Worlds to come

October 3, 2018

I feel in myself the future life. I am like a forest which has been more than once cut down. The new shoots are livelier then ever. I am rising toward the sky. The sunshine is on my head. The earth gives me its generous sap, but Heaven lights me with its unknown worlds.

You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of the bodily powers. Why then is the soul more luminous when the bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head but eternal spring is in my heart. I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets and the roses as at 20 years. The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous yet simple.

Victor Hugo

After five months of summer’s heat and humidity here, I welcomed with open arms the definite change in the air on Oct. 1. It was amazing, invigorating and exciting. It made me happy as past memories of cool and beautiful Autumns welled up in me. I am so grateful. It’s been another strange summer of anticipating and then realizing the consequences of climate change. Heat waves, immense wildfires out West, 500-year flooding rains in the Southeast from yet another ghastly hurricane in the Atlantic.

Despite all this and the grim news about the fate of the planet, I feel an almost welcome and invigorating sense of reassurance, hope and mental buoyancy. It’s hard to explain, and I’ve had a terribly difficult time starting this entry. A lot of these new feelings now relate to a time in my life now when I’m retired and I’m relieved of the daily obligations of going to work. I enjoyed my job and the people I worked with, but all that seems so long ago and faraway now, though it’s only been a year and a half. I feel that the time has come at last to really explore new worlds of the mind and spirit. I’m so excited by all the books I want to read, each one of which will yield a small universe of knowledge and wisdom. I’ll be exploring ancient wisdom traditions, delving much more deeply into my own Christian tradition through books, lectures and daily devotional readings. I’m going to keep opening my mind to many other points of views, to the teachings of theology, science, history, psychology and religion.  Also I’m going to pursue as never before my lifelong passion for photography. I have to many photography books to look at and be inspired by. I love sharing my photos with others, too.

Right now my time during the day is still very limited by my caregiving duties, so I am retired from one kind of work while still bound by love to the much more difficult work of caring for my 94-year-old mother. I will continue to write my Dementia Journal entries. Even though my mother’s mental capacity is so deeply and tragically diminished by that terrible disease of the mind, I learn from her each day and I also learn patience and the ability to be more kind to myself, something I often was not in the many years of loneliness, drifting and mental turmoil I suffered until I finally settled down age 43 and could accept my enormous new responsibilities as the ensuing years revealed them to me.

Oct. 4

Almost 40 years ago now in the Spring and Summer of 1979, I slowly made my way out of the darkness of an extended period of depression. I took long walks as a most magical Spring unfolded In New Orleans where I recovered at the home of my parents where I spent my youth, before moving back to South Carolina. I jubilantly watched and was inspired and given hope by my favorite movie of all time, Breaking Away. Here is part of what I wrote in my Journal about that time. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to recapture that same immense joy in living. I was after all only 28 and basically still had my whole life before me, even as I thought it had ended only months before. Now at 67 I want to tie all the loose ends together, discover the missing links and live with a feeling of freedom and release that I never could have experienced years and decades before when I was younger.

From my journal, describing a period of time in late March, 1979:

The months-long nightmare, the descent to the black pit, is receding, farther and farther back into the darkness from whence it came. The familiar New Orleans streets with their canopy of live oaks, the cracked sidewalks, old and new houses, cinderblock and tidy brick Colonial, a comforting world of equilibrium embraces me as I take long walks on sunny afternoons, past buzzing, blooming ligustrum bushes filled with the sweet scents of childhood. Past azalea bushes in bloom and magnolias and lawn mowers cutting slightly less scented grass.

On and on I walk, long walks, to take me to other places. I reach the high earthen levee which corrals the Mississippi River, high with spring flood waters now, higher than the land below that I have just walked on. I clamber to the top of this preposterous levee, maybe 30 feet high and a small mountain in a city that lies below sea level, and I survey the ships plowing through the swirling dark, spring-muddied eddies of that wide and deeply mysterious river spread out before me like an inland sea. I smell the fresh river air. I look down the bend where the large freighters have recently came up from the Gulf of Mexico and distant ports, and I long to be on one of those ships. I dream of distant lands. I sit in the grass and close my eyes and let the unending pain of the previous six months surge away down that same river, joining the flotsam and jetsam, the dirt and pollution and filth that drain away to the sea, there to disperse among the dark blue waters of the Gulf. Gone.