Riding the waves of belonging

                                                                    Baubo in the kitchen (2)

     We’re tethered to the world by who we love. Whether a person, an animal or a place, this is how we belong to the world and how we know how to be in it.  This is how gravity works, not as a unified force, but through people, places or animals.  Or other lives that we live. Otherwise, we’d just float off into the cold, distant night. 

~

     Mrs. Scattergood smoothed things out.  She polished wood.  She stirred the boiling to a slow simmer. She made nicey nice and didn’t always leave the right picture of reality.  But this smoothed out thing happens and that’s a reality on its own.  Could be that in the smoothed out world you can find the dimension of the large and heroic. That world of fable and figures from myth that stand larger than people ever could. Where they’re more noble and funnier too if you get the right person to tell their stories. Baubo loved a good story. She told Mrs. Scattergood that she thought of memory as a hive. Each story is a part of a world. Often an unexpected event will call up a story. In the last few years Mrs. Scattergood would try to hold onto the tenuous connection she had to a cloud shape or a character's notions about the world.  But they are as flimsy as a drop of water on a dry hot day.  Everything evaporates. But a fascination with memory and wanting to hold onto those little moments tolerates that sometimes parallel track of futility. Her fascination with timelines and history graphs catered to this part of her life. If it wasn’t eras that she tried to memorize, it was dates and centuries, which, frankly, make eras seem as far away as the rings of Saturn.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

riding the waves of hieroglyphs

 Something stirred beneath Mrs. Scattergood and the movement woke her some more.  Entire patches of sand were moving. At first she thought it was the sweet ghost crabs.  About the only crabs she’d ever call sweet. That would have been something considering her weight.  But the movement was too particular and too many. Small clams.  Coquinas.  Their translucent legs peddling to burrow them down.  On either side of her there were a line of gulls plucking at the sand having clams for breakfast.

     She pulled the dried seaweed off her shirt and sniffed it the way she checked the dill in the markets.  A piece of seaweed slid off her.  Baubo says the sacred is in the pieces.  Mrs. Scattergood was always collecting pieces but didn’t have a memory of it.  When her legs were ready to go she stood up and headed home.  

~

     Baubo was waiting on the cottage porch wondering what happened to Mrs. Scattergood this time.  Then she nearly fell over backwards when some black capped chickadees came barreling out of nowhere flying through the holes in the trim that captioned the porch.  Baubo had been fiddling with her ears and yelled out, “I lost a great piece of earwax because of them.” She watched the birds fly into the pine trees.  Barry had put that trim in. Thought it added the homey touch.    

     Baubo was prone to contemplation but rarely let anyone know.  She did wonder why a person begins to cry when she gets sympathy.  Of course she noticed that gentleness allows tears to flow. That’s why she showed up when Barry died and offered Mrs. Scattergood her first Southern Comfort, straight up.  In addition to his sudden death, she knew that this was already a difficult time.

~

      Mrs. Scattergood was saving a piece of cedar at the back of her house.  It has insect hieroglyphs on it that also look like cranial stitching.  She knew the bugs were at work a long time on that one.  She also likes wood with knots. Liked seeing the lines from a paint brush on anything rather than the rolled on paint.  People are too busy wanting to see completion. They get hypnotized by the newly paved highway.  Assumption sleepiness.  Lack of consciousness. Loss of detail.  Beauty takes time and she was okay with that.  But it is true that some details are too much.  Some losses totally divert your flow.  Barry was gone.  Some days you wake up and don’t know who you are.  

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

riding the waves by freda karpf

I’m reading Sandra Ingerman’s book, a treasure for me, Medicine for the Earth – many times throughout what I’ve read so far she makes it personal and reminds the reader why she’s writing the book. I really love this and want to emulate this and these words from her, p. 131, in her chapter “Reconnecting with Nature, “As you read in the introduction, my true purpose in writing this book is to bring back ancient wisdom to help us in transmuting environmental pollution.  As we became disconnected from spirit and our own divinity, we became more and more disconnected from other living beings and from nature. This disconnection has created most of the toxins and pollutions we now need to transmute in order to survive.”

The part that moves me in her quote above is simply these words and the feeling I get from them which reminds me of all the passion that I have for this beautiful place, all the love I feel for the ocean, the sky, clouds, birds, Molly, people I love and lost, the green everything – her words, these words “my true purpose in writing this book” are the words that connect me to my soul and my love for this place, for my home. 

I see that my home is a home within a home. That the habit of writing my address and extending out as far as I can to the galaxy, as many of us have in our own ways, when younger or at other times needing to get a fix on just where we were in the universe – I see and feel that my green home here, with the black-eyed Susan’s all around and the small areas of gardens here and there, the moss, slow growing and green or brown depending upon the water, all connected to the small local address that I call my home; all part of this town and the town a part of the county; and the beach not far off and who knows who that belongs to; and the ocean, my part of the Atlantic where I have swum, possibly in the same water molecules since I’m a baby since the  ocean doesn’t move out from other bodies of water but keeps within its sphere and seems to move because of the wind and tide, the sun’s reflections and the birds and all of us at the shore. But my home, my nostos, is in a state which has a border in a country which has a border on a continent which is outlined by many oceans and defined by many lands and people and cross-traveled by many butterflies and birds, herds and domesticated animals and some that got loose.

my true purpose in writing riding the waves was to share the swift, mercurial ride when you body surf and everything that you have loved, felt, created and delighted in comes along for the ride with you. Every wave is a ride to shore and every shore is a new awakening. 

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