We moved along. In the mountain’s shadow, a false darkness fell and it seemed almost like night again. From time to time a rock would poke into the sole of my shoe, if I kept going, they hurt for a moment but did not cause me any injury. If I stood still on them, they were hard, sharp, painful. We were in the northern rainforest, even though I had spent my childhood there, it seemed sinister to me. Like a cemetery in a schoolyard.
The rainforest you are thinking of is lush and warm, there are birds and fruit hanging down, insects and plants quiver with the secrets of a thousand undiscovered medicines, it is a kind of fertile magic. Glowing green, everything springs full of electric life, it is a vibrant place.
But in a temperate rain forest, cold, damp air causes everything to grow slowly. It grows the way mold grows and it will not be denied. Fungus pushes through rotting branches next to new trees sprouting. Lichen clings to the rough bark of twisted oaks, bindweed twists through the bracken sinking roots seven years deep. People call it lush, verdant, miraculous. White sprouts tendril over the black bark of fallen branches under leaf litter. Moss cushions every fall. Nearly every plant, I’ve been told, is edible. It grows and grows and grows, with or without sunlight. There is enough to sleep in, eat on and grow dull, like an animal who has never seen summer.
After a certain point, such exuberance becomes monotony. Growth on growth on growth, never pausing, covered the slopes and consumed the paths.Stones rolled down the mountainside every night, spiders drew lines across the trails and all the while everything grew and grew. It never stopped.
I prepared myself to walk still further. Drained and defeated to be back in this place after so long, after so far, I paused and drew a deep breath, steeling myself not to buckle, not to cry but to trust my guide and accept whatever suffering I might witness.
There comes a point where one is not comforted by comparisons. Saying “at least it’s not snowing” or “at least you have your health” – being forced to say that in the face of quotidian sorrow brings on a kind of reflexive numbness.
Hold out a promise delayed to someone for long enough and they will become crippled from the loss. Disaster begins to look like movement and any movement would be welcome.
Just the same, I thought, this was my dream. This mundane tragedy, the life lived just well enough to get by and not enough to thrive. It was my job to understand it. Inside I made a promise not to falter nor draw back but to keep moving forward and remember it to chronicle my journey.
And so I said, “Poet, why is it you, I settled on? Why drag you out of my memory?”
“You painted the rage of a woman wounded, told the story of earth and sea, turned through your art, a dead father into an immortal portrait. You saw every city and told every tale and you know the way. How can you trust me to see what must be seen?”
“How can I dare to go through this? Why would I and having gone, how do I presume to speak? How can you know I’ll even see what you’re trying to teach me? “
Some of us can rethink a thing and think it through again and again until it’s worn away to nothing. We use our thoughts like water, wearing away stone.
I stood and questioned, doubted, wondered, worried. It is my way to stop myself and shelter from failure by only thinking. I worry and think some more; speaking it all to myself as a nun speaks a prayer told on a rosary. I run my thoughts through my own hands a thousand times and eventually, time leaves me in its wake. I can sleepwalk again.
So I hung back binding myself in that familiar knot of words and cradling my fears as one would soothe a child. It never occurred to me that I was fighting against my own efforts to reclaim my sanity.
“I see what you are doing,” spoke my guide, ”and you will hobble yourself again if that is what you choose. You sink your heart in cowardice the dark, cold pool where many gifts are lost. It takes great books from shelves before they’re read. Plays and songs that could have healed humanity, are plunged into that pool before they leave the lips of those who made them.
I have lost many children to that pool as have my sisters and yours, all our mothers before us, lost a world of wonder in timidity.
To break the lock I will tell you how I came here, if you think you can hear it.”
I came to you in part because I heard an echo of my own life in a prayer raised on your behalf. We souls can hear the living cry out when they sing the notes in our own key and yours is mine. I pitied you.
Between the rift of sleep and dreaming, in that place that is neither life nor imagination souls sometimes hear the heart’s desires of those who suffer troubled sleep. Here, someone came to me one night. He was a tall man, dark and slender. His face was lined with worry and his eyes were clouded by drink but he prayed for you. Like water sparkling on green leaves, he reminded me of what I lost and what he might have been. He reached to me and I stopped to answer him. He reminded me of someone I once loved.
His voice was soft and rich, sweet – it was a butterscotch sound, filled with southern music. His thoughts were clear and urgent on this one subject but they emerged from a morass of other things, anything but coherent. Still they spoke to me, there was no murmuring. “You Lady, muse and voice of femininity,” He began, “all you gifted women who dared to go where she only looks, speak to her. Find her, please,” he said, “my dearest friend. I did this to her, I know and now – afflicted, alone and afraid, she is frozen on the shore of life. Give her your strength to move, lend her your breath to speak and bring her back. She has lost her way. Bring her back; not to me but to herself.”
My guide went on, “He was wrong of course. You did this to yourself and used his help to hurt yourself in the end but I saw the strength of his infatuation do battle with his weakness and lose. He did not ask you to stay and he will not come for you. He is not strong and he is not brave but as he called to me to rouse you and help you find your way.” That was interesting to me, that woke me from my own sleep. You reminded me of me, as so many women do.”
“I answered him and came to you. My life, my work was at its core, for love and for love I came to you. For buried deep within our feeble human bodies is the one, the most enduring circle of heaven, love for each other.”
“I felt compelled to guide you for all our sakes. Love can kill and be killed, it killed me many times but only love can resurrect. We are lost and trampled in this world, too often. And given the chance to walk with a woman, I knew I wanted that chance.”
“I was remade by God’s mercy and can endure anything now. I’m here to guide you, while you are with me you will feel it all and fear destruction but you will not be maimed or mortally wounded by all the anguish in the depths of this abyss. I was made by mercy, asked to come by love and so I came.”
“And then Lucia led me to you here in this dark place. By her light I saw your journey in the way he sees you and my dry heart beat again. A man can love,” Lucia said, ” and all love is real, the weakest and the shallowest, has some measure of dignity in it.” My guide wiped a tear away and said, “I need to know that too.”
“And so” she asked, “who will you be? Will you bear the grace of our faith in you? or will you turn away? Will you live through your anger at him or through your will to live your own life? Will you be the woman who goes up the mountain, however slowly, or the one who stays in bed?”
There is such bitter pleasure in being wounded. Spite feels like vengeance. Even when it scalds, it satisfies. To know his dreams of me were all defeated gave me some satisfaction. My failure was his remorse, I liked that. I bit into it like food and held it like a blanket. I was glad he hurt for me. Why would I want to give any room to love in my heart or in his world, even in dreams, so blinded by the wound was I and I began to say it but considered who chose to guide me on my path and was humbled. It was time to put these things away and open my eyes.
And so I thanked her for her grace and dignity. “I will come with you.” I said, “I will try to take in a universal love that is clearly absent. I will hold on to a loving intention and walk the road it paves.” (and part of me was pleased by this little lie, this nod to cynicism, the road to Hell is paved by good intentions; who knows what the road out of hell is made with.)
No matter what, I decided, I would not be the one who stays in bed and let the sun rise without me. I feigned humility. “Wise Guide,” I said “please lead me, with my gratitude. If you lead, I will follow, just as I followed your art when I was a girl. Even though I think I can’t.”
She turned and showed me her back, scarred with the wounds of love lost and broken but still strong. She started down the path and leaning on that vision, I attended.
