Temple of Memory

 

Words, when carefully attended to, can cause important shifts in perspective. Often when grieving we feel overwhelmed by our memories, with the implication that the memories hold us in our grief. But — 

"Without memory we would be unable to be healed from past painful events.”

Sr. Phil O’Shea

In the meditation she led today, she quoted from John O’Donohue in his book, Anam Cara, on the idea of the “temple of memory.” We might reflect on the temple of memory, and further, of “no yesterday, no tomorrow, only now.”

I am well familiar with the idea of being in the present moment, rather than sacrificing our lived life to dwelling in memory or fixating on what might yet be. But I struggled a little to know how I would be in the moment while also reflecting in the temple of memory. After a few moments, the light came on.

Rather than grief spilling over every moment of life, uncontained and unanswerable, I can preserve, honour, and enter the temple of memory and visit wholly with my absent loved one there. A place of containment, a place of release, a place to love. At this stage in my grief over my brother Victor, that may be exactly what I need.

In our last (dismay!) session, last week, my bereavement counsellor said that it was okay to take a break from grief. A novel concept, with some appeal. My fear is of shutting down again, where the underground grief does damage rather than being attended to and offered healing. But the idea of a temple where I can visit Vic or simply enter to grieve, rather than being twisted by grief in every place and any moment, appeals to me. To tend my grief, to honour Vic’s memory, but to also take breaks. It sounds very good.

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until that coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

 

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance

With the invisible form of your departed…

 

 from “For Grief” by John O’Donohue

I don't actually believe that grief “heals,” that there is a last drop, a time where grief no longer is. I believe in making peace with grief, so we don’t reject it and suffer as a result. Because grief is love. And love, I want to keep.

Thinking of all of you, with your sorrows and your losses. Grateful that we all have loved.

“Loss” — sculpture by Jane Mortimer. Faceless but expressive human sitting with arms around knees and head down. Grey-blue against darker blue trees.  Malone House, Malone Road, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

A Segment from *The Cure at Troy* by Seamus Heaney

 

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols

beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

Seamus Heaney

from "The Cure at Troy"

Image: Spreading Creek Wildfire Rips Through Banff National Park, Huffington Post Canada.

School Day for Chickadee

I was in my garden today, the little one just beyond my patio, when a pair of chickadees arrived at the feeder. It's just a simple thing, a shallow frame made of wood with a screen bottom, suspended from a garden hook by wires. Inside the feeder I have a couple of jam jar lids filled with shelled and broken sunflower seeds, a tiny bowl of peanuts, and another tiny bowl of suet balls.

There was a brief fracas when they first arrived at the feeder and one flew a metre and a bit away while the other (at a guess, I would say, it's parent) fed. When the first one had had its fill it flew back into the maples and chickadee number two ventured over. First to the top of the feeder stand. Then over to the fence. Then back, closer, landing on top of the suet block cage. And repeat. Finally, when the coast seemed truly clear, it made a bold hop to the feeder with the sunflower seeds.

It landed, as I have seen it's relatives the bushtits sometimes do, upside down on the bottom of the screen. This didn't work very well so it flew back to the suet feeder, then back to the fence, then to the bottom of the screen again.

Meanwhile, the sun shone, bumblebees climbed into the mouths of waiting bellflowers, a hover-fly inspected the sedum, and a bald-faced hornet searched for something low down among the leaves. I glanced over at the hole in the fence this chickadee likely hatched out in. It had been taken over by bumblebees after the chicks had fledged and now I noticed there is an impressive funnel shaped web opening around the entrance to the cavity. It's delightful to think of the succession of creatures making use of that one small hole in so short a period of time.

At this point the more confident chickadee returned. Our unsuccessful diner appears to have paid better attention to what its associate did this time: It landed inside the feeder, spent a moment or two snatching up sunflower seeds, and returned to the trees. Immediately the young chickadee copied the action, landing on the upside of the feeder and settling down to eat.

Another skill acquired. There is so much to learn in our first year of life.

Image: "Poecile atricapillus 1513, A Black-capped Chickadee at Blanche Lake, Minnesota USA” by Tattooeddreamer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rescue Me, Oh Mud, Oh Earth

Rescue Me, Oh Mud, Oh Earth

 

This has been a hard, hard week. But I got myself out into the backyard today with my copy of Dave Goulson’s book The Garden Jungle - or Gardening to Save the Planet. I had my cup of decaf coffee and a folding chair which I tucked in out of the rain, between the planters and the birdfeeders. I spent several minutes just gazing out at my wonderful, soggy, dilapidated garden and feeling so relieved at escaping from the various stresses indoors. I must have been thinking a lot but I have no idea what I was thinking about. Probably, at first, the things that were chewing away at me when I was indoors. But I do recall beginning to distinguish between the plants I saw before me, to remember: these are the friends that I brought from home. The sword fern, the epimedium, these clematises and bellflowers, the giant bleeding heart, and of course, my Iolanthe magnolia.

 

I moved here four years ago from a place I’d been for thirty years, a beloved old building set to be torn down. It was really important to me to bring what I could of my plants. One, the magnolia, got some deep root pruning the year before I moved, to encourage it to grow roots closer to the surface in order to survive the transition. The move itself was difficult. And it turns out the land my new abode sits on was a dumpsite previously, and since then many hedge plants and high maple trees have penetrated that hard, compacted earth with their dense net of roots and rootlets. It took me weeks to dig a hole big enough for the little tree, but I got very good at cutting through roots, and I retrieved many interesting items, from rocks and broken glass and crockery to a shrivelled washing machine ringer. So, as gardening goes, it was hard, especially with my screwed up back and knees, but from an archaeological point of view it was fascinating. Finally, digging up that tree might have been the finish of me if one of my neighbours hadn’t come out to lend a hand. And then the wild ride here in the back of my friend’s pickup. Poor little Iolanthe!

 

I suppose that is where my thoughts began to dwell. On the plants I’d rescued from demolition at my old home to those I have introduced since moving here – those that remain and those that couldn’t adapt to conditions in my tiny yard. The garden bed I am building up from below rather than digging down into, to avoid repeating that fight with the roots. And, of course, there was my roving inspection from a distance: who is coming up from the soil, who has survived the winter, what needs replacing and shoring up.

 

After a while, I opened my book and began to read about peat bogs and some of the fascinating creatures that live in them, the properties of the bogs themselves and their importance not only to the plants and animals that make up their biosphere, but their role in preventing flooding and storing carbon. Having established the wonder and importance of bogs, Goulson discusses the conditions and health of soils in various circumstances, like farm fields versus allotments versus suburban and urban gardens. He outlines the efforts and lack thereof of horticultural societies and nurseries and gardeners to stop using peat. 95% of UK raised bogs are already gone; the majority of compost continues to be made of nearly 50% peat.

 

You would think that this would be totally depressing, and I might have done better to stick with my novel. But there’s something about the grace with which he speaks of the land, the personal relationship he has with the butterflies and his compost heap and the springtails and worms in his garden that make his writing uplifting despite all the worries outlined in such depth. Reading him helped me feel more grounded in and related to my own little patch, helped me think of ways to get around the impact of the bans in my building on having open water outside and establishing compost, and so on.

 

When I was finished with my reading I moved into the garden itself and began to see what was needed and do some work. It felt so good.

 

There is nothing like concentrating on the leaves and shoots, the worms underneath old bricks, on the soil itself and its black nature and moist beauty. Nothing like deciding where this sort of leaves can go to do the most good and where these ones need to be – figuring out how to get the most out of my limited freedom here. My aim with my little garden is to make it as attractive as possible to all manner of invertebrates, and yes that does include scale insects, beloved of ants, even though my first instinct is to get them off “my” plant. The healthier I can make the soil, the more little creatures I attract, the stronger the plants are – able to carry a greater load of scale bugs, for instance, the more that bigger creatures will come to eat the little ones, and the more joy I feel when I am sitting out there with my coffee and my book in this small, imperfect sanctuary that helps so much to ease the pain of living in this world. 

 

When I was reading I heard the chip and thrum of a hummingbird and I looked up from my book. A male Anna’s was checking me out. He went to the left, he went to the centre, he went to the right, hanging in the air maybe two feet ahead of me. His brilliant iridescent neck feathers glittered as he moved from side to side. When he was satisfied, he zipped away. All the while in the garden today, I was hearing chickadees and sparrows and glancing up to watch the brave ones as they flew to their feeders, snatching a sunflower seed or stabbing at the suet, flying away in swift retreat.

 

There is something about being surrounded by plants and birds and air and mud that is like being swaddled in lace. There is a warmth even on a cool day, a gentleness – perhaps arising from the innate gentling of stopping and hearing and seeing more fully than usual. The worst sorrows can be kneaded softly by the garden world.

 

So, thank you for this much-needed intervention, oh mud, oh earth. Thank you for letting me reignite my love for you, my involvement with you, my caring for you, and feel again the balm of you against my soul.

 

I return indoors buttressed for whatever work I need to do in this more human world.

                               

Images: Photo of leaves by Kristian Seedorff on Unsplash. Photo of muddy hands by Chris Yang on Unsplash.