Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance…It is astonishing how faithful experience actually is; how it never vanishes completely. Experience leaves deep traces in us. It is surprising that years after something has happened to you the needle of thought can hit some groove in the mind and the music of a long vanished event can rise in your soul as fresh and vital as the evening it happened.
~ John O’Donohue
Dear Springhouse community,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am well and full of gratitude for the experiences I have at Springhouse daily. I am particularly grateful for the gift of spending my days with people of different ages. One moment you might catch me reading an old Irish tale with 5, 6 and 7 year olds, another day learning about Mayan cosmology with the Springhouse team, or twice a month you’d find me in my office in a peer mentoring conversation with Kim, one of our Trustees. Because this year I decided to facilitate a writing and book making internship with Sarah Pollock, you now will find me down in the print shop on Thursdays with two of our teens. This time is proving to be quite an unexpected gift and I am excited to tell you about it.
I spend a lot of time writing. I write grants weekly, I write this newsletter monthly, I write books that we publish in our print shop, and I write articles for other networks. I do not often free write anymore, and therefore, do not freely visit my memories as much as I would like. This writing and book making internship is changing that story.
Every Thursday at 10:45, we gather in the print shop and we choose a card from a deck of cards that has writing prompts on them. Then we spend at least 20 minutes freewriting in response to the prompt. After that, we read our writing out loud to each other. This can be very vulnerable, and therefore, very lifegiving. After we read, we have some lunch, and come back to make something creative in relation to what we just wrote. It could be a painting with words from our writing on it, a letterpress printed piece, or something else. I get excited for Thursdays now, and I don’t think I am the only one.
I have not given myself space in a long while to freewrite like this. As I do, memories come back from hidden places within me. These memories want to be heard, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, and they want to be delivered back through my writing with some kind of lesson for me and for the reader. Two weeks ago, I was surprised as memories surfaced in my writing from my early childhood. The prompt was “Have I enjoyed my life?” I felt a moment of reverent surprise, as these long ago memories showed me that they still had something to teach me. Here is a bit of what came forward in that writing:
I remember wearing a brown dress with pale flowers printed all over to Mrs. Schultz’s third grade class. This dress was my pride and joy. It felt so good to wear it. Out of my entire third grade experience, this dress is what I remember. I think I felt more of who I really was in that dress.
I remember this little farm set I used to play with, particularly the white plastic fences I would set up. They created a boundary, a place, for all of the little animals. I loved my Lincoln logs and how I could build old fashioned houses. I watched Little House on the Prairie, as problematic as it was in so many ways, and it brought me comfort. Holly Hobby was big in the 1970s. I had Holly Hobby pajamas and a Holly Hobby sleeping bag. I loved the quilt pattern that was on both.
There is a thread here. Farm life. Old-fashioned life. “Keeping things simple” life. This is what I longed for. This is what brings me joy now. There was a void in the suburbs of Detroit where I grew up. I longed for something deeper, something truer, something closer to the Earth. I found it in my dress, in watching Laura Ingalls on the TV screen bring water in a pail to her house, and I found comfort as I slept in what looked like an old-fashioned quilt.
Fast forward decades, I live on a farm now. I live in rolling hills and in a town where there are only a handful of restaurants, and the town itself is a block or so long. Life can be simple here. What brings me joy, why I have enjoyed my life, is so deep sometimes I don’t really have words. That deep joy is simple and it is solid. It is hard to see in the world around me as things continue to grow further and further away from the Earth, from the dirt, from the ground.
When I sit out on our front porch, I am surrounded by the soft and rolling Blue Ridge mountains. I am reminded of the landscape of my Irish and Scottish ancestors. This feeds me in a sustaining way. It’s not fancy.
I saw a heron today in the creek that I passed by on the way to Springhouse. I saw her yesterday too, standing guard near the well. She didn’t move when I stopped to take a picture. She was majestic in her straightforward stance. I wanted to capture her nobility with a photo and as I pulled my phone out, I had a flutter of fear that she would fly away. I wouldn’t be able to grab her. Kind of like memories..like the ones of my dress and the little white plastic fences. So many memories take flight before I can catch a photo of them. Why do some stay and some fly away? I will never know. The heron did not fly away. She stood there proudly while I took a photo I will probably never really look at.
Things come and go. Memories, dresses, herons. They are with you one second and then like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they disappear and his disciples wonder what happened. Not joy though. Joy is the ground. Joy is the Earth. Joy is what gave rise to the fences, the heron, and the logs that build the cabin. Joy is the river that runs underneath. It is always there. Knowing that makes for a joyful life no matter what happens.
But somehow, the memory of simpler times, even if they were all in my imagination, brought me back to that river as a child. They reminded me that as crazy, lost, and cloudy as things seemed around me, there was something deeper, a joy that will never leave me and this world can never take from me.
I am grateful I took a moment with these teens and with Sarah to let these memories and what they had to teach me come through. One of the things I love most about Springhouse is that we value the unknown. We value what is in the hidden spaces. We make space for it (and continue to learn how to do this better) through our community practices and curriculum. We invite quiet moments, we dance without words together, we are guided in our studies by questions more than answers, and we have things like writing internships and open studios, where we can let our cherished memories and what deeply matters to us come through. Respecting and creating space for the unknown, for our deeper wisdom and imagination to come through, is critical now, at a time where we need new ways of living to emerge and align us more deeply with the power of life itself.
I hope that you have spaces and communities where you can let the hidden, deeper parts of yourself come through. Those hidden places have so much to say, and so often, what they have to say is very important.
In gratitude for the mysteries of this life,
Jenny
