February 2020 – Divine Ready

February 29, 2020

A Contender at Times

images-1 It had been several years since I made my way to the middle of the country in a car, more often looking down on the neatly quilted squares of farmland from 35,000 feet. From the road those squares blurred into a smooth white blanket whose edge began at the nearest rim of vision and extended to an endless horizon. Like most blankets, it was comforting while holding the potential to smother.

Utilitarian understated and underappreciated, that precious land—tilled and toiled over centuries and often enhanced by little more than a farmhouse, a barn, and sometimes a strand of bare black trees—is content to leave first prize in the beauty pageant to the mountains, canyons, ocean, rivers and lakes. But she shows herself a contender at times, unexpectedly bringing a showstopper through a meteorite shower or a stunning view of the constellations in vast, clear skies. Midway through Ohio, I saw a golden yellow sun blow up over the horizon in my rear view mirror like a child’s crayon drawing or a rendering on a cereal box. Distracting in a mesmerizing way, I watched until it became blinding. Little did I know then, it would soon become a longing.

I stayed 12 days in the small town in Illinois where I was raised. I had forgotten the punishing endless sameness of monochromatic gray white winter days. I tried to lean into it, wondering what my ancestors must have faced when they arrived in Nebraska and Kansas all those years ago. Was this land in my bones not only through the nutritional sustenance it had provided but at the deepest DNA and cellular levels?

We all taste the salt of the ocean in our tears and feel mountains well up in our bellies through the crowns of our heads when we are excited and awed just as we feel a ravine-like plummet when we are disappointed, the bottomless echo of a canyon when our hearts are broken. The plains provide a no-nonsense steady kind of love and measured discipline. They are the elusive sweet spot of a quiet mind in meditation. I was sorry to leave, more because of the people than the place. But the reality is I can’t leave either of them, no matter how many miles I drive away.

February 16, 2020

Dear Diary

book-4806076_1280 Several years ago, I told one of my cousins if I preceded him in death, he should make a beeline to my place and burn any journal he found before anyone else arrived. He said, “I’ll buy you a shredder, and you can take care of that yourself.” And so, he did. And I got busy.

Not all diaries are secret BFFs, confessionals or epistolary therapists. They are written for many reasons, and some have been quite enlightening in a historical, humanitarian or artistic sense.

After her death, through Anne Frank’s recorded thoughts and feelings, the world, including her father, came to know what it was like for her in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Virginia Woolf’s famous diaries are autobiographical as well as where she experimented with and explored her writing. The diary John F. Kennedy kept as a young correspondent in 1945, in which he expresses his opinions about Hitler and the UN, sold for over $700,000. Historians believe it is the only one he ever kept.

Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) family tore several pages from one of his diaries and mysteriously misplaced some volumes, only adding to speculation about the nature of Dodgson’s relationship with the Liddell girls, including Alice, who encouraged Dodgson to write down the story that became Alice in Wonderland, a book that’s never been out of print since its publication in 1865. Nor has Carroll’s contentious reputation been laid to rest since his death in 1898.

The impulse to keep time and to record fact, fantasy, delight, sorrow, guilt, secrets, and even shame, is not universally felt but sometimes universally appreciated. There is a Wiki page devoted to the many people who were diarists. They include writers, theologians, politicians, philosophers, artists, historians and others.

Whether a diary is intended to be shared or not, the voice is immediate and intimate, implying a sacred trust. The sacred trusts we hold in locked boxes and vaults imo pectore for ourselves and others make each of us diarists. These holy pages can never be shredded, torn out or burned. Along with love and loss, they forever change the narrative.