we knew we were loved

What is essential is invisible to the eye. - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

...

The inception of much of what I have written over the years came directly or indirectly from my wife's wisdom and capacity for distilling concepts to their essence. It is a rare talent and one that I admire greatly. She is my chief muse.

But of the many revelatory conversations we have had during our time together, one returns to mind again and again. It was so long ago that the fact I still remember it clearly is indicative of the extraordinary effect it has had over the course of the intervening years.

We were discussing the strange phenomenon of the soul-self, the sense or feeling that we are bipartite, infinite spirit housed in mortal flesh. This led naturally to a long discussion of consciousness. But when I asked how my wife defined it, she casually answered, Awareness of the self, my jaw opening in surprise.

Not awareness of self for those of you who read quickly. Awareness of the self. I don't even remember what my opinion on the question was anymore, awareness of the self connected, consciousness suddenly meaning something more than simply awake.

Her answer struck a chord like a clue to the enigma obscuring my understanding of the question Who am I? a little piece of my memory suddenly glowing with resurrected meaning. But when I asked her in turn what she thought the connection of the ego was to the functioning of consciousness, that is when the fireworks began.

The ego exists to preserve the integrity of the self, she simply replied, every animal that fights or flees danger demonstrates the ego's evolutionary function. In response, an immense heat radiated through my body like a powerful roar, my aloneness within the cage of self suddenly magnified a thousand-fold as I trembled at the discovery of an animal brotherhood I had never before humbled myself to acknowledge.

I was reminded of our conversation recently when I saw the first wooly bear of autumn as it shimmied up our fence. I have always loved wooly bears and wondered in that moment if his consciousness warned him of danger once he left the protective cover of the grass.

And where was brother wooly bear headed in such a hurry? How much energy did he expend climbing up six feet of wooden fencing, just to climb down the other side? Did the seeming obstacle of the fence confuse him so greatly that he climbed it rather than simply crawling under it? Surely the latter was the more efficient of his options.

I myself have often taken the long way round when failing to appropriately weigh my options. What does that say about me that I am sometimes no wiser in my choices than a caterpillar?

But I was happy to see the little fellow, like so many simple things in life the joy of his appearance sparked the magic of warm feelings, the synapses in my gray matter triggering a cocktail of happy chemicals in my gut. Do such joys trace a pathway to meaning in my soul-self or are they no more than a contact high that science might blandly explain away?

Unlike us, our animist ancestors were anchored to nature and their environs, believing that the souls of loved ones who had died could be trapped by lesser beings like my obdurate little wooly bear or a tree or even an insensate stone. Some were even convinced that only once we took possession of the creature that imprisoned a loved one might we free them.

But this circles back to our remembered discussion about consciousness like a strange loop between science and the belief in something more than synapses and chemicals - psyche, soul, or God breathed spirit. Science can decode our DNA and tell us the precise chemical and biological breakdown of our fleshly bodies, but it cannot tell us who we are or why we are here.

Watching the scurrying wooly bear magnified the sense of frailty in my life and the lives of those I have loved and lost. They are not imprisoned in brother wooly bear or sister robin, but they are trapped within me. I can only unlock the message and meaning of their lives by recognizing their presence within mine. Till memory awakens meaning, I not they am the one held captive.

Memory is a living thing, an organism, a sea of disparate connections. Because brain cells die, memories must be rehearsed and shared in order preserve them. Otherwise, they die or mutate beyond all recognition. In this, memory and its unstable malleability is often the enemy rather than a friend. If the proper connection is not made, I may never truly awaken those whom I have lost.

In his autobiographical novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust suggested that memories might return most powerfully when unbidden by a taste or scent reminiscent of a formative experience. After soaking a 'petite madeleine' cake in his afternoon tea, he wrote I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.

But drinking the remains of his cake-soaked tea he tries and fails again and again to recall the locus of the memory and tease from it the formative time associated with it from his past. Eventually his efforts pay off, and he tells us the smell and taste of things remained poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest, his youth unfolding to him like a map of his childhood revels spent with a dear aunt in Combray.

Waiting like souls to remind is a poignant Idée fixe for memory reawakened. In its obsessive preoccupation an emotional picture forms, often as impossible to put into words as it would be to draw it. How very strange the expression of consciousness when caught up in powerfully experienced memory.

I experienced my own Combray in the sleepy little town of Corinth, Mississippi, for me and my siblings the happiest place on earth. But the one thing that might have provided me with my own madeleine cake moment, a fried cornbread known in the old south as a corn stick, I have not eaten since the late 1980's. I have had corn sticks in southern style buffets on occasion, but they are as different from my grandmother's as corn muffins are from fried cornbread in a cast iron pan.

So too is the mournful wail and the rhythmic, staccato rattle of the rails when a freight train passed in the early morning dark a scant stone's throw away from her home. I rarely hear the sounds of a train in the night anymore, but when I do my eyes grow moist remembering wakeful hours spent in the darkness on the sofa bed in my grandparents' living room.

I remember too, the pleasant grinding of our car's tires on their pebbled drive, the sound of the whirring wings of thousands of bees collecting pollen on my grandmother's beautiful Rose of Sharon and the shuddering hum of the fan in her kitchen window. I fear that I will likely never reexperience sounds of their like again.

There are a thousand other memories that I wish I could reawaken that I might use to paint with a metaphoric brush a map of the soul-self to capture the spidering roads leading to the liminal edges of my psyche, the loci where memory and vision ends and forgetfulness begins.

Memory is a pathway of sorts, a wayfinder, we can use it or abuse it, we can reinvent ourselves by altering memories as easily as we might find our true selves in them. But you can no more sketch a map of experienced love than you can of hate. Tracing the liminal expression of character defining moments is as difficult as following your former footsteps by walking backwards in the darkness.

Contrary to the popular rendering of the Proust's tea and petite madeleine memory restoration, scent and taste did not revive it alone. What was awakened in that initial moment was insensate feeling. After repeated efforts failed, it was his obsessive meditation at the liminal edges of memory which returned him to his youth. And then he wrote and wrote and wrote some more. And the more he wrote the more he remembered.

In the last three years of my father's life, I was determined to make a real connection with him, something we had never been able to do when I was young. Both he and his youngest brother spent hours sharing stories with me about their home life and about themselves. And in recording these stories, it gave me greater understanding of where they came from and how they became the men that I knew in my youth and in their old age.

With this foundation I began to write and explore my own memories. Joan Didion once wrote that A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively. The little brick house on the corner of Young and Wick became my Idée fixe. It was already a guidepost in my dreams long before I started writing about it. But within the process of remembering, this story grew into something more, laying down roots in my soul-self, it dimensions in my psyche increasing severalfold.

But the more I wrote, the more my memories focused on my grandmother's sacrificial love. She had lived her entire life in the shadow of the men in her life, her story suborned to theirs.

There were no bad children in her home. In her care and the tight clasp of her arms we knew we were loved in a way that people are rarely loved. Every meal was a feast, the sound of her quavering voice when we talked one of my most precious memories.

My writing came to a halt the morning my father died, my brother calling me at about five in the morning to share that he had passed gently in his sleep. Although I assumed at the time that the news would keep me awake, I remained in bed, meditating on the permanence of death and the harsh reality that I would never see or speak to my dad again.

In consequence, I did not notice my unexpected transition from mournful wakefulness to sleep. In the dream that followed I stood quietly in a white room with my wife, daughter, mother, sister and my father’s mother. When a knock sounded at the room's door, I answered it, and my mother’s mother and sister entered the room together. I hugged them both and tearfully told them my dad had died.

Then I awakened with a start.

In my waking hours it was always the men in my life who dominated my psyche. The masks that I wore I learned to wear from them. The reflexive machismo, the stubbornness that kept me from backing down in the face of poor decision-making as well as the deafness to the feminine within my soul-self that somehow still meekly bore witness to my foolhardiness.

In the midst of my grief, it was not those men who comforted me in my dream, but the most important women in my life. If I were to draw a map representing my true self rather than the facade that I long presented to the world, it would be the faces and outstretched arms of these women, the ones who carried the emotional burden that we men could not be bothered to bear. The most humane branches of my soul-self all bear the lasting imprint of these women's lives.

Home is not a place; it is a person. Memory is not a map of self, but it can help us to locate those things that we have in our day-to-day struggles forsaken.

For all of my life each home that I loved, the one where I was raised, the one in Corinth a stone's throw from the rails, and the one I have shared with my wife for almost thirty years; what I truly loved has always and will ever be the women who made those places welcoming.