm, fingers flat - and reveled in the feel of the velvet noses snuffling on our skin. We learned how to put the bit in and fasten the harness; choose our own saddles and tighten the girth; adjust our stirrups to the correct hole for our longer-growing legs; and eventually to mount and dismount without so much as a stool or a helping hand. We learned that horses, like people, are intelligent and have personalities that have to be respected; you’ll like some better than others. Of course, the same could be said to them about us.
I asked Stacey if she could remember details about our horse friends. She sent a hilarious text back:
“Wheeler - big, gorgeous, we rarely got to ride him, liked to drink Coca-Cola.
Native - slightly appaloosa perhaps, grayish. Skittish when it came to cars. Another I always loved to ride when Mary passed him over.
Tea Biscuit - red, fat oaf, liked to eat instead of walk, stubborn. I remember him jumping over poles on the ground like they were real jumps. He also hated water and would avoid it at all costs, even if it meant sending the rider into the tree branches as he hurled himself over a creek.
Bailey - another stubborn boy who was fatter than he was tall, a bit goofy.”
Ahhhh, it was all coming back to me now. Tea Biscuit threw me in a meadow once, too. The laziest horse in the barn suddenly decided that he was scared and reared up on his hind legs, sending me sailing through the air. I landed flat on my back, which broke my collar bone, but I was unable to scream because when I opened my mouth to do so, I found, in a panic, that I couldn’t take in breath. My lungs didn’t work! I remember seeing a circle of cloudy sky above my head, ringed by tall meadow grass, and the sound of my own grunts and pants as I gulped helplessly for air like a fish out of water. I also heard thumping footsteps and saw Mary’s curly head come into view, silhouetted above me, as she fell to her knees by my side. I looked at her with wide eyes and gasped and panted some more but could not speak.
“She’s alive!” she yelled over her shoulder to my parents who were themselves making their way more gingerly across the uneven surface of the field. “She’s just had the wind knocked out of her!” At which point, almost as if on cue, I drew my first breath and let out a blood-curdling scream. Mom told me later that that scream was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. I raised my eyebrows at her, my arm in a sling. She nodded that I had heard that right. “We saw you get tossed into that tall grass like a sack of potatoes and thought ‘uh-oh.’ And then you didn’t get up or make any sound and…we were pretty scared. When we heard you scream like that, though, we knew you were going to be okay.”
“Yeah,” quipped Dad with a chuckle. “A girl who can scream like that sure ain’t dyin’!”
Mary taught us to walk, trot and canter in the open-air ring in front of the barn, and eventually set up jumps and periodically put on informal “shows” with bright-colored satin ribbons with shiny buttons for all those who placed. The most coveted, of course, was the blue satin for 1st Place. But what Stacey and I loved the most were the cross-country rides. We crossed the road and plunged into the corn and alfalfa fields, hugging the borders to get to streams and lightly wooded hills, and from there, the big wide world.
This was where I learned the word “fallow,” for it was through fallow fields that we could run the horses. I liked the idea that a place that looked barren wasn’t actually dead, but resting. I liked to imagine the fallow field in a few years’ time, bursting with green growth again.
The wind whipped strands of hair from under my helmet into my mouth and out again, leaving moist trails across my cheek. My lavender satin windbreaker billowed like a sail, and my spirit soared. I loved the earthy roundedness of the hoofbeats, the gentle rocking beneath my saddle and the rhythmic and airy exhalations of the horse, who occasionally tossed his head in exhilaration for he, too, felt free.
A Gift
Dad gave us the gift of horse riding because it had meant so much to him. He was not “an equestrian” by any means. It had simply been transformative for him, bringing him healing, pleasure, and exhilaration, in a time - in the CBI Theatre of World War II - that these were hard to come by. Perhaps he thought it could be transformative for everyone, in one way or another, and so he wanted us to have it.
The family had had two old nags, one named Charlie, who was the most resentful and stubborn, to pull the laundry cart back in Savannah. The horses were kept in an urban stable nearby and it was Uncle Archie’s job, as eldest son, to clean the stalls every morning. Charlie was a work horse and not for riding, although Dad figured out a way more than once to do exactly that.
Serving in the war, with the Chinese cavalry stationed nearby, he found - as an officer promoted to ever higher ranks - that he had opportunities, when he was off-duty, to borrow horses to ride. He spoke of the Mongolian breed as “ponies” because they were compact and sturdy - so unlike the horses at home - and had strange coloring that made them look half wild. But make no mistake, these “ponies” had been bred for war and conquest for thousands of years; it was not at all unusual for them to be in camp.
Dad wrote to his wife, Gretchen, frequently about riding and encouraged her repeatedly to please get lessons while he was away so that they could ride together when he got back home. He had stumbled on a remarkable escape for himself and was eager to share it with somebody.
August 17, 1943
Dear,
The moon is full tonight and outside is as bright as day. Although we are at the height of the monsoon season there has been no appreciable rainfall in 3 or 4 days, so I’ve been dry for quite a spell. It’s now 11:00 AM in Manchester and I wonder what you’re doing. I wonder what thoughts of me passed through your lovely head today, and whether a thousand and one little daily incidents in life remind you of me as I am reminded of you each day.
Today I got one of the Mongolian ponies from the cavalry and rode for the first time in 3 weeks. Across the fields and up the mountain through a deep ravine, I rode alone except for phantom you who are my constant companion. Dear, have you ever realized the rare beauty of our wedding? I did not want it any other way, because as it was, it was more beautiful than the biggest we could have had. I love it more than Waltermire’s or Joe Kline’s, with all the audience and rice throwing; I love it because there in that tiny church at dusk was more love - more feeling of a oneness for you and me than any 2 people could ever hope to have. It was more than I had any right to have, or even expect. And yet, wonderful you made my wildest hopes and dreams come true and I shall love you always for it. Some time ago, you said something about making yourself a better wife for me; don’t my darling - you couldn’t even if you tried, and I love you just as you are. Don’t ever change, for as you are now, I love you.
TFNAA,
Earl
September 4, 1943
Dear,
This afternoon late my Mongolian pony and I (he’s not really mine, but my Chinese friend lets me use him when I come out) went up into the hills again - farther than we’ve ever been before. The landscape there is beautiful, and the dense foliage contrasts sharply with the barren desert waste of the surrounding flat country. Naturally the trees are stunted because of lack of water, but there are enough to provide cool shade from the extremely hot sun. Eucalyptus seems to predominate, and there are a great many Indian type flowers which I do not recognize. I did see one flower which I believe was an orchid; however, it was the darkest I’ve ever seen, and in some parts of the petals the purple was so deep that it was almost black. I remember wishing that you were with me so that I could pick it up and give it to you; but you weren’t, and there’s no one here worthy of it, so I let it grow.
I like these solo rides, Beloved. They give me a chance to get out and think things over. Maybe I shouldn’t have made “things” plural because there’s really only one thing I think about and that is you and I. Today I proved again that I love you dearly, and if my recent letters have been a little bitter, maybe it’s because I’m spoiled and too sensitive, as someone told me a few days ago. […]
September 23, 1943
Dear,
Only God knows why I take you with me wherever I go. You and he must have gone into partnership to bewitch me with [the] color of your hair or the lights that dance in your eyes when you laugh; or maybe it’s your mouth, which I love, or your nose, which I adore. I wonder if it’s the mischief your mind is always making you get into - like marrying me, for instance; and buying baby chickens to run around under your nightgown - and wanting ice cream late at night. There are so many wonderful traits in you that make me love you that it’s impossible to say which are the ones which make you dearer to me than my own life. I only know that wherever I go, there you are, haunting my every thought - spoiling all the fine heads, whose companionship I could enjoy if I had never known yours.
You know what, Honey? I’d like for you to learn to ride a horse by the time I get back home. This is the only pleasure I get any more, and I go nearly every day with the coaching of one of the American 1st Lts attached as liaison officer with the Chinese animal outfit. I’ve learned the rudiments of correct riding and while I still am far from a smooth rider, I believe that in another month or two I’ll have an approach to “horse show” form. For instance, he says that in trotting you’re not supposed to bounce vertically, but should sit up there with a backward-forward motion like a rocking chair.I haven’t mastered that yet, and the only way I can avoid a spanking is with the vertical bouncing which I know is funny looking and crude. But no matter, you and I are going to do a lot of riding when I return. Will you learn how before, so we can do during those first few days at the port debarkation? And wherever we might be thereafter? (P.S. don’t buy a horse). […]
December 14, 1943
Gretchen Dear:
That Chinese major whose horses I used to ride at APO 628 has moved up and he’s a couple of miles down the road from me. That’s not so interesting, but he liked me enough to assign me a horse for my personal use from his corral, and he gave me a saddle and bridle which sit in his tent for my use. No one else is allowed to ride my horse or use my saddle and bridle. Wasn’t that nice of him? […]
Black Man in de White Man Suit
When Dad was finally discharged - in February of 1945, after over three years of uninterrupted deployment - he had an overlay of some two or three weeks in North Africa, waiting for his flight back to the States. The war wasn’t over yet, but his part in it was. He was alive, and heading home, gripped by a crazy, euphoric sense of limbo. He was between worlds - death behind him, life ahead. But what kind of life exactly had yet to be imagined, built, and lived. The sky really was the limit. It was heady stuff, and left Dad feeling, for a short time, utterly invincible.
Here in the North African desert he and some friends found a place where they could rent Arabian stallions by the day; his was a stunning white, which shaded to gray only around the muzzle and eyes. They galloped those horses through the desert day after day, whooping their exhilaration into the wind, calling jocular insults at each other over their shoulders as first one, then the other, would pull his steed ahead and dust the others behind him. They came back each afternoon with sand-chafed cheeks and merry hearts.
Once, when Dad was a very old man and he was reliving this story for the family, I asked him how he managed to stay on. Arabian stallions were not for beginners. He got a funny little smile on his face. Words sometimes failed him at this point, but his comprehension was good, and he puffed his frail frame up into a Mr. Universe pose, flexing stiff and withered arms over his head and looking up at 10:00, humorously shoving his lower lip and jaw out. “With my musk-els,” he said. The kids hooted.
One day, at the end of one of these rides, as Dad returned to camp, slowing the horse down to a more staid and loafing gait, he came upon a woman sitting by the road in many-layered textiles, weaving baskets. She glanced up at him, looking impressive in his uniform, sitting on a white horse, while he himself was dark as a Brazil nut from three years in the jungle. Their eyes met, and hers began to twinkle. So did Dad’s. Seeing his comprehension made her merriment grow, and it spread down to her cheeks. Dad’s grew in equal measure. Was she going to say it? He knew what she was thinking. He twinkled at her expectantly. The ball was in her court. At this, her face broke wide open, showing two rows of impossibly white teeth, and a hearty, wheezing laugh rose deep from her diaphragm. She said,
“Well now, look at de black man in de white man suit!"
Dad smiled his own dazzling smile back at her, lifted two fingers to his head in a casual salute of camaraderie and mutual understanding, and coaxed the horse on to camp.
Freedom From and Freedom To
I quit riding lessons when I switched to private school in 7th grade and became overwhelmed with homework. I have many fond memories of my riding lessons with Stacey and Mary, but I did not know much about what riding meant to Dad until I found his basket of war letters shortly before he died. It took months to read and digitize them all, as well as to discern and label themes that threaded through the collection and connected disparate letters to each other. References to riding were many, but buried deep in 350 specimens that spoke with equal depth and introspection about love, life on the Front, natural surroundings, religion, philosophy, history, literature, native cultures, photography, science, and resourceful inventions he had made in the jungle, it was a long time before I could process it all.
Stacey’s message about Mary’s barn falling to ruin, though, seemed suddenly to bring the theme of riding into acute focus. I looked at the picture of the ruined barn before me and my mind spontaneously “telescoped” both forward and backward in time - life since my childhood riding lessons speeding up in “fast-forward” motion to the current moment: middle school, high school, a year abroad, college, grad school, marriage, family, Mom’s death, career changes, Dad’s death, faster and faster. At the same time, I saw Dad’s life before my childhood riding lessons speed backwards in “rewind” motion: him standing at the fence watching us ride, a new baby (me), first grandchildren (Michael and Stacey), a divorce, life after war, black man in de white man suit, Mongolian ponies, college, the Jim Crow South, faster and faster, sneaking Charlie the laundry horse out for a ride…. Mary’s barn was the culmination of one sequence, the starting point for the other. It was also my link to his past.
I could see it all now. In full color and context. Riding for Dad meant freedom - freedom from and freedom to. It freed him from circumstances of war; freed him, temporarily, from racism; freed him from his own worst demons, both as man, person of color, and military commander. It also freed him to imagine a better world; freed him to visualize the life he wanted; freed him to step into the power of his own true potential. Riding, I think, made him feel at home in his own skin and able to be the soul that he was born to be.
With feet planted firmly on the ground, it was hard not to see the world as it was. Flying over the desert on an animal of mystical power, stamina, speed and beauty, it was hard not to see the world as it could be. And everyone knows that you have to see it before you can build it.
Dad gave Stacey and me riding lessons because he wanted us to discover our own “freedom from” and “freedom to,” our own in-grown sense of home and self.
I knew why Stacey said the picture of the barn lying in ruins “hit her hard.” It’s because it felt like the end of all that.
Ghostlands
The picture of the barn and the ruminations above that it awakened in me, soon found me searching Google Earth for the street I grew up on. Once I was hovering above my neighborhood and had located the Presbyterian Church around the corner, and the elementary school at the end of the street, I descended from on high to “Street View.” I “landed” with a bounce, and “walked” on Street View to the elementary school, in the footsteps of my kindergarten self. Then I turned around and walked back home.
I stared at the house - a white stucco, mid-century split-level ranch - and I knew Dad was alive somewhere inside. I could see the jewel-toned glass bottles Mom had lined up on the windowsill above the kitchen sink to catch the light and cast rainbows. Dad’s extra-long hose against the front of the house was also there, a reminder of more ambitious and capable days. These were the days when unruly grass and shrubbery, grungy window screens, hornets’ nests, sagging gutters, popped slates from the breezeway, and the occasional outbreak of a mass of maggots inexplicably hatched on the front porch consumed his waking (and sleeping) hours. Many the morning that he fairly leapt out of bed to get to some puzzle or conundrum that had been dogging him day and night because the solution had simply appeared in his dreams. Many the other morning that he would complain of insomnia because a puzzle or conundrum was still dogging him with no solution.
I zoomed in on the windows. Could I see anything? The resolution wasn’t great, but indeed, there was some large pale thing sitting on the dining room table – a package, perhaps. My heart skipped a beat. What else could I make out? I searched for a shadowy shape, perhaps going through mail at the table, or shuffling to the kitchen for some cookies and milk. Nothing.
The pictures were copyrighted 2015. Spring or early summer time, judging from the profusion of small purple and white flowers in the garden, and the Korean lilac – planted for my sister in recognition of her adoption from Korea – still green and unflowered. I guessed he was sitting in his TV chair in the living room, probably drifting in and out of a snooze.
At this time he would surely also have been lonely. Mom had died four years before. He had not yet had his fall (late June of 2015, see also Orpheus & Morpheus), and at this point, the companion service we had hired for him was sending someone out to see him only once a week, for three hours. The rest of the time, because he had lost his license at 101 (which was appropriate), and lost his mobility, as the bone-on-bone arthritis in his knees continued its creep, he was almost entirely alone. To characterize it as solitary confinement in no way exaggerates the situation.
I smiled to see the house looking so neat and just as I remembered it. My eyes stung and filled with the knowledge of what was by this time within. I shook myself free and tied the laces on my sneakers. My reflections on the barn and my childhood home had taken more time than I expected and I was now in danger of being late for my 9:00am CrossFit class.
I hopped in the car, turned the radio to the new Coffee House station and put the pedal to the metal. Construction forced me to take a different route to the gym, and about halfway there, I was overcome with the emotions of the morning. I considered turning back and just calling it a day when my ear tuned in to what I was hearing - a song I’d never heard before - and the refrain was singing about “my little girl, this is your world now” and “this year has been so-o hard…” I cocked my head and looked up to listen better and saw a great yellow triangular sign, nailed to a telephone pole, rise up against the blue sky in my windshield view. It depicted a child on horseback, indicating caution for motorists. Indeed, I found I was driving by a horse farm that was advertising lessons for kids.
What was happening? Could Dad have been watching Stacey and me all this morning, reminiscing about our riding lessons right along with us? Did I even believe in any of this stuff? As the melody and lyrics continued, I found I could not see the road through my tears and pulled over to compose myself. The tires crunched to a halt in a small parking area next to a Baptist Church. I took a deep breath, wiped my face, and got out of the car. I walked up the road a bit to take a picture of the sign so that I could send it to Stacey; it was all so remarkable.
I breathed in the beautiful day and turned back to my car, feeling my heart fill with hope and gratitude. I had reached the door and had my hand on the handle when I came to a sudden halt. For there, behind my car, was the church’s own roadside sign, whose plastic letters could be switched out each week to leave a new message. Today it said, “Where there is love, there is life.” I gasped and my hand flew involuntarily up to my mouth and throat. An electric shiver ran through me.
On the last Christmas before Dad died, I had been helping him in the upstairs bathroom with his dentures. He was seated on a stool in front of the sink and his emaciated frame showed almost everywhere under his bathrobe, which was falling open. When at long last his teeth were comfortably in, and I was trying to help him stand, he found couldn’t get good purchase on the sink counter and couldn’t shift his weight forward enough, or bring his legs back enough to stand. He collapsed back on the stool in a heap, exhaled sharply, and shook his head in palpable disgust. “I might as well be dead,” he muttered. My heart constricted. I had almost never heard him talk like that. I pushed my horror aside and hugged him and told him that I understood how frustrating this all must be, and how hard it was to suffer all the stupid indignities of old age.
“But Dad,” I said, steadying my voice and wrapping my arms again around his torso, encouraging him to grab me around the neck while I stood him to his feet, “Just remember, where there is love there is life.”
The Spirit of Place
My house was as empty as it had ever been after Mom died, but it didn’t feel empty. The parties were over, the kids were grown, the twenty exchange students had come and gone, the animals had grown old and been put down, and mountains upon mountains of junk had been cleared out; it was just Dad and the house now. But I felt every corner of the place burbling with memories. I could almost see everyday scenes playing out before me in empty rooms. An impromptu jam session with musical friends from the neighborhood crowded around the piano on a Halloween night; Mom weaving on the couch; the family playing Clue at the dining room table.
This spawned a fun little photographic experiment, shown below, where I went around the house and yard and took “pictures of old pictures,” in the exact places that they had been taken to begin with, and evoking the ghostly memories I had swirling all around me. They filled the house and made it feel like a living thing, and the place called “Home.”
The house didn’t feel empty after Dad died either, at least not at first. I had watched the coroner wheel his body out the front door that afternoon, feet first and in a burgundy corduroy body bag. There aren’t many scenes more final than that. That evening, friends of my parents, Lee and Marcy Loomis, had called me to check in and upon learning that I was alone, cried, “Alone! You’re not alone are you?” And because indeed I was, they swooped in and gathered me under their wings and clucked over me and took me to dinner and let me laugh and cry and reminisce with them over a delicious sesame-encrusted tuna steak, drizzled in wasabi ginger sauce.
I remember fighting the urge to demur and ask “are you sure it’s okay?” before ordering the most expensive thing on the menu. Something stopped me. Something told me that life isn’t just about knowing how to give, but also about opening yourself to receive. The Loomises, or “the Loomi” as I was tickled to discover they call themselves, were offering me a sacred gift of companionship and presence and parental love just hours after my last parent had died. My only job at this point, I understood on a very deep level, was to receive it. So I ordered a second glass of wine. If I couldn’t accept a tuna steak and a couple of glasses of wine on the night my father died, how would I be able to receive the bigger stuff in life?
When I got home, I didn’t bother to turn the lights on and made my way mechanically to Dad’s overstuffed TV chair in the living room. I fell in to it and stared vacantly before me, not moving, barely breathing, and quite numb. My first night on earth without Dad yawned around me, threatening to swallow me whole. But, I remarked, I did not feel alone. I examined the feeling curiously, turning it this way and that; was it true? Yes, indeed; I most definitely, and inexplicably, did not feel alone. How odd. What’s that about?
And then I jerked my head slightly to the right, to the sound of Dad’s voice in my right ear - loud, crisp, and clear as day: “You couldn’t have done a better job, Honey.” I was wholly uninterested in questioning or analyzing. Had I really heard what I heard? Was I hallucinating in a grief-maddened state? I didn’t care, and on a level of not-caring that is almost impossible to convey here because I’ve never felt it since. Were the words true? Yes. Did they warm me in my cold cell of self-imprisonment? Yes. Then what did it matter what they were or where they came from? I nodded my head and said out loud, “Thanks, Dad.”
The house felt full all the next day too, and when I locked it up to make the long drive back to New Hampshire and a post-parent life I still had trouble visualizing. But when I returned for the memorial a few weeks later, it - and the town - were decidedly empty. I wandered the rooms of the house the same way I strolled the streets of the neighborhood - listlessly - hoping to recapture some sense of home and belonging. I trailed my fingers along the walls behind me, listening, remembering; and plucked small leaves from the town’s hedges, stopping before key landmarks, waiting to feel “not alone” again, but the house and town stayed remote, and offered me no succor that week. Whatever it was that had filled them before and made them feel like “home” was gone. Amazing how a person can fill a whole town, I thought to myself. I had felt an urgency in “coming back home” for the memorial, for I had spent three weeks in a dark loneliness I could scarce find words to describe and wouldn’t want to anyway, but now I felt let down and adrift. Home was gone as sure as Mom and Dad were. There was no getting it back. It got me to thinking about how we confuse the physical structure of place with the spirit that inhabits it. And at that time, I felt that the spirit had left and I was home no more, nor ever really would be again.
Homecoming
About a year after the memorial, and a year before the current writing, I found myself in Spain where I mixed my parents' ashes and released them to the wind from a mountain side overlooking the jeweled waters of the Mediterranean. On my walk back down the mountain, I picked up a natural garnet and a large, pearly white sea snail shell, miles from the ocean and sitting there for no obvious reason on a desert slope. As unusual objects, I collected them and I've kept them ever since as a reminder of my small sacred ritual I did for myself. But it was over a year before I was struck with the deeper meaning behind them, and why, perhaps, my intuition guided me to take them with me.
Sometimes grief is so thunderously loud that you can't hear anything. It takes time before you can hear the small whispers in your mind again. One morning this past May, when I opened the cupboard to make coffee, as I do every morning, and was greeted with the usual view of the snail shell, the garnet, and a picture of Dad and me dancing at my wedding, I was struck dumb. In an instant, I knew why I had picked up those objects.
The garnet is a semi-precious stone - and one that signifies the heart, connection and love no less! In its raw state, you can see it peeking out from under a rough cortex of impenetrable-seeming rock. My quiet inner voice spoke to me and said, “It means that love and connection are ever-present, and inside you, even when invisible. That they are gone from you now is an illusion. You need only break open the rock.”
Then I picked up the shell and ran the fleshy part of my thumb over its swirls and ridges. “Snails carry their homes with them wherever they go,” said my quiet inner voice. I dropped my hand holding the coffee scoop to the counter, and continued to stare at the shell in the other hand, as comprehension began to set in. "Home is where the heart is,” said the voice. “You do not need to mourn it. You do not need to search for it. You do not need to visit it. It is with you always because it is a part of you, the way the snail shell is a part of the snail."
So…I’ve not lost anything at all, I answered back. Mary’s barn may be a ruin, and the house may have felt empty when I last saw it, but the memories that made them feel full, and made me feel loved, are with me still. Is that it?
“Yes, you got it,” said my quiet inner voice.
Then home was not the structure but the feeling it gave me inside, I went on, and that feeling, that Spirit of Place can be accessed anytime and anywhere… I need never again feel orphaned, homeless, or rootless. I AM home. Home is inside of me.
“And more,” said my quiet inner voice with emphasis, “it always was.”
I remembered my last visit to Dad’s house and the feeling that the spirit of the place had left it, and by extension, left me. It was a feeling of crippling abandonment. But if, as I now suspected, the spirit never leaves because it resides within you, then at most, you may only ever block it - through grief, fear, anger, anxiety, sadness, etc., or by too narrowly defining it. Let me explain. I thought parental love would never be mine again because I thought parental love could only come from my parents. And then “the Loomi” showed up and I opened myself to receive the gift that was being given. My lesson that night is that it is indeed still possible to feel held up and taken care of. There is an archetypal “parental love” that exists always and can be received. You have only to be present enough to recognize and accept it when it appears. Most of us instinctively reject it because it does not come in the form or from the person we are expecting it from. The same can be said of all other kinds of love.
To really come home, I realized, I needed only to remember what home meant to me - love, connection, belonging; freedom from and freedom to - and then open myself again to those feelings when- and wherever, and in whatever form they are offered. I am worthy of that gift, and it does not have to, nor often does, come from the usual suspects.
We’re so demanding of the Universe, aren’t we. We want our love and our connection and our belonging, and we want it now. We also only want it in certain forms, from certain people, and in certain places. But what happens then? When those people and places are gone, we imagine that so, too, is love. What a terrible disservice we do ourselves, spending our whole lives meticulously setting ourselves up for failure in this regard because the Universe is FULL of love that we are simply not prepared to receive.
See the love when it is being offered, even from unexpected places.
Be the love you want to feel and see it mirrored back to you ten-fold.
Create the home you want to inhabit and watch your fears subside.
Your authenticity is your greatest gift.
Since that morning in May, I’ve had cause to reflect on my sense of home, which was built and nurtured with loving care by real people in a real place, but whose spirit continues on in my life even as people and place have dissolved. My sense of home, when I tap into it, gives me freedom from isolation and loneliness; freedom from despair about the state of the nation and the world; freedom from the worst forms of self-doubt or -loathing. It also gives me freedom to be daring and bold; freedom to challenge myself and follow my whimsy; freedom to visualize a life I never thought possible for myself, my best creative life - archaeologist, photographer, painter, author, speaker, writer, raiser of amazing children - and all this without parents, without “a home”!
Everyone knows you have to see it before you can build it. The Spirit of Place, which never leaves me, is my magic mirror, where I can see it all.
Don't forget to get quiet. There is wisdom in silence.
“For whatsoever from one place doth fall, Is with the tide unto another brought: For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”
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