“You will receive a gift,” the workshop
leader tells us. We do not know what it will be, nor when it will arrive, but at some point during this afternoon, as we explore “How to Have an Inner Life that Supports Your Outer Life,” the gift will come. Our chairs form a circle around a candle, a small fire to connect us to all human beings who have gathered for all time around a center of light and warmth to share their stories. We share our own to form this community of souls on this particular day – why we have come, what is in our
hearts.
“This morning,” I say, when it is my turn, “I got an email from my father telling me that they were calling in Hospice for my mother.” Hospice. A clean-to-the-bone word, shocking despite the fact that we have known, my four siblings and I, that our mother’s disease is terminal.
Of course, I’d thought as I read his words, I couldn’t attend this writing workshop, even if I had been looking forward to it for months, even it was being led by one of my writing heroes, Christina Baldwin, a forerunner in the field of journal writing whose Life’s Companion is one of the most dog-eared, well-worn books on my shelves. Not only
was I numb with grief, but I also had to prepare for a 600-mile trip to my hometown for an indefinite amount of time. There were items to pack, care arrangements to be made for my children, appointments to cancel.
But I believe in the power of the word, don’t I? I have always said that writing was a medicine for
times such as this, and so I have come anyway. And after we have wound our way around the circle, cast our stories into the flame, Christina gives us a very simple, meditative exercise with which to begin: Close your eyes. Take a deep breath – a reminder to be in your body. Open your eyes. Catch an image. Let go. Write 5 minutes. This will be, she says, “most delicious if you have no idea what to say.”
My eyes rest on a tree outside the window. Yes. My pen meets paper here. I have always liked being outside more than in, from the time I was a small girl who loved the small woods behind her backyard more than her house.
And this thought turns into words about the times I have fallen asleep in the dark in a place I’ve never been before. There were a number of these on the whirlwind, three-week trip from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Francisco and back when I was 22.
I remember being lulled to sleep by the
Green River, which I could hear but not see. And later, there was a bed and breakfast in Bath, North Carolina, which I didn’t know overlooked the Pamlico River until daylight, when I looked out my bedroom window. I practically ran downstairs with my journal, stopping to grab a cup of coffee on my way out to the bench that beckoned below a willow right beside the river. Sunlight rippled. What delight.
But, oh, the best of these morning surprises was most definitely the one on the 52-hour Greyhound bus trip I took a few years before my cross country adventure. I was 20, on my way to spend the summer in Flagstaff, Arizona, with my oldest brother, who was going to graduate school there. I had never been to the Southwest. I fell asleep somewhere in Kansas with my face against
the bus window, and awoke to the sight of the sun rising over red rock country – a sight so foreign and so beautiful that I gasped out loud right there in my seat, awestruck by this new landscape. And as I wrote about this moment, out came the words, “This is what it will be like for my mother.” There it was, my gift from the retreat.
I carried this gift with me up three long, rainy highways, through the mountains and two tunnels, into the room where my mother lay asleep, her breathing supported by oxygen. It lay with me on the two chairs pushed together into a makeshift bed that I took over from my sister. It carried me through the next days with an easy grace, this certainty that my mother would soon be filled with that joy.
~ Maureen Ryan Griffin, September 28, 2010
