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New Edition of Aweigh of Life

I’ve recently republished Aweigh of Life with IngramSpark.  The new edition is published under my name, Patricia Morgan, and is available through the usual sources on line.  Besides making a few grammatical corrections, this new version includes some maps (at the request of readers) and photos.

What has been lost in republishing is all the fine 4- and 5-star reviews readers posted with my first edition.  Below are several reviews of that first edition, previously published under the pen name of E.D. Snow, as they appeared in Amazon Reviews. I encourage my readers to re-post their reviews… not to feed my ego or even bank account (for the Universe knows I’m not getting rich on this!) but to encourage others to enjoy the adventure.

“The book is INCREDIBLE!” Aweigh if Life is a poignant memoir. I couldn’t read it fast enough! She takes you with her on her incredible journey in such a way you can almost smell the salt air. The quiet times, the exhilarating adventures, all of her trials and tribulations to find herself. Definitely recommended reading. – Amy C.

“Sail Away” Imagine yourself boarding a sailboat in your early twenties and cruising the South Pacific for the next ten years, island hopping, moorage in blue lagoons, footprints on white sand beaches, swimming tropical pools, hiking palm tree covered islands, living on fish and coconuts, hunkering down through a harrowing hurricane, meeting colorful natives and swapping sea tales with other ‘yachties,’ and all the myriad experiences of such a soul-stirring, life-affirming, wondrously fascinating journey.

Now imagine what circumstances, obligations, trajectories and vectors would converge upon you until one day you realize you must leave the sea, and its ‘way of life,’ behind.

Finally, in your later years you are drawn back to that time, through the extensive journals you kept and by the very pull of memories steeped in golden sunshine, blue seas and fair winds, and you sit down and write it all out.

Anchors aweigh, come aboard with a woman who did just that, lived in communion with deep waters, hitched her fate to sea breezes and sailed away to the far horizon. The author is an everywoman – imperfect, impassioned, sweet and not. Like all of us her sails are at times full or slack, relationships bucking headwinds or on a tailwind, her life making headway or in the doldrums.

This book is an easy read, as effortless as a reach on five knot trade winds of a soft, sunny summer afternoon in following seas. Grab a coconut water, put on your favorite sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt, pull anchor, trim the mainsail and cruise. Aweigh. – Freemind Arcata

“Brilliant Details of a South Pacific so few of us know.” [Patricia Morgan] is one intrepid woman, and very, very strong, both physically and mentally. Her incredible memory for details of her seven years sailing through the South Pacific 40 years ago makes these experiences seem like they’re happening right now. The book is really a “personal journey” memoir, in which she reveals disquieting aspects of her family and upbringing, and how she comes to grips with being a rebellious “outsider” who wants to live a minimalist lifestyle, freed of the trappings of capitalist society.

The book gives a real sense of the adventure of sailing amidst remote islands that most of us have never heard of nor know anything about the people who live there. Two chapters really stay with me: the first is her absolutely spot-on depiction of the misogyny and racism of Northern Queensland 40 years ago–she really captures the harshness of that place then, remnants of which remain a part of Australian society to this day. The second is her stunningly beautiful description of giving birth to the first white baby on a tiny island in Papua New Guinea. That chapter could stand alone for any anthropologist or poet.

Friends who are sailors to whom I’ve recommended the book say it includes some of the finest writing about sailing they have read. The book could use a bit of editing, for repetitive passages and awkward phrasing, but all in all, this is a magnificent effort. Well done! Let’s make it into a movie! – Erica Esau

“One of my favorite books ever.” I read a lot and this is one of my absolute favorite books. The writing is beautiful and was comforting to me in a way that is hard to articulate. With all we have going on in the world, this was like balm for my soul. I felt like I was on a journey of my own while reading along and it felt like stepping back from all of the busyness and chatter and craziness. I slowed down toward the end simply because I didn’t want it to end. I highly recommend this book. – Amanda C

“Tales of Adventures on the High Seas delivered straight from the heart of a remarkable gal.” “A Sweeping Tale” doesn’t do justice as a description of this book. You know how it feels when you are reading a really good book and suddenly realize you’re only 30 pages from the end? “But I don’t want it to end” you think. That’s this book. [The] story is a “warts and all” memoir told with grace, humor, irony and just a tiny bit of sarcasm. Her gift for describing the geography and nautical aspect of her travels will pull you in to the point where you can actually feel the salt spray coming over the bow of your Lazy Boy Recliner. Beyond that her brutal honesty and candid confessions of doubt, hurt and amusement make this book so much more than a travelogue. I am a compulsive reader. I normally read to “learn” stuff (non-fiction & history) and an equal amount of literature that makes me “feel” stuff. This book covered both bases. A 2-fer if you will. I recommend it highly. – Geoffrey Williams

“Honesty and Depth.” This book is an emotional moving metaphor of a fearless, strong, independent woman who is looking for the soul she has always possessed. Its filled with her fascinating adventures throughout the South Pacific Islands in the 1970’s and gives us an historical and cultural glimpse of the special people that shared her life. It’s a page turner and one that I couldn’t put down and didn’t want to end. We can see you now E.D. Snow and thanks for sharing this piece of your life with us! – Betsy P

“Highly Recommend.” Aweigh of Life is a must-read for all life adventurers and explorers. Fascinating and intimate story of a woman’s journey forward, while coming to terms with her past. Throughout, it’s a heartfelt memoir of a seven year trip of a lifetime, sailing the waters and learning of people and cultures in the South Pacific seas. I couldn’t put it down, and I didn’t want it to end. – Pamela

 

 

Do you know the story?

 

At first glance, what do you see?

I would not have noticed but for my daughter.  She was driving me to the Portland Union Train Station to catch a train to Seattle.  Going up Burnside, she suddenly stopped in the middle of the street and her hand reached across my face, angling back a tiny bit, to take a photo.  My first reaction was to look behind me to see if her stopping in the street was interrupting traffic or might possibly cause an accident.  And then, feeling a tiny bit irritated that my space had been violated with her hand thrust in front of my face, I asked, “What are you doing?”

She said, “There’s a person in that pile of garbage.”  My response was, “Nooo.  No there isn’t.”

By then she had driven on. She handed me her phone and said, “Blow it up.”   When I increased the size of the photo, indeed, there was a person sleeping in that pile of garbage.   Oh, my.  Oh, my! In that moment, questions flashed past me. Is she (or he) alive? Had those been her possessions and her place to  sleep the night before, and had the city officials torn it down, like they did repeatedly, and shoved it to the side of the road to be picked up by the garbage collector?  Or had that simply been where, in desperation and exhaustion — or in a drug-addicted haze — she found a moment of rest?   I even had the horrifying imagining of a backhoe or Bobcat scooping up this pile of trash and throwing it into a dumpster.  Oh, my.

When I first saw this picture on my daughter’s phone, the writing was not yeet on the wall.  But let it be on your wall.

 DO NOT THROW ME AWAY!

I don’t know the story of this person buried in a garbage heap.  Nor the stories of the thousands of other homeless folks who sleep on the streets across America, a country whose richest could provide food, housing, medical care, and mental health care for every individual in this country. But I know in my heart that that person did not choose to be in this heap of trash.  But they’re there, and they’re suffering. And my daughter sees them.  She sees them when they’re invisible to others.

Do you know her story, this person buried in that trash heap?  Of course you don’t. Have you passed judgment?  Possibly. Could it be that maybe she’s only 15 years old, and she finally fled the nightly rapes by her stepfather, only to find herself on the streets of Portland, homeless, with no resources. Or was she so desperate to escape constant emotional or physical abuse that living on the streets was preferable?

Or did he have chronic pain from an injury or congenital defect for which a doctor prescribed him Oxycontin?  And then his doctor’s license was yanked or he himself couldn’t get relief from the prescribed dose, so he turned to street heroin which took him down.

Does she have a severe mental illness, no fault of her own, just the run-of-the-mill chemical imbalance in the brain that exasperated her parents and school personnel to the point that her parents kick her out for her obstreperous behavior? Did she suffer from severe clinical depression?

Was she simply experimenting with drugs, never thinking she’d become an addict?

The list of scenarios is endless for how this person ended up in a trash heap.

Should the story that left them homeless matter?  Does it matter if it’s a boy or a girl, a old man or a middle-aged mother?  I don’t think so. What matters is they are there on our streets.  That’s the current chapter of their story that you can see. And it is a symbol of the state of our society.

But possibly a more important question is what is your story?  How we perceive things alters what we see. How did you end up blinded and unable to see society’s pain?  How did you lose your compassion, your empathy? How did you come to hold your possessions and riches so close to your heart and give them more value than this young person’s life?   How did you come to be afraid to look at society’s discards?

Are you aware of where your beliefs and prejudices came from? Are you aware of the historiological slant to information provided to you? Are you aware of the agreements you unconsciously made from birth to think the way you do? How many of your beliefs are based on assumptions?  Or centuries-old myths?  At what point did you start to lose sight of your feelings, your empathy, your compassion?

I don’t know the story of that person in the trash heap. I do know how and why my daughter saw this person and why she notices those who have been overlooked, why she notices the ones who are invisible to others. She notices the ones who are dope sick and the ones who are clean and sober but mentally unstable. She doesn’t discriminate.  She notices the pain in our society when too many of us look the other way.

She notices because she used to be a drug addict living on the streets of Portland. As the chemical cocktails rearranged her brain chemistry, she began to hear voices (which she continues to struggle with today), she says, that told her, “Don’t stick that needle in your arm.”  She is one of too few who got clean and sober, by a miracle or through grace and a few caring people who gave her a kind word and emotional support.

From that experience, she started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Mudblosm Connections (https://mudblosmconnections.org/) to help the homeless and those financially distressed in the Portland area. She collects donations of clothes and food and distributes them regularly, sometimes person to person, tent to tent, sometimes in organized events in downtown Portland parks.

She finally convinced just one local grocery store to let her pick up their expired and almost expired food instead of throwing it in the dumpster.  Every day, seven days a week, she picks it up and drives it to seven different organizations including a senior housing project, several nonprofit organizations providing transitional housing and counseling, and organizations providing a cooked meal to the needy.  Last year alone, she collected and distributed 100,000 pounds of food just from that one store that would otherwise have thrown it away!  As an example, her first-ever pickup included 102 gallons of milk, four cases of frozen meats, boxes of bakery goods and piles of plastic food trays of various fruits and cut vegetables.

It costs her $600 a month for gas and car insurance to do this selfless job which is paid for by small monthly contributions from caring folks and from recycling cans and bottles.  Still a fledgling organization, no one is paid a salary. They hope to eventually receive grant money to expand and to pay for the selfless labor involved in saving good food from the landfills and providing that same food to those in need.  Mr. Bezos?  Mr. Musk?  Mr. Gates?  Anybody want to help?

I’ve accompanied my daughter on a wet winter day, handing out socks, food, and jackets to the homeless huddled in their tents under the bridges, the racket of cars thrumping overhead and the echo of cars traversing the darkened streets below those bridges.  I’ve been with her when she’s noticed a young couple huddled on a curb, shivering in the damp Portland winter.  She took the time to stop and talk to them.  She reached into her trunk and gave them jackets, and then before leaving, she took off her own boots and gave them to the girl who was wearing thin, wet canvas sneakers.

I know the stories of the richest of the rich by observing how they live in mansions large enough to house a small town; that they have their private jets and yachts and limousines in which to travel in luxury.  That they have closets bigger than the room I rent in a four-bedroom house, because I can’t afford my own house.  That they eat the finest foods only at the finest restaurants and drink $1,000 bottles of wine.  I know they don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

I know that our federal government spent $916 billion in 2023 to fight wars in other countries or to provide military assets to countries to attack other countries and render their lands unlivable.  I know that finally in January of 2024, $3.16 billion was allotted to programs to help the homeless, of which the state of Oregon received approximately $60 million. I know that too much of that money will be spent on more studies.

I know the largest contributor to homelessness is affordable housing.  I know that corporations are buying up properties to bolster their bottom line, and I know homeowners are choosing to rent their second homes as Air BnBs. I know poverty is the number one cause of homelessness.  I know that the largest number of homeless are African Americans. Thirty percent of the homeless are families with children. I know these facts.

I understand the circumstances that can un-house a person and how it is so very difficult to get into a new apartment: one needs a first, a last, and a cleaning deposit, coming to as little as (or as much as) needing $5,000, depending upon where you live.  When a person’s total income after taxes might be no more than $2300 a month, if that, and now with a history of eviction, it becomes insurmountable to get into a new apartment. I know 30% of the homeless are families.

I know there’s a sense of hopelessness, not only in our country but around the world, heightened by climate change and war.

What I don’t know is why humans treat others the way they do.  Other than I know that historiologically, the dissemination of human history continues to promulgate fear, hatred, and otherness.  The self-destruct button is hit with each iteration. Drugs, wars, gangs, homelessness. Bad actors in multiple countries around the world are murdering and subjugating their citizens or, like Netanyahu and Putin, are trying to wipe their neighbors off the face of the earth. None of it’s new to human history.  Wars and murder and subjugation are what constitute history. It is the human legacy, precipitated by greed, hatred, and delusion. We seem to be an evolutionary species gone haywire and heading to extinction.

Generosity, loving kindness, and wisdom are not measurable attributes to be found in a government study, but I believe they are the cure, already present within the human heart. It requires each of us to notice the invisible. It requires each of us to love our neighbor who is, like me, a spiritual being having a human experience. Within my human experience, I can choose to experience the joy of loving kindness, generosity, empathy and compassion.

This photo is a symbol of what is extant in our society. To the drumbeat of certain politicians, we are separated by fear. We are separated by greed. Stories for millennia have supported this scenario. Our Constitution was written by and for white landowners, those with money, to protect what they declared to be theirs alone.  To this day, its interpretation is supported by the same biased group of individuals to protect the interests of predominantly white and monied citizens, but not the poor, the colored, the disenfranchised.  Those who want power and live in fear, defend their right to possess firearms, an amendment enacted to protect the rights of slave owners to subdue a rebellion.  They defend the Electoral College, again, an archaic amendment that gave greater voting power to slave owners. To this day, the Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified to give women equal rights, and now, those in power are stripping away even more rights of women.

We suffer under these laws to the point of being numb to the egregiousness of their perpetuity and frustrated against the power of those in control. Maybe for our own sanity, we stop listening to the news depicting the murder and destruction of people by stronger, greedier, more evil country leaders.  Maybe we turn away from the garbage heaps on the side of the road because … because why? Because you fear or hate what you see?  Or because you feel there’s nothing that can be done?  Because you’re waiting for a government (controlled still by the wealthy and white) to take action?  Maybe you wonder why you should even care?

I believe you should care because this young person hidden in this garbage heap on the side of a downtown city street is a symbol of the state of our society. It’s a symbol of a collapsed society. Maybe that knowledge produces too much fear and helplessness to look at it straight on, so we drive on by. Oh, my.

I believe when we shift our perceptions and beliefs to be inclusive, to be nonjudgmental, to be compassionate and caring, that only then can we find the path to heal the suffering of others and ourselves. It’s within each of us to heal the ills of our society by healing ourselves.

My daughter took this picture. She printed it. And she wrote across the top of it:  DO NOT THROW ME AWAY

I also plea:  Do not throw away your ability to feel compassion and empathy and generosity and loving kindness.  Do not throw away your ability to question authority.  Do not throw away the ever-present need to investigate where your prejudices and beliefs have come from, especially when they diminish or discard another’s rights to enjoy basic human rights. Do not throw away your ability to discern good and bad. Do not discard or diminish the will, courage, and heart to change those beliefs and to right perceived wrongs.

 

 

Certainty, Be Gone

Oh, certainty.

My thought is that “certainty” is a dangerous word indeed. It pours concrete on thoughts and ideas. It shadows and darkens how the sun should shine and glisten off a still pond. It stills the wind on which the spread of an eagle’s wings glides. It allows every gazelle to escape the jaws of the lion or it allows every lion to kill every gazelle.

Ah, certainty, be gone. May tablets of so-called truths rot away, be eaten by the bugs that survive on rotten wood or be dissolved in turbulent rains and pounding winds, to blow into the air and land lightly on all it previously burdened with its certainty. May constitutional dogmas yaw open into a question mark to meet the new moments exposed by the uncertainty of life, each person different than the next, each day bringing new gifts and new challenges, all different than those that came before. May old cultural myths acknowledge they are only flowers that bloom for a season before going to seed with new visions to wrap into the next season.

May possibilities be unlimited, searched out beyond the edges of certainty. May freedom lie in imagination with no boundaries except a morality based on loving kindness, compassion, generosity and joy.

Thoughts on the world

It might be gray and somber, slow turtle-sleeping day for creatures big and small. Or a blue-sky day through which a red-tailed hawk streaks. It’s a changing mirage, one that is out there and one that is nowhere; a world one can’t hold onto nor let go; one that reveals beauty and one in whose darkness hides all that’s grotesque only sometimes out of reach; and one that turns joy held so tightly into a passing memory.

On one day in one place, it’s a man’s world, where at every turn one sees the masculine spire of the conqueror jutting forth like giant penises: tall 80-story buildings, power poles thrusting into the sky; erect pine trees jutting up, pine nuts hanging down; and the unseen push of a billion engine pistons.

In another place on another day — maybe tomorrow — it’s a woman’s world, inviting openings, soft bosoms, gentle curves of loving arms. River banks, bending bows, the half moon of a bird’s head, a hand curved into another’s, an arm wrapped around a shoulder. Softness.

It’s a world of questions. It’s a world of answers. It’s a world in between the two. Guesses. Assumptions.

Like thoughts left dangling by fickle souls, it is a world where the raging storm is replaced by the mirrored pond; where the mirrored pond invites the toss of a pebble; a world where forever seeking leads to never arriving. It’s a world where peace slips away by the power of a look, and peace is restored by an outstretched hand; where the pain of childbirth is greater than the pain of death, and where the peace of death invites forth the birth of life.

It is a world to which one gives no meaning, and in the void, the gift of peace can be found. It is a world of music where in the pauses one hears a heart beat. Perdendosi.

It is a world where one can ride a roller coaster of fear of what might happen, or blame for what one thought happened. Maybe it was just all a dream from which one awakens to a turtle- sleeping day or to the scream of death — or was it life the talons carry back to the nest on the blue-sky day?

It is air breathed from the shadows of a receding path, the glue of memories holding the pain of love lost, the aches of life’s deepest rifts, as well as the tranquil anchorages and the signposts to peace.

It’s a world of energy, of waves rising up to touch the shore, a slip- sliding sibilance or crashing with a roar, while the wisp of breezes moves the earth to spin. It’s a world of crackled, dry, dusty leaves releasing their last gasps into the swollen smell of mountain bay laurel woven tight by junipers’ aroma.

Sometimes I think:  “I can stay here forever.”

Until I don’t.

The Weaver of Words

 

     The blue curtains are still half closed as to not disturb the cobweb that had been built the night before. She is thankful the sun had glistened off its threads in such a way that it had caught her eyes before jerking the curtain wide open to let in the morning. She moves her chair slightly so she can watch the web shiver in the sunlight as she drinks her coffee. Her kitchen, small, bright from that sunlight coming through the window, is free of clutter. It reflects her simplicity: room for only two at the table, no cute containers on the counters, only a blender for smoothies. She'd long ago put away the microwave and other contraptions of modern cooking. 
     With one finger, she moves the vagabonding strands of long brown hair to lodge behind her ear. Her face holds the quiet, reflected in a softness that is only gently etched by time that has worked creases into the corners of her eyes. Her mouth is pulled down slightly at its corners as gravity schlepps its ever-gentle pull on her aging skin. Mornings of sunshine and light, like this morning, help balance the reflections dwelling in the shadows.
     A writer, a weaver of words, a sleuth of storylines, her creations happen in the space of secluded rooms, wombs into which she descends where most life first thinks itself into existence. Far from tenebrous but necessarily holding the calm that the darkness of night embraces, her life is lived in the seclusion necessary to create, that place in which thoughts reside in quiet. Every morning, she has settled into the silence of her small house. Never any music played nor news of the world pushed into its clean energy. She fills with the silence, content, like a comfort food meal. She fills the silence with words. 
     She looks at the paper on which she's written a title, "Aweigh of Life - A Memoir and Travel Tales of Seven Years in the South Pacific," and she begins to write.

“I was never tethered tightly to my family body, nor was I brought close in for nurturing and protection. I felt I was not an essential thing to protect. As a young child, I was tied by a thin string which broke again and again. I tugged hard so they’d know my strength, and they’d see my accomplishments. “Am I good enough now?” Seeing my demands not as a need for recognition but as rebellion, they tied thicker ropes with stronger knots made of stricter rules. But they too frayed quickly, eaten away by the acid anger of an unhappy family. I drifted from home because there was nothing to hold me, and when I was far enough away, I pulled the anchor up completely and stowed it deep inside to put down only if or when I found safe harbor.

“Anchor aweigh, I touched that exhilarating freedom of deep waters. I ceased to look for safe harbor. I sought out the storms and mountains, any challenge that proved that I could survive without “them,” an ever-broadening pronoun. I changed course, changed boats – just as tides turned and winds shifted – like moods, changing hour by hour, day by day, leaving flotsam floating on receding horizons, never thinking that they would be the pieces I’d gather up one day to find my way home and the reason I left.”

     That's how it began several years before. Now remembering the genesis of that book, she ponders the story behind the story. A new cobweb hangs in her window. She herself feels suspended, twisting on woven threads, a coarse, emotionally tactile tatted fabric; holes left between tight stitches. She's reweaving something, giving it form, finding the warp and filling in the weft of a generational backstory.
     But her sacred world is interrupted by her cell phone ring, playing Ripple. She allows it to reach the beginning lyrics, "If my words did glow, with the gold of sunshine, and my tunes were played on a harp unsung....." before answering, "Hello, this is Edie."      
     She hangs up the phone and takes another sip of her coffee, gazing out the window. She'd almost forgotten that she had committed to a weekend of women who, for 30 years, have gathered together once a year at the summer's end. She is being reminded to bring a cooler of ice. Her preference is to stay here and keep writing. Each year she is nudged from her cocoon, a call to shift gears and join the Tawanda Girls for another "crazy weekend." Sometimes she commits, though this year she wishes she hadn't. 
     She fears letting loose her muse to roam elsewhere, to gather loose threads in the wind and wander afar. Will the weaver return?  Will this sacred spell be broken? Will the frivolity of the Tawanda women destroy the thaumaturgy created in this moment? Will the muse return to fill the empty pages between the bookends? 
     Time eases the sun away from her window. She resolves to have faith. Her coffee is cold, but she pours the last into her cup, adds the last of her half and half, and then she gathers up her things and walks out the door.

 

What brings me joy?

I find my deepest joy in moments of deep meditation where I feel I am the joy; that the Everything and I are shimmering in a place where there are no thoughts, no judgments, no comparisons. It’s a giant emptiness filled with a quiet joy.

In the world where all my senses perceive its sights and sounds and textures, it’s found in baby’s smiles and puppy breath. I touch it in sunsets on mountain tops and exquisite desert sunrises. It’s in the exhale of leaves touched so lightly by the soughing of a breeze. Great joy is found on a high cliff overlooking the endless ocean. It’s carried on the call of an eagle or raven or in sighting a buck standing majestic in my field.

Nature and all things natural bring me joy, even great storms.

The coming together of people in a crisis, working together, sharing and caring, brings me great joy in the moment, as does the returning to the silence and solitude of my home to enjoy a good book and contemplation.

Joy is fleeting and yet it’s ever present and everywhere.  I need only pause to allow it to fill me.

My earliest memory

“They say” that people don’t remember things before the age of five, but this not true for me. My memories are embedded in the places I’ve lived, which have been many. Hence, my earliest memories put me in the summertime on the edges of a tributary of the Patapsco River, somewhere outside of Baltimore where my parents had a cottage, a small place on post and pilings with brownish asphalt shingles. There was a hand pump in the kitchen for water and a latrine across a narrow road behind the cottage, filled with cobwebs and all things scary, in line with others’ latrines.

I was two and a half years old, and “the memory” is actually several snapshots of that place, a spanning and blending such that I’ll never know which memory came first. One memory is, at that cottage, I shared a bedroom with my two brothers. In it there were three iron army cots with squeaking springs under the thin mattresses. We had gone to a Ben Franklin’s one day, and I had stolen a chocolate bar and had climbed under my army cot to eat it. My brother, a year and a half older, discovered me eating that bar of chocolate and when I wouldn’t share with him, he tattled to my mother who then angrily dragged me out from under that bed, piled me into the family car and drove me back to that store to confess I’d stolen that nickel candy.

Within that same place, at that same cottage, are my parents sitting in lawn chairs by the water’s edge drinking martinis with their next-door neighbors. Jack was one of my father’s colleagues at John Hopkins. His wife, Olive, typed Braille books. I have a swirl of memories being at their small cottage next door to ours, the most poignant being touching the pages that Olive had typed, feeling the raised bumps while Olive explained that some people could not see and they read books with their fingers. I felt her watching my wonder as she allowed my exploration of this strange typewriter, during which time Olive would be rolling her daily quota of cigarettes that she’d put in a shiny brass case.

There was a swing set there at the cottage, and I regularly shinnied up the pole to view the world from on high.  I have a clear snapshot of being up that pole one day, overlooking my parents and Jack and Olive as they smoked cigarettes and sipped on martinis. When I descended the pole, I went to my mother’s chair and, apparently thirsty, I reached for her dry martini and took a large gulp as if it was water. I remember the four adults watching me, thinking I would spit it out. Instead, I remember really liking that martini.  Then I ate the olive.

I know those memories are from the age of two-and-a-half, because the summer when I was three and a half we moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I drove in the front seat with my father to the new house — an old farmhouse on 26 acres — in our station wagon loaded with our clothes and smaller possessions. As I exited the car, I slammed the car door completely shut on my right thumb. As I stood screaming, my father rounded the car to spank me for screaming only to discover, upon opening the door, that my thumb was almost completely severed. My father reached into the car and grabbed, of all things, my best pair of socks, my only pair of socks that had embroidered flowers on its edges, to wrap my thumb together and rush me to the hospital where they reattached my thumb. For that whole long, hot, humid summer, with my right thumb wrapped in thick gauze, with creeks and fields and woods to explore, my life was severely restricted so as to allow my thumb to heal.  I remember learning to read that summer.

My brother is a year and a half older than me, and we have talked about those times seventy years ago, and though of course he doesn’t have my specific memories, he too has memories embedded in those places which we have shared to reinforce what would otherwise be considered a daydream.

Bravery

I am no more brave than the steadiness of a great tree leaning into the brutish force of hurricane winds. I am no more brave than a boat with reefed sails awash with cresting waves. I am no more brave than a feather on the wings of a breeze to be blown one knows not where. I am no more brave than the leaves that fall from a tree at the end of a dry summer to lay as carpet under the weight of a herd of elk. I am no more brave than a bedouin laying beneath the pin-holed sky of an immense night in the cooling sands of the endless desert.

I am no more brave than a baby that makes the journey from its confined watery world into the air – for it is not this mind and body that produces the act of bravery but the very detachment from that which we’ve conjured necessary to survive. I am brave when I release my mind and the ego I of my actions to dwell, instead, in the space of spirit within.

Having edged into the realm of Elder, looking back at those moments where action was needed for survival of myself or another, where another might have witnessed my actions as bravery, I now know the look and feel of the place-that’s-noplace into which I would slip where bravery is given form, ever so briefly. Like all things of spirit, the room of bravery cannot be explained but through metaphors.

Though it is nothing physical, I see that source hover before me as a horizon-wide, giant cube that is solid and yet I can enter into it; it has no doors or windows but I can move into its space to rest within. It’s a within-ness devoid of substance and yet it is a completeness in itself from which I cannot separate. In this pure space there are no thoughts and without thoughts there is no fear. Without fear, without constrictions, bravery is easily tapped into, like an endless stream of energy from which I can draw as needed; not unlike the endlessness of love, bravery dwells in this space beyond mind and body, always available to fuel a necessary action. Bravery is complete surrender to the dwelling place of spirit.