Even today, when the sun shines, when I watch young people learn about native plants, and how to do chemical equations, when I can buy fresh tortillas on the way home from work, … The list goes on of how incredible my life is… and yet I still wonder…. what are we supposed to be doing here?
Every day the first thought of the productive person is…. what do I need to accomplish? Work, laundry, grass mowing (ach), finances, really never ending. What a funny life we have decided is normal. I look at the young people and think that I am now old enough to be their grandparent, and yet I still feel like I am the hippie kid who spent her last 200 bucks on a property down payment back in 1977 with the hippie Buddhist guy with the long hair and beard with whom I lived in the tent where we conceived our first child.
We thought we were pursuing a meaningful life. We did everything differently than our parents. We eschewed the Catholic dogma which drowned out our childhood spirits, and we looked out into the world for more.
Thirty five years later he has gone onto the place where The Beloved Reverend Billy, and our Dear Uncle Mike have gone, and I am still here, digging away at the same freaking Existential questions that I began to ask when I was ten. Why is that? I welcome any answers from Edge Readers because I trust you not to give me pablum.
Thank you Margi for encouraging readers to step back from the canvas.
I practice wondering what’s going on within and around me, and try to follow that wonderment wherever it leads in my thinking, conversations, reading, and writing. Yet I also keep a mental to-do list of practical tasks that define my productivity. These habits get scrambled together as the days and weeks and months and years move along.
On good days, the information and images and ideas I’ve been gathering fit together (often when I’m engaged in some manual chore like mowing the grass). When this happens I feel as if the pixies have led me to some hip eureka moment.
On bad days I get lost and fuss at myself for following the freaks out into the tangled wilds of the pointless forest. While there I meet other lost characters. We talk and share memories that are often connected to certain songs or books or foods or animated films we watched as children. At some point we usually realize that we’re still children and are part of some greater story that describes our situation.
Together we find our ways home.
Funny that you mention a ‘canvas’ Watt. As of late I have this craving to just sit myself down with some paints and waste an afternoon putting colors and lines together just for the total mind freeing feeling of it.
In my post above I mentioned feeling like a young hippie girl, and I fear, and my kids would most likely agree, that my art work has not changed much since I was in about 9th grade. Hippie girl art, flowers, mountains and peace signs hidden like waldos.
So, yes, lets step back from the canvas. The days roll along, inspirations come and go, and we get closer to the final scene, how close we know not. Thinking of the ‘end’ is a trick I use to bring me into the moment. When I was 33 and suddenly became a widow, life never looked clearer to me. I felt cleansed of all kinds of mental garbage for a few months. The grief was not a good trade, but that is how it goes for so many of us. Death is that awful and unique connection to life.
I like that you also mention the feeling of us as children. We are all the ages we ever were all at once. This is a fact I have only begun to realize after about age 50. The question becomes, how do we access the creativity, the freedom, the clean sparkling of the child mind?
Above my computer is a quote from the Dalai Lama which I try to read when I feel the meaninglessness creeping in around the edges:
“For as long as space endures
and for as long as living beings remain
may I, too, abide
to dispel the misery of the world.”
One night while on a road trip, during the early 80s, I met an octogenarian Indian in Taos Pueblo who said all humans are babies. Back then I was attending college in Boulder, wishing I had arrived ten years earlier, when hippie teepees still dotted the surrounding countryside.
That was about the time The Big Chill came out, recycling questions of existence for folks who came of age in the 60s. I was three years younger than the youngest actor in the cast, Meg Tilly, who played the girlfriend of the baby-boomer who died. Wikipedia reminded me that the last spoken words in the final scene are “We’re not leaving. We’re never leaving.” Then the credits roll as “Joy to the World” plays in the background.
The little tangle of memory seems fitting for this thread, which could be viewed as a generational musing on existence. Wouldn’t it be cool if other people joined in? I smile to imagine a place where kids of all ages can ponder life’s journey along with peace sign pioneers.
Who was that pueblo elder with a beautifully wrinkled face and long black braids? I can’t recall his name, but I remember pieces of what he said. At one point he started singing “Jingle Bells” (we were in Taos at the beginning of the winter holiday season). I played along, sort of like I was humoring a nursing-home resident. “Jingle all the way” we sang; then suddenly he stopped and looked me straight in the eyes and asked “What is all the way?”
I’d love to hear a few more memories, Margi. What happened to that property where you pitched your tent? Hopefully that hippie-child is full of ever-loving gratitude for his/her mom’s creativity.
Watt, your question here has opened something akin to a pandora’s box of memories for me. When I count the years, 35, since I bought the first piece of land with Jim, it seems like a story like those my grandparents told. 35 years, too long to fathom, even when you’ve lived it.
That property was in Joyce, WA, 15 miles west of Port Angeles. We built a cabin with a lot of recycled, free or salvaged materials, spending something like $200 to get the first little part up. Arlyn, our first son, was born in that cabin. We sold it in 1979, when he was 9 months old, and moved to Bellingham so that I could finish college. We took the proceeds from the cabin sale and purchased a 1920 Bungalow fixer near the WWU campus. We worked on it for 2 years, and the whole time Jim could not wait to return to the Olympic Peninsula.
We sold the remodeled house after I got my BA from Western, and found 20 acres for $42,500, which included 8 apple trees, 5 dilapidated outbuildings, thousands of daffodils, a boundless amount of river alluvium and a view of Mt. Olympus through the valley cut of the Elwha River.
Our adjoining parcels were Elwha Tribal Trust lands. In 1983, when my younger son, Amery, was born, the Elder, Grama Sampson, declared him to be the “LIttle Chief”, and an honorary Elwha because he was born in our house, ‘on the res’, so to speak. Everyone called the whole valley ‘the res’.
We lived there from ’81 till ’92. In 1989 we lost Jim in a sudden tragic accident. He was electrocuted by a downed power line on July 7. He was 35 and I was 33. Our kids were 11 and 5.
I moved away after 2 years of being in the memories, every turn reminding me of our life and the strange turn it took. I moved to the Oregon coast, a long time dream of mine.
I talked to the Elwha tribe about selling the land to them to help build their community there in the beautiful little valley. They readily agreed. I sold the land and house for far less than the market value, because Jim had always talked about what a rotten deal the American Indians had been given, how much land was stolen from them. It was my gesture partly in his honor to make a transaction happen easily so I could move on, and the tribe could begin utilizing the land. The caveat I gave was that the tribe would never cut down the beautiful forest in the low part of the land. That is written into the sales contract.
The young man who was born in the cabin became not a hippie, but certainly an artist. He plays and teaches classical double bass, is a wine sommelier, and has very short hair, almost shaved, does yoga and is a city boy by choice. He is a good and kind person through and through,and when I see him I imagine the days I walked in the woods when he was first born, holding him to watch the sky and the trees as we wandered a summer day. I think that must have done something.
The young man who was dubbed Little chief has an MBA, works for Nike, married an attorney and they are just now buying their first home in Tigard with plenty of room for their 2 huskies.
So, maybe that is more than you needed to know, but there it is. 35 years from my first property.
On a side note, Jim and I made a pact that spring, that we would never rent. Since then, I never have. That means not always having running water and electricity and living under construction. He left me with that legacy I guess. He left too soon, but we kept on, faces pointed squarely into the wind, rain, and sun, whatever life offers. On the days when I chide myself for my blind idealism, I remind myself that it is not a choice, I just am that way. I think we spend our lives being what we already are, making friends with the parts of ourselves which seem to just be in the genetic code. Maybe too, the memories of all those we come from as well.