The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  I am acutely aware of my mortality now, in a way that is different from my past awareness of it. The beauty and excitement of the world will go on being beautiful and exciting without me. The familiar curves and corners of the towns I love, the voices of my family, the understanding of friends—all of it will pour out of the glass. I wonder if my present quietude is not simply an attempt to make sure I don’t run too fast or trip over an excess of feeling. Or is it a reward of age?

  Perhaps because I’m trying to hook my writing students on keeping a journal, I’m thinking of them as I write in mine. There are two ways to look at the act of committing your thoughts and feelings to paper:

  1. as a frightening revelatory act that leaves you less in control, or

  2. as a way of taking your thoughts and fears and subduing them, like pinning butterflies to a wax tablet, so you can examine them more closely.

  The second is what has always motivated me.

  Looking through an old folder of students’ work and my notes about them, I came across a statement uttered by one woman: “No one ever told me I could listen to my heart.” The sentence jumped out at me as being so simple and obvious. Yet it is a habit that is so easy to lose, particularly when the inside of one’s head is like a crowded restaurant with bad acoustics.

  Yesterday there was a late night call from Sarah, who said she thought my lack of strong feelings was a stage or phase. My mother could feel passionately about her life because I was providing her with the safe harbor that enabled her to relax and let her feelings grow.

  Mother, speaking about her friend Bessie, whose life is so hard because she is black. The landlord won’t look her in the eye, the woman who lives above her takes her handicapped parking space, someone let the air out of her new tires. Mother advises her to send light to the woman. Bessie asks what that means. Mother replies, “It’s love,” and Bessie says, “I believe I’ll try that.”

  Bessie was one of my mother’s long-distance healing clients. I am not the person to explain how long-distance healing works, other than to say that it involves meditating upon specific symbols or archetypes, sending light, and remaining detached from the process. While she was living in California, her spiritual teacher, Lawrence McCafferty, had introduced her to it, and a psychic correctly predicted that she would go to France and work with someone there who had psychic abilities.

  After she moved to Ashland, Mom’s first client was my cousin’s horse, whose ankle had been so badly sprained it would have to be put down if it didn’t get better. The ankle improved. Then she was asked by a neighbor to work on his son, who had been in a very bad ski accident. He got well soon afterward. But perhaps the most dramatic example involved my friend Diane, whose son Michael had been suffering from excruciating back problems for years.

  When my mother heard about Michael, she asked whether Diane would mind if she tried to heal him from afar. “Of course,” she replied gratefully. “I will try to help,” said my mother, “but first you must do one thing.” When Diane retells this part of the story, she always starts to cry. “What?” she asked. “Get out of the way,” said my mother. Michael has not had any back trouble since.

  All this work was done behind closed doors in her bedroom, in a wing chair, where she sat quietly and focused her energy and attention upon the person, animal, or situation she had been asked to help. Then one day she announced that she had decided to “go public” with an ad in our local newspaper. “There may be somebody out there I don’t know who needs help.”

  At first the Herald Progress refused to place the ad, probably because it sounded a little too New Age for its readership. But mother knew Jay Pace, the owner/editor, and when he heard who wanted to place the ad he gave it the go-ahead. The Herald Progress didn’t have a HEALING category but agreed to make one. “It’s Category Thirty-six,” she exclaimed happily, “between HAY and HELP WANTED. Three and six add up to nine, which is the Tarot card with the magician holding up his lantern to give light—which is what it’s all about—even if no one calls.”

  The ad was straightforward, offering telephone consultation for people who were suffering from physical or mental distress, although my mother wanted to make sure that people didn’t think she was a born-again Christian. (“I added ‘trained by a European healer’ to lift it out of the Pentecostal business.”) Then she sat back and waited for the phone to ring.

  The first caller was a man who said he was having trouble with his prostate gland. Mother was somewhat taken aback, and it took her a few minutes to realize that he was an obscene caller. “When he asked me how old I was, I realized he just wanted a little sex chat. After I told him I was eighty-four, he hung up.”

  All told, perhaps several dozen readers saw my mother’s ad and phoned for help. Some of them, like Bessie and her son, William, became dear friends. There was no charge, but every so often an envelope appeared in the mail, with a couple of dollars and a thank-you note inside.

  The other morning I went walking through the woods beyond De Jarnette Park. Moving along the path, my face was brushed by spider threads that broke as I walked. Only the first walker of the morning would ruin the spider’s plan. Moral: don’t cast your ideas too low across the path if you want them to survive.

  Ashland was as cool and fragrant as a Mull morning. The leaves, now fully out on all the trees, overlapped each other, filtering the light. Tiny birds rolled off the leaves, like plump drops of water, onto the grass and flew up into the branches again.

  Walking home, down England Street, past all the flags that Virginians love to hang outside their houses, I saw them in a more positive light, as stained-glass windows that the sun illuminated. Granted, the sun was lighting up appliquéd flowers, bunnies, and Virginia Tech symbols, but still I saw the similarities between them and the windows in Chartres. The whole world is a stained-glass window and you don’t have to be on an island in Scotland or in a hill town in Italy to see it.

  When we say negative things about ourselves we are really trying them on for size, to see if we really believe our own words. Yesterday, for example, I was talking to my sister, Cynthia, on the phone and said, “I am always pining to be someplace better than here.” And she said, “Yes, you do that a lot, don’t you?” I didn’t appreciate the confirmation even though she was only agreeing with what I had just said.

  IN SAN FRANCISCO FOR THE WEEKEND BEFORE HEADING UP TO THE BISHOP’S RANCH IN HEALDSBURG FOR MY SEMINAR

  Why do we take the place we were born so personally? What is it in our natures that makes us consider the streets and trees, the very light itself where we grew up as sacred and empowering? I am not sure, but whenever I am in California I feel like a grandee who looks upon everything as my inheritance or dowry. California is my trust fund, one that I can never deplete.

  I went with a friend to Crissy Field, a newly created marsh and beach along San Francisco Bay. Sitting on the beach, I watched kites, wind surfers, and yachts leaning close to the water. In the distance, huge tankers nearly blotted out Marin County.

  There are changes. Presidio Terrace where my aunt and uncle used to live is closed to traffic. A uniformed guard by the gate outside of Senator Diane Feinstein’s house blocked our way. We speculated that the Palestinian-Israeli terrorism attacks were the reason. A sidewalk sale on nearby Lake Street made me feel rooted. I bought a $5 tablecloth and felt at home.

  Until this trip I had never ventured inside Temple Emanu-el, whose orange tiled dome had dominated my childhood neighborhood. It is a formal place of prayer, with a large courtyard and deep interior worship space flanked by green marble columns. Along one wall is a large stained-glass window with strands of brilliantly colored glass flowing across the face of it. From the street, you cannot appreciate its beauty. But from inside the sanctuary, Temple Emanu-el blazes with light.

  AT THE BISHOP’S RANCH SEMINAR

  During our first evening together, we go around the circle to introduce ourselves. I am struck by the way the introductions begin
where they should and end where they must. I chose to start with Pat, who said she would have frozen if she’d had any time to think. She broke the ice by saying that she wasn’t a writer but was “just Pat.” This gave everyone permission to be themselves without feeling the need to pad or promote a résumé.

  Bev was eloquent about her hospice work, where she sees the innocence and openness of a child return to the people who are dying and want to tell her their secrets because they know that she will keep them.

  Jill was the last to speak—and she was heartbreakingly direct. “I’m the most self-centered person here,” she began. “I want to see if I can feel anything at this late date.” She spoke about how she has begun to wake up earlier and earlier, “Before I can make trouble for myself or anyone else,” and just being with herself for what her mother used to call “added minutes,” when one got to spend unexpected time with someone.

  The ranch house is full of good books, which is like being surrounded by good people, Ken Wilber next to Jacob Needleman, for example. Books need no towels or linen, just an inch on a shelf. And they’ll talk to anybody who will listen.

  “Fame in this country is a religion that demands human sacrifice,” writes Wilber [in One Taste ]. “You end up exactly with what Oscar Levant said to George Gershwin: ‘Tell me, George, if you had to do it all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?’”

  THE NEXT DAY

  The ship is under sail, as I had hoped it would be by now, with some real writing beginning to emerge. I find these women very nourishing and, in short, fine, or finely wrought: Mimma, sitting for long hours at a table on the porch, relishing the uninterrupted peace to think and express herself, away from a very sick husband; Marge, bearing the cross of her two dead sons and trying so hard to carry it.

  Jeanne’s poems are gentle and accessible:

  each holy thing is borrowed,

  everything depends.

  Those last two words fit so effortlessly together, as if they have been headed toward each other since birth.

  Lois, eighty-seven, carries a tumor on her kidney and a large cardboard box with her autobiography in it in her arms. Her small birdlike face is beautiful. I told her she had a fine mind, and her eyes filled with tears. “Since my stroke I cry more easily.”

  Last night, watching Nancy Hiles sit on the floor creating an ikebana flower arrangement, was like meditating. Nancy was entirely wrapped up in the process, delicately cutting a leaf here, a leaf there, so that the end effect—a few sprays of bamboo and a yellow lily rising from a mound of stones in a blue bowl—was perfect. This was the most unusual thing I had done in a long time: sitting in a circle, silently watching someone arrange flowers. No one moved.

  THE FINAL MORNING

  The cool fog-filled air begins the day as it has every day. By nine-thirty, when we sit down at the table to write, it is almost gone. There is something too factual about midday. There are no shadows to give things a deeper meaning. But in the early morning and late afternoon, the “hour of gold,” which Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes about, returns.

  Last night as we sat for the last time together, I allowed the reality we had created between us to make itself felt. I realized what I always realize when I’m in the midst of one of these seminars—that my hunger to feel whole has been fed.

  Back in Ashland with a new group of writers, I spoke of Emerson and then read them the first paragraph from his great essay, “Self-Reliance.”

  To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.

  They were amazed at his clarity. How did he come to such authority? one of them asked. “He chose his life early,” was my answer. Most of us don’t, or we wait until we are much older and must correct our course.

  After an operation for a basal cell cancer on her face, Mother is zonked out on Demerol. “You can’t know how much I deserve this,” she muttered, half asleep. Today I will stick very close.

  Parallel lists in my journal today make me smile at how divided I am. At the top of one list I wrote COST SAVERS, after which I wrote change phone companies, use clothesline, walk more, drive less, shop wisely, consume less. The other list is labeled TODAY. Beneath it I wrote Send house present of silver coffeepot to Moira and Get hair appointment at Blondie’s.

  To go to bed thinking about the little dreams and obstacles that are in my life and to wake up with these same small obscuring preoccupations in my mind: How can I spend my precious life squandering it this way? Do I think I will live forever? Am I waiting for some large catalyzing event or realization to show me the way? Not consciously, but this morning I said again, “You have not written anything significant for almost a year.” This is the truth I must face. And the second truth is that I am out of money again.

  Last evening, at an Ashland party in a noisy house full of people I didn’t know, I found a quiet place on the side porch and sat there with the host’s dog, listening to the rain come through the trees.

  I thought about how most of us are asleep while waking, how we open and shut our mouths making conversation, but we are still asleep. Perhaps the only difference between them and me is that I know I’m asleep. Then, not wanting to appear rude, I returned to the party and had an unexpectedly interesting conversation with someone who has been meditating for twenty years, is taking a natural health correspondence course, and could not be less asleep.

  Yesterday I felt a deeper, more definite obligation to be a daily, even hourly, caretaker for my mother. I had gone to Washington for the night. To be in a pretty living room talking to smart people about events and ideas that are rarely taken out of the closet in Ashland was a relief. But returning I found that Mother had mistakenly ripped off the bandage on her leg. A pile of dry oatmeal had spilled out of the box onto the floor, and she hadn’t seen it. I am needed here. Somehow, I will have to dig down for my stimulation instead of leaving town. I have no access to new ideas this morning, but there is a deeply felt care and connectedness to my life, a sense that it is wide and deep.

  One of the ways I keep my books from flying into hiding is to alphabetize them. The wing chair where I sit in the morning is just below the l section, so I am unusually familiar with books by Joseph Lasch, Laurie Lee, and C. S. Lewis, whom I plucked off the shelf a minute ago. Like all good writers, Lewis is simultaneously simple and suspenseful:

  As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom’s cottage, I reflected that no one on the platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.

  —The opening sentence of Perelandra

  IN CALIFORNIA: BIG CREEK

  I am at the Farr’s cabin in Big Sur, sitting on a rock by the rushing creek as it pours down from the mountain. All night its gentle roar was just a few feet away. This place has been treated kindly by the human beings who have lived here. There are only a few cabins, a hammock, and a suspension bridge. Last night I listened to Belinda Holliday tell me about the death of her son, Kenneth, when he was ten. She knew somehow that he would not have a long life, and his death precipitated her career as a plein air painter. Painting, she said, was something she could do that didn’t remind her of him.

  Later, I hiked down to the beach where the fresh water meets the salt beneath the massive Big Creek Bridge. There were at least a hundred western gulls resting on the sand. Red-tailed hawks wheeled above, and then a pair of oystercatchers—shiny black birds with long pincer-shaped red beaks like a pair of chopsticks—arrived. The beach is full of a kind of natural jade that is plentiful here. One piece will return home with me. It sits solidly on my lap and has a soft, slippery feeling to it.

  Looking at a huge boulder nearby, I realize that shifts in power are going on all the time, yet the largest ones are so slow in happening we don’t realize it until the transfer is complete. That boulder had made its way down the side of a mountain and the length of a creek bed before coming to rest o
n this beach by the Pacific. It has been on the beach for a long time. But it took an equally long time to get there.

  The difference between the twenty-five-year-old who sat in jeans and a straw hat on a boulder in Big Creek and the sixty-two-year-old who visited that same creek today is an internal emptiness that lets the creek in. There is so much more room inside, as if the many selves and fears that used to compete for space have coalesced or disappeared so that now I am almost a bystander in my own life.

  Later in the afternoon all the Farr’s guests got in a van, drove to the top of a ridge, and sat in Jeffers’ “windy company of the grasses,” looking out to the sea. Behind us were mountains, humped, ridge-backed, and wrinkled, straw-colored beneath blue sky. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  Rereading an earlier part of my journal, I came across the lines where I say that Emerson chose his life early. I have chosen to be a writer and must be willing to do what it takes. It is like drilling for oil, having the faith that it is down there. But beyond or beneath that faith is the commitment to dig, whether the oil is there or not.

  Before going to bed last night I read an interview with Larry Dossey on the efficacy of prayer. The image that comes to my mind when I think of somebody praying is of a fisherman mending his nets, each intersection of the net being a soul that is part of the whole. He goes from one to the other, examining, repairing, strengthening them.

  Sitting in a semidark living room in the early morning, I look at a black-and-white photograph and wait for the light to transform it. It is an amazing daily occurrence, going from black and white to color. Is this the difference between the enlightened and unenlightened mind?