I remember things from my past every day and this morning was no exception. But today something felt different in the way I remembered living in a tipi on the edge of a lake in Nova Scotia. The man who was building a house there with no metal in it–using wooden dowels to connect planks he cut from logs and planed smooth–had gone to sea on a scallop trawler for 14 days.
It’s not as if I am consciously trying to expand and clarify my memories from earlier times in my life. But when a new perspective arises on its own in one of the remembered scenes that regularly play in my mind, I realize that there is much about my life that I no longer actually remember. This morning, I remembered the firepit under the tipi’s smoke flap and I wondered if I had cooked my meals inside the tipi, or only outside.
It was 1975 when I spent those two weeks living in the tipi. My memory of that time feels like a quilt assembled from a few panels stitched together: this man trusted me with a building that was clearly woven deeply into his sense of who he was; I needed someone’s trust at that time in my life; there were so many mosquitos after dusk that if I did cook outside, it would have to have been in the blazing midday sun; he had pellets I lit inside the tipi which smoked like incense sticks and drove mosquitos away like a magic wand; and during that summer I slept in a cemetery above Lunenburg harbor in Nova Scotia; picked tobacco on Prince Edward Island; and made an initial gesture toward discovering that I could make my own pathway, or at least tread one that was new to me.
I met this creator of a temple of wood at a café in Lunenburg where I ate breakfast each morning, walking down a steep hill from the cemetery where I slept. My mother had bought me a sleeping bag which even then was probably old fashioned. Instead of a zipper encircling its periphery, it had metal clasps around its edges with which to clip one side to the other. I mostly left it open so that it’s down filing provided a kind of mattress on the hard ground between the tombstones on all sides.
This man’s offer for me to stay on his property touched a raw nerve with which I had fled my life in Montreal, feeling bankrupt in every cell of my body; he said he didn’t trust people but he trusted me and wanted me to live on his land while he was out at sea. Since I had little trust in myself at that time, his offer meant a lot.
This morning, I wondered if my mother, knowing that I was about to embark on a venture in fear and trembling, as Soren Kierkegaard put the state of mind I was in, was remembering her own dark times when she bought that sleeping bag for me.
There may be a reason that I am remembering these times of change in an altered light today. We went to a memorial this week for a woman whose husband was one of my closest friends in Albuquerque. After his death, I stayed in touch with her. When she died this past weekend, that period of my life, once so full and eventful, felt like smoke from a campfire dispersing in the wind.
In the final moments of the memorial, a family member shared an incident in which a son was sitting on a bench at the top of a cliff face while his mother walked ahead and jumped to her death. Hearing that story, I felt a misgiving that something I thought of as complete imagination was actually connected with the sad truth of someone’s life.
As for the imagined part, at my book reading for Gaia Awakens last weekend, I read the chapter, “Empty Space”, and explained how it had played a role in providing a way for Gaia to awaken—precisely because that chapter was not drawn from the life I have actually lived; and as a chapter stands apart from the memories that I used to construct character and plot. Precisely because it never happened to me, the spirit of Gaia, as a presence beyond human biographies, could flow from its unexplained mystery.
Hearing that family story at this week’s memorial, I remembered that Stephen had once mentioned this incident to me. But since I had not met the people he was talking about, and still have not, I had nowhere to file it in my memory banks. But it must have impressed me on some level enough that I wrote an invented scene with similar elements and posted it as my weekly blog, where it received an unprecedented eight comments.
My son, Jon, had already died when I posted that blog, so it expresses the fierceness of my own grief. But I don’t know whether Stephen told me this story before or after Jon died, and now I have no one to ask.
When that post found its way into my novel it became a doorway of blind hope, standing alongside the fabric of cause and effect woven from my memories of a life I have lived in Canada and the US. It provided a platform for a call from Gaia for our species to wake up to the pain we are inflicting on the only world we have.
Now I also know that for someone whom I have never met, something like the incident recounted in the chapter “Empty Space” must have had the fierce truth of loss that we only experience when someone who defined our presence in this world vanishes with scarcely a word of farewell.