…to the same motion. 1725

October 21, 2012
by Richard Wolf

Two decades ago, in the mountains of North Carolina, I worked with two Mayan day-keepers.  I learned a time-keeping system for interpreting 13 tones and 20 glyphs, counting in concurrent cycles, within constructs of larger numbered patterns. 

As with western astrology, one can look to the tone and glyph of one’s birth date for clues as to identity, orientation, or mission.  My entry count and glyph are 2 – Cimi.  This date signifies a polarized orientation (2), together with the further polarizing Cimi as “world-bridger”, also translated as “death”.

The motion or role of Cimi is equalization through polarization.  This sounds and is daunting but especially resonates with the “mission” aspect of my situated life-form.   “Division toward Unity” might be my personal motto.  But Mayan day-keeping isn’t really our topic today. I just present this to offer some background and qualification for my offering you this particular talk, initially entitled “Our Unwelcome Familiar”, which evolved into “…the same motion.”, and now into the current working title of “…to the same motion.  1725.”. 

Reverend Emma Chattin and Noel Levan, offering our past two Sunday messages, provided some fascinating threads of paradox and duality.   I thought I’d dare us to take a few more steps, if you want to go, toward a few more indefinite, apophatic dualisms:  ones like birth / death;  living / dead; us / them;  then-of-the-past / then –of-the-future.  That third one could also be seen as harmonic tension between the disguised opposites of linear time and eternity.  I invite us to consider our own traditional or emergent apophatic supports, the unique and shared ways we live beyond grief and survive through loss.

I grew up thinking of those who had died as the “faithful departed.”   I prayed to martyrs and pondered crucifixes over every doorway and blackboard.  When I was 13, I began to be initiated into the actual emotions of death (denial, anger, guilt, regret, relief, sadness …),  as the deaths of human friends, grandparents, pets, other animals, and trees began to impact me.  The transcendental images and rituals of the Roman church offered ideas that engaged my imagination and, to some extent, helped me to cope.  But during those same times, I became increasingly resistant to traditional Christian theologies which put afterlife into elaborate hierarchies, — hierarchies which seemed to leave a lot of people out:  Buddhists Pagans, Unitarians, dogs, goldfish,…  What happened to the unfaithful departed?   I started and continued to look for something more comprehensive. 

Especially since the deaths of my parents about twelve years ago, I’ve received the most nurture and solace from what I’d call atheistic and experiential sources.  As I entered this new liebensweld of an elder-orphan, I was brought into closer correspondence with life’s constancy – paradoxically, via deeply feeling its temporality.  The life of the natural world, intimates, and companions drew closer, as though to bring messages or signals. 

Especially in the earlier days of griefs, I began to know the speed of time, if there is such a thing, as increasingly radical and unpredictable.  Although my mind re-played the Roman prayers and images which are encoded in me, my most effective (and affective) coping tools started to come from new sources beyond traditional theistic models.  As surprising motions of what I use to call “grace” broke into my consciousness, diminishment of pain and emergence of fresh memories followed, enlivening both my mind and heart.  With ebbs and flows, this motion continues. 

My friend Ronnie’s husband died last Spring.  As a devout agnostic, she’s shared with me, a devout phenomenologist, some of her struggles and insights, without benefit or burden of theologies. She told me of how one day last week, on her way out to the Wegman’s, she has a thought for the possibility of something like a sign, — an assurance that beyond death there could be some kind of something-more:  (warning:  this can be a very dangerous something for anyone to do, but maybe especially for an agnostic).  As she pulls off the I-490 exit at Winton road, she sees the words “Goodbye Ronnie” spray-painted on the concrete barricade just to her left, as she’s stopped there for the light. To the left of the words she sees a “Support Your Local Musician” bumper sticker.  And wasn’t her husband in a band. 

So I ask you:  did some friend leave this message there for her, knowing her route to the Wegman’s?  Maybe so.  But even so – why did she see it just then, right there in-line at the light, in that lane, about 13 minutes after putting out a question.  Psychological?  Maybe so.  Metaphysical?  Maybe more. 

When I read today’s responsive reading, the words “the same motion” jumped out to me.  Can we consider final loss as part of some motion beyond linear time?    What’s constitutes our individual and common life threads – within and beyond these curves and folds of time?   The reading suggests some potential for transit across the chasms between us and those before us, at least via honor and memory.  

And what about those who come after us?  They must belong, too, to the same motion; and with us, too, as bridges in this time here.  We sing of being “mothers of courage and fathers of time.”   Uniquely situated lifespans are woven into an eternal fabric.  So far, for the most part, each moment has been  preceding from and flowing into the next:  breath in / breath out.  Our breaths are like hinged spirals.  We take in, we send out, … flowing motion.

Like breaths, I’ve come to regard human lifespans as unfolding along patterned  curves rather than along beginning-end trajectories.  Even though individual breath someday ceases, collective breath continues. I came across a daily-reader quote from Madame deStael:  “the human mind always makes progress, but it is progress in spirals.”  True both individually and collectively. Imagine a multi-dimensional spiral, moving.  Maybe spans of births, deaths, and lifespans in –between are something like this:  discreet yet powerful motion in flow, overlapping with the rhythms of breath.

—-    “From the People of the House of Earth to the People who were on Earth before Them” comes from Ursula LeGuin’s trans-cultural epic “Always Coming Home.”   Stories, poems, songs, maps, and glossaries depict landscapes and societies which never existed as though they were, will be, and are still here.   One group of people in this time out of time is The People of the Valley, the Kesh. 

Kesh build towns loosely following the routes of springs and waterways in the form of a hinged spiral :  one course flowing one way and one the other.  This echoes the ying / yang of opposites in balance, in motion.  Kesh call both this concept and location heyiya.  I interpret it as speaking of the whole of life somehow moving in simultaneous, polarized, yet synchronized directions.  Like flowing water, the motion of life takes place in pluriform directions and at diversified  speeds.   My imagination moves the heyiya to double helices in three dimensions.  These could be strands of mitochondria, DNA, and / or parts of galactic bodies.

 â€œFrom the People” heard in various voices in an irregular yet synchronized pattern attempts to model the heyiya of which it speaks.  The piece seems to originate and end from and in the same direction.  The structure parallels the message that our ancestors and our progeny, whoever they may be for us by genetics, adoption, or adaptation –are the same people.  This sentiment or law seems to overlap with the indigenous practice of considering all action in light of 7 generations into the past and seven generations into the future.   —

I’ve been more often noticing when anomalies of time support me to cope and heal.  Last Wednesday I had one of those time-out-of-time experiences to which Noel referred last week:    In the midst of overseeing 63 third through sixth graders in the cafeteria, I got lost in noticing how there had been a gradual release from the raging grief that I was feeling in the same place a year ago.  I remembered how that time of day was especially hard, and now it was sort-of ordinary and ok. For just a fleeting 3 seconds or so, I had something like a prayer of gratitude for a healing through those hard emotions.  To where did my grief go?  From where did peace originate?  Why did it happen then?

Another occasion was a regular work-day.  Driving to work across South Mountain, watching for deer through the fogs, I was kind of praying that I’ve have, sometime that day, some insight or inspiration as to what I’d be saying this morning.  With back-lit clouds cresting over Shenandoah ridge, these minutes are a frequent locus for the recollection of family, friends, students, colleagues, and often some of you all –here and not here.  And a time to seek the shaping of intention.

Later that day, after lunch, a student told me about how doctors and family are deciding to “pull the plug” on his mother.  His manner was very matter-of-fact, and we talked about just what he thought this meant, and about his particular anxieties of impending loss. On the drive home, I realized how my intention had become and was becoming realized.  With no biological progeny, I felt a particularly bittersweet gratitude for that day.

How do I acquire and hold a broad enough perspective to keep this lifespan, overlapping with yours, in some perspective, in light of the great unknown?   In closing I hearken back to the seven generations practice of being in-time and out-of –time at the same time:  From his book Turtle Island, Gary Snyder’s “For the Children”:

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light