Time Out

I am back in Virginia, back in the county where I live, back in the village where I work, back in the house I call home.  I had forgotten how lovely it is – not in a general way, but in the specific beholding-with-your-own-eyes-in-the-moment way . . . the mountains covered with trees . . . the forest canopy that shields most of the road home . . . the church grounds . . . the home I’ve decorated and adorned with the trinkets and colors and comfort that are uniquely me – I love them all.

Sundial at Culzean Castle, Scotland

But I also love the very rare – unique in my own life, actually – gift I was given – the ability to spend 7 weeks of my life in Scotland, doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, having to be nowhere at any particular time, having to answer to no one about what I would do or not do or when I would do or not do it.

It was, it is, the liberation of the disconnect.

It wouldn’t do for a lifetime, but for a wee while, it was . . . heaven – the essence of the practice of being made easy.

We don’t get time outs very often, if ever, we grown ups.

Being so precious, so rare, perhaps something spectacular should come out of them.

But that’s the thing about just being.  It isn’t about the spectacular.  I’m not sure what it is about, but it’s not about that.

I am back in Virginia.

And the lessons, if any there are, will come.

But for now, I have had my time out and it was glorious.

And that is
enough
more
than

Memorial Day

It is early enough in the morning to still be dark outside and I am standing in Rhonda’s back garden, as a deer, a yearling walks by and then another and I am blessed.  Home.

***

Later I learn that Doc Watson died Tuesday.  Washington Post

And I remember back to Ronceverte, 1977 and the bluegrass festival where I saw and heard Doc Watson – the one and only time that I did.

And I remember Uncle Howard dying – the catastrophe for my cousins; but if I am truthful, the interruption of a bluegrass festival in the mountains of West Virginia that I would return to after the funeral for me.

It’s Memorial Day.  I for one like very much that we have moved from remembering the dead who died in wars to simply remembering the dead.

My mother will go alone to the cemetery today, for all her accompaniers of times past have died before her.  I miss them; but she honors them.

Willing or unwilling, the one who lives on becomes the witness to a collective past to which the dead may no longer attest.

My mother, Harriett Pyles, with her family at Thanksgiving

Today I picture my mom at the family cemetery for my dad’s family, paying homage to a people not her own, remembering the various aunts and uncles, babies who never made it that she never knew alongside her own mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and husband.  And I picture her imagining her own people, buried hours away at the other end of the state – her own parents and sister Lucie and a bit of the ashes of brother Harvey and brother Howard – her protector and teacher, he the oldest and she the youngest - he the first of them to die, she to be the last in some future moment that awaits us all who draw breath.

My Uncle Howard was only 50 when he died.  It was sudden and it was tragic.  I remember the day and the days that followed.  I remember the sense of tragedy that I felt for his daughters, my cousins.  I remember the concern I felt for his wife.  I remember the sadness I felt for my mother bereft of her protector, for them all.

***

When the second yearling walked by moments ago, she stood for a time, framed against the emerging dawn when she slowly turned her head and looked at me and for an instant only, we two saw each other - truly saw each other; and in the place within the mind of a deer that whispers . . . danger . . . human . . . she will remember me always and in that place within a human mind that whispers . . . she matters . . . I will remember her.

As with the yearlings, the passing of so many through a life sometimes changes the life, sometimes not.  But the life remembers.


_____________________
In one way, this is a fictionalized remembering.  Today is Memorial Day and so it is the day that my mother would, in times past, have been at the cemetery.  But moving all things to accommodate the long weekend fetish of we in the US, the last Monday in May long ago became the day when most folks do their Memorial Day-ing; so too with my mother.

ScotlandTour -- The List

Whenever you get the chance, as I did with this trip to Scotland, to spend a significant amount of time away from your day-to-day life and routines, it seems a good idea to take some sort of stock – an inventory, if you will, of what you come away with.  Here’s mine.

Days spent in Scotland – 48
Books read – 13.5
Miles traveled to get there and back – 8,106.86
Days spent in Scotland – 48
Modes of travel – 4 (trains, planes and automobiles, oh, and feet)
Miles driven in Scotland – 1,400 (give or take)
Friends visited (old and new) – 36
Restaurants – 16
Hours slept – at least 384
Something intentionally spiritual done – 0
Ska punk band concert attended – 1
Cities/towns/locales/sites visited – 18
Sunsets seen – 47 (not nearly as many sunrises)
Days of sunshine – 48 (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it)
Trinkets & souvenirs purchased for the folks back home – enough to require an                               additional suitcase
Pictures taken – hundreds
Blog entries posted – 41
Miles walked – I’m guessing 10 (not nearly enough, I know)
Folks in Virginia and West Virginia won’t believe me, but number of times I drove            
               faster than the speed limit - 1 (and that was unintentional - really hoping
               the vidcam wasn’t on just then)
Times driven on the right side of the road instead of the left - 1
Fun/silly things done – 4 (not counting time spent laughing with friends)
Preached – 0
Participated in worship –  1
Money spent – more some would say than I should have and less by far than I          
               could have
Number of people worshiped with – thousands
Number of young people I spent time with – 5
Percentage of overpacking (when will I learn?) – 80
Cuddles with Zara & hugs from Rudaridh - countless
Conversations and catching up with friends - too many to count and yet not enough
Moments of hospitality received – infinite
Time spent doing absolutely nothing productive – glorious!
Laughs with pals Liz and Idris around the table – lots
Puppy kisses from Ruca – laughter producing
Scottish wool sweaters looked at to get just the right ones for my boys
               at home – hundreds
Number of good-byes – too many
Spirit rested and refreshed from the love, grace and care of so many,
               but especially my friend Liz, to take back with me – 1

The Journey of Goodbye

Early tomorrow morning, I fly back to the United States; and thus will end my time in Scotland.

At this stage in my life, goodbyes have a distinctly different flavor than they did when I was much younger.  Goodbyes have always been hard for me (see Hard Good-byes ), but now they are even more so as I come to the stage in life when you know, genuinely know, that each goodbye has the potential of finality, of the last time, the last embrace, the last fond glance, for nothing in this life is guaranteed.

So even as we plan when we will meet again, we say goodbye as if it really mattered, because somehow, it does, as, looking back over my shoulder (both literally and figuratively), these people oh, so dear to me, fade smaller and smaller, them to me and I to them, into the backdrop of the past.

Photo of grounds of Culzean Castle by Idris Crumlish

It is a disconcerting moment, this bending and blending of time present and time past.

Thus am I left with the visuals of memory . . .

The chance meeting with Peter and Ann, as we each dance so briefly into and out of each other’s lives . . .

Myra left in my hurry to the next friend, standing in the shop looking at shoes – it’s so very ordinary and made the more special for it . . .

Alison and Jamie walking away, hand-in-hand, into the night on the sidewalks of Largs as I sit in the car and watch for just a moment before heading in the opposite direction – away and towards . . .

Cameron and Fraser and Rachel and I posing together, Alison always being good at capturing the moment as we measure my visits like growth charts with me as the wall against which these maturing young people move from childhood into something somehow sweeter for its fleeting . . .

Charlie, always with smile on his face, as kind in the parting as in the welcome . . .

Christine, who seems to get younger as I get older (so unfair as we’re the same age and she about two months older) – as we hug, I feel her shoulders are so small for all they carry that I hate to let her go . . .

Ruaridh smiling his way through it all – his life just begun, such things as goodbyes must seem so trivial in the hurry to the next thing . . .

Neil’s smile above his mother’s head, the son now larger in life than the mother – and Moira’s hug, always reminding me of our first goodbye when she whispered hast ye back into my ear . . .

Bill’s final act of tending this former student, leading me in caravan fashion out of town in the dark of the night, the wave of the flashing car lights our final goodbye as he went right and I left on the roundabout, my spoken thank you unheard by intended ears . . .

Zara hugging me tight and telling me over and over again I don’t want you to go . . .

The well-wishing handshakes at Castlehill Church, all asking with the anxiety of the superstitious – or the weather-worn –  you won’t take the sunshine with you, will you? – I think but do not say that even if I could, I would never take sunshine from these people . . .

Idris and what I imagine will be a quiet hug and goodbye, having had far too many of the hard forever kind of goodbyes of late . . .

Liz – friend and colleague, mentor and confidant, trailblazer and listening ear – how will I do without you close by?  I know when we hug for the last time, I will cry, but it will be all right – we both know it is what I do . . .

The lasting visual of my goodbye to Scotland will be the crowd at the window. . . Leaving Christine and Charlie’s house after a lovely evening filled with good food and better conversation, I turn back for one last look and see in the dark the lit front window as frame for the crowd standing there – Stuart and Patricia, Monica and Les, Ricky and Susan, Charlie and Christine – all waving goodbye.  They are in shadow to us, but I can still see them smiling . . .

All my goodbyes – the ones already had and those yet to come – stand framed in my mind, the real people that they are frozen in moments in time – that thing we call the past – even as they and as I continue our own presents.

And so it is that through all my goodbye tears, I too am smiling – smiling into the faces of friends – even those I leave, knowing the comfort that the void of these goodbyes will soon be filled with the presence of heart-warming hellos – home.

Empire

Looking at the Royal Scots Memorial
and wondering –
truly wondering
if only for a moment or two
what it must be like
to live in an Empire

the moment evaporates
        into self-awareness
and I say to myself
aloud “Oh.  That’s right.
I am an American.
I know exactly
        what it’s like
to live in an Empire.”
I hate that part.

The whispering beggar

The whispering beggar
Instead of walking on by
I want to stand before him
and say “I see you, you know –
you’re not invisible to me.
I think it’s cruelly funny and tragic
and wrong and yes, funny (more’s the shame to me)
that you would make so much more money
if, like so many of your more
savvy beggar colleagues,
you got yourself a dog.”
I want to say sharply, “I see you, you know –
and that fake-whisper ‘help me’ nonsense
isn’t going to cut it – either get in my face
and demand that I take account of you
or just sit there with your placard –
anything else is just insulting to us both.”
That is the conversation that happens in my head –
the one I am ashamed to admit,
even to myself.
At times like this, I wish I were a Muslim woman –
the rules of zakat are clear, at least to my friends –
someone asks – you give – simple as that –
my financial, emotional and spiritual obligations
would be so much more clear, I think,
if I were a Muslim –
but I am not
and so I live in the land of
having no idea what to do
and today
as with most days
when I meet the beggar on the street
I do nothing
and condemn myself to hell
But please know, my friend
(I say friend with no trace of irony,
although we both know I haven’t
been any kind of friend to you)
you weren’t invisible to me
not ever
I saw you
I just don’t know what to do with you –
well, without giving you the gift of my time –
the thing, it turns out,
I least want to give.

__________________
There are quite a number of beggars in Edinburgh.  Many of them have dogs with them; and the ones that do have pets at their sides seem to get much more response from the passsers-by than those who do not, on its own an interesting and disturbing observation.  This young man had no pet at his side and when we walked by, he whispered, "Help me".  I hate that I kept walking, but that's what I did.  I get no credit for thinking about him without helping him, responding to him.

The Trees in the Woods Are Speaking to Me

The trees in the woods are speaking to me
One whispers look this way, its branches    
pointing to the still waters below

Ayr Gorge - Peden's Cove

another’s branches growing out at
an awkward right angle offer the image
of gentle embrace and comfort merely by presence

yet another shouts
behold all things are made new
with its uplifted branches

Grounds of Culzean Castle
at sunset

at the margins, a stand with branches all
turned leeward from the constant and
never-changing winds
remind me to notice, to read,
the signs of the times with humility
while deep in the woods
one lone tree fallen at the waters’ edge
arms outstretched towards the source
of all life would have me see anew
The Sacrifice . . . and its cost –

Ayr Gorge

whether the tree that falls alone
in the forest is heard by human ears
does not matter so much
for I am given to know
that the Divine Ears hear
every tree . . .
every branch . . .
every twig that falls . . .
hear and weep . . .
hear and rejoice . . .
for the life that was
the life that could have been
and, as solid wood melts into
the loam of the forest floor
food for the sapling
to rise yet again,
every life that will be
from every life that was

The trees in the woods
are speaking to me and
it is well with my soul