Saturday, April 5, 2014

Relinquish

A decision--becomes many commitments which my own nature is not strong enough to fulfill.
How quickly I can lose sight of a castle I beheld from a pinnacle, in the toil of climbing through the forests of preparation!

I have snapped many "selfies" of myself in my different living situations.  It is so normal, very human to identify with my things (simple as they are), the paint on the walls, the books on the shelf.  I also have identified myself many times as an artist, a musician, a would-be writer.

Now I wrestle with my things--how absolutely shall I reject them?  Are they not memories--external hard drives for the brain?  A few notes, photographs perhaps, will do, won't they--if I want to be really technical.  Oh, a photo is nothing like holding a treasured mug in hand, but at least the memory may live.  (And how we humans do treasure memories!  Invisible realities that remind us we are bigger than this moment! that we are part of a collective identity that has sweated and bled and loved both for created things and the Creator!

In some moments, many moments, I think I would rather write about doing than actually do.  But without the pressure to accommodate both, writing has no inspiration.  And where writing has no inspiration, work has no art.

I can sit amidst a jumble of displaced items--most of them so useful given the right situation!--I can sit among them and think because I do not see them as chaos; I see them in their uses.  The five-gallon water cooler on the dining table is not there, but on a picnic table full of iced tea, and my three young children run to it with their plastic cups for a refill.  The miscellaneous scented candles burn cheerily, mingling with the scent of dinner to welcome my husband home along with two or three guests, and children's voices babble happily at play.  Two deeply red platters are piled with dessert, and half a dozen assorted mugs await a fill of evening decaf. 

The ragged fence in the back yard is there, but I easily imagine methodically cutting it out of the tree stump and digging up the posts in teamwork with a mate.  But all this imagining has suspended my connection with the reality that there is no such man at this time, and no promise of one; that there are no children; that plastic does deteriorate whether it is used or not.

And a decision to shake off the fog of superimposed fantasy, to become a little less nostalgic for the future (as only imagination can do!) brings about moments of emotional conflict.  Lingering, sitting down and reflect on why I love my possessions, when I need to get real and push them off like encumbering weights, freeing my footsteps for a much greater, surprising journey!

And I wonder.  From Lot's wife's perspective, did she feel she had just as much reason to love her city, to long to imprint its image in her mind that she might take its memory with her?  As far out of context as I am, I don't want to draw a comparison that unnecessarily shames--but I wonder if so much sentiment, so much determination to remember flickers of story is just so many strings keeping me tethered....
(but tethers can be so reassuring!)

Somewhere deep inside, I must somehow find hope in my past.  Hope in my earliest memories--hope that there is something I have forgotten, but that one day, if I hold onto the memories I do have, I may suddenly remember something fantastic.  Why do I have the persnickety desire to remember my earliest memories?  Why does it drive me crazy to remember only as early as 18 months of age?  It seems I wish I could remember the moment my soul sparked into existence.  And if I could just understand who I am to such a level, memories would cease to matter.  I cling to early memories as a sort of anchor I can dive to in the sea of my conscious past, hoping I might one day excavate just a little deeper than I ever had.  Somehow I believe I do have memories earlier than the ones I am sure of.  (Last night I watched Mary Poppins for the first time, I thought, and in the scene where the Banks children and their father cross the street from the cathedral to the bank, along with the richly beautiful choir of saints, I was struck that it almost perfectly depicted a dream I had a couple years ago, in which I stood on a portico like that of the bank, looking across the street at the cathedral, thinking I would just dash over to join the church service, then realizing it was already begun, as great swells of choir music came out, so rich that I doubled over crying at its beauty.   (So now, I ask my older sister, and she says yes, we did watch it, when I was about two years of age.)

Closure.  Sometimes a decision with no organic context, or sometimes a naturally occurring event in good time.  Sometimes a relinquishing of the quest, replacing it with a quest to go forward, to leave all these questions and things behind, for something and Someone so much greater than any formative human sense of "home".

When Jesus said, "In my Father's house are many mansions--if it were not so, I would have told you," what was indicated by that second clause?  That it was a popular belief that heaven would indeed be a magnificent, glorious place, and if it were not so, Jesus certainly would have corrected the disciples' thinking?  The Lord is good.  If there is a reason for me to remember some random memory, He can bring that about without me questing and clinging.  

As to memories in general, hopefully I can retain them internally and externally within reason, without being hampered by them as I press onward.  I do not want to become a stranger to the people I love from the past and the present.  Family, gold friends and old friends, those who have passed and those who will surpass me--
ah what a mysterious fabric is Creation.
May I dwell even more on the beauty of the Creator.