I’m convinced there is a larger story playing out. One that is unfolding, in part, through our lives. Every now and then, we get a glimpse of what is going on at some other level. I’m about to share something of the way I got in touch with feeling implicated, and part of, what is coming to pass. More questions are raised by this awkward and fuzzy memory, but it has also given me goosebumps. It is like an invisible being is breathing down my neck. I can feel it, this strange warm aliveness, but I can’t really name it. I am cornered by not knowing, and knowing too much.
When my father was in his late 80’s, he began writing a book about growing up an Iowa farm boy. In the time before electrification, during the Great Depression, he had an experience, that he only recalled as a result of the memories he was exploring as he wrote about that era of his life. I lucked out, as happens to be my nature, to be present when he told of his recollection of witnessing, and being touched by, a miracle.
His mother used to raise a few chickens, so she had a little house cash. He recalled a day when he was with her, and she showed him a small egg incubator she had in the house. It was full of eggs that were just hatching out. He remembered getting to witness the baby chicks pecking their way out of the eggs. To his astonishment, that memory transported him back to that moment, and with a vividness he could not believe, he felt the awe he had experienced as a child. Baby birds, little vulnerabilities, were working hard to escape what had been their nurturing safe homes, to come into a larger unknown reality. He was transfixed by the drama of what he witnessed. Years later, this memory, became something he wanted to pass on to his loved ones.
That experience was notable to me, because my father was not an obviously sentimental man, and because I could feel his intensity, his awe at witnessing something he couldn’t give words to. In his old age it still touched him — maybe more —as he neared the end of his life. This is an element of my father’s unknown inner life that has stayed with me.
Recently, I was doing some reflection of my own (I’m in my 70’s now), putting pieces of my life into some unknown pattern. Suddenly, I had a memory from my high school experience. I was a senior, and I was having my first experience of writing a poem. Looking back, I could see myself as a young man with practically no wherewithal for expressing the complex feelings I was having. I was a jock boy, who was assailed by something inside, that had no way out. For some reason, in my desperation, I tried to write it out through a poem. It was a poem about myself as a baby chick, confronted with the realization that I had to breakout of my previously comfortable home. The world I knew had grown too small, and the world on the other unknown side of the shell, awaited with its promise, and its terror. I wrote out my teenage ambivalence.
Now, I am an ageing man. The process of loss is breaking me open. My body, my identity, the very story of who I have been, is all drifting away. I am something else. This thin veneer — of what I thought I have known — is giving way. I am a mystery to myself.
Somehow, I doubt it is coincidence, I am recalling my father’s memory, and my own from high school. Connecting these two experiences arouses awe in me, making my upcoming transition look like an old mystery, one that I am familiar with, one that is stirring within me, even if I do not know what’s on the other side. I do know the ambivalence, uncertainty, and vulnerability, inherent in this time. I also now know — thanks to the power of recall — that this is the way life proceeds. I am less afraid than I was, and more excited than I ever have been.
Hatching out renews some mysterious goings on, that I am ambivalently happy to be part of.
